That’s No Gospel, It’s Enoch!

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In 1972 the Spanish scholar José O’Callaghan startled the world of biblical scholarship when he announced that he had identified nine New Testament fragments among the Dead Sea Scrolls.¹ In the 30 years since, O’Callaghan’s findings have annoyed many scholars, excited a few and left most scratching their heads—wondering if they will ever know for sure what these tiny fragments contain.

But now, thanks to the painstaking research of two European scholars and one Disney World carpenter, all this has changed. It seems certain that two of the nine fragments are definitely not New Testament texts, that the same likely holds true for the other seven, and that at least some of these fragments and several other unidentified pieces from the same cave can now be positively identified: They come from the First Book of Enoch!

The fragments “identified” by O’Callaghan were discovered in Cave 7 at Qumran. The cave is itself curious in that all the fragments found there were written on papyrus and in Greek, whereas the vast majority of the Dead Sea Scrolls were written on leather and in Hebrew (and, to a lesser extent, in Aramaic).

Cave 7 contained 24 fragments in all; the initial scroll editor, French scholar Maurice Baillet, suggested they were the remains of 19 different scrolls—called 7Q1 through 7Q19 (the 7 stands for Cave 7, the Q for Qumran, the 1 and 19 for the first and last scroll from the cave). But the editor was able to name only two of these texts: 7Q1 and 7Q2 were quickly identified as fragments of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible begun in Alexandria in the third century B.C.²

O’Callaghan claimed that, of the remaining unidentified fragments, nine contained portions of six New Testament books: Mark, Acts, Romans, 1 Timothy, James and 2 Peter. For example, he identified the scroll fragment known as 7Q4 as containing 1 Timothy 3:16 and 4:1, 3; and he identified 7Q5 as part of Mark 6:52–53.

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If correct, O’Callaghan’s thesis would have far-reaching implications (and create enormous problems!) for New Testament scholars. Most important, it suggests that these New Testament fragments date as early as the Dead Sea Scrolls—that is, mostly before 68 A.D., when the Qumran community fled the site. This contradicts the findings of most New Testament scholars, who typically date Mark, for example, to immediately before the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D., and Acts to the following decade, 70 to 80 A.D. Another implication is that this would allow for the possibility that early Christians had contact with the Jewish community living at Qumran, an idea that is dismissed by almost all scholars.

O’Callaghan’s bold thesis has found few supporters, however (one notable exception is the very vocal German scholar Carsten Peter Thiede, who has popularized O’Callaghan’s research).³ Most scholars find it highly unlikely—if not impossible—that the nine fragments contain any New Testament writing (see the sidebar to this article). The main problem is that O’Callaghan’s evidence is extremely flimsy. The pieces are tiny: The largest of O’Callaghan’s nine fragments measures a mere 2.7 by 1.3 inches. And they contain very little text. A grand total of five complete words is found among all 17 unidentified Greek texts from Cave 7! Further, in order to draw a connection between the scrolls and the New Testament, the Spanish scholar was obliged to date all nine pieces to the mid-first century A.D. or later. But some of these fragments had already been dated much earlier, to the first century B.C., by the scroll editors.⁴ Finally, O’Callaghan’s identifications are extremely speculative: The fragment 7Q5, for example, which O’Callaghan identifies as Mark 6:52–53, is simply too small to have contained all the words from this biblical passage—so he cut some out (see the sidebar to this article).^a

Although most scholars today agree that these texts are not New Testament manuscripts, it has proved far more challenging to reach a consensus on what they actually are.

The basic problem facing every researcher, including the original editors and, later, O’Callaghan, is that the fragments are simply too small to identify with any great degree of certainty.

Some have proposed that all the fragments, not just 7Q1 and 7Q2, preserve parts of the Septuagint.⁵ “Biblical texts (?)” is how scroll editor Maurice Baillet tentatively characterized them in 1962, in the official publication of the material from Cave 7.⁶

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In the late 1980s and 1990s, however, scholars began asking whether the fragments might not come from the Bible at all. In 1988 the German scholar Wilhelm Nebe suggested that several Cave 7 fragments were from the pseudepigraphical First Book of Enoch! In the mid-1990s French scholar Émile Puech reviewed Nebe’s findings and came to the same conclusion.⁷

Their conclusions might have been added to the long list of possible but unprovable identifications if it were not for a breakthrough from an unexpected direction. In the late 1990s amateur American sleuth Ernest A. Muro, Jr., a Disney World carpenter, succeeded in identifying and joining three Cave 7 fragments.

Muro first heard of the Cave 7 fragments 20 years ago, while waiting for his clothes to dry at a laundromat. Bored, Muro wandered into a neighboring bookstore and picked up a copy of David Estrada and William White’s The First Testament—a semi-popular account of O’Callaghan’s theories.⁸ In the mid-1990s, a friend asked Muro what he knew about 7Q5, and he pulled the book back out. Around the same time, he read a harshly critical review in BR, by leading New Testament manuscript expert Bruce Metzger, of a new book by O’Callaghan’s biggest supporter, Carsten Thiede.^b

Muro began studying the high-quality, black-and-white fragment photos in his book and reading the scholarly literature on the fragments, including Emile Puech’s articles identifying several of the fragments as Enoch.

As a carpenter, Muro has an expert’s knowledge of different woods and their grains. This led him to focus on something no one else had thought to look at: the shape and direction of the fibers that make up the papyrus fragments. Papyrus fibers typically form a grid pattern. But Muro noted that the horizontal fibers on three fragments had a characteristic downward slope to the right. This suggested to Muro that these fragments originally came from the same piece of papyrus. By following the lines of these fibers, he was able to piece together fragments 7Q4.1,^c 7Q8 and 7Q12.

A college dropout, Muro had been studying ancient 040languages and biblical text criticism on his own for years. He found a Greek edition of Enoch at the library and began scanning the text, looking for the letter combinations that appeared on his new, larger fragment: He found a match—with the Greek letters in the right order and column formation—in 1 Enoch 103.

Muro had overcome the difficulty faced by every other Cave 7 researcher: He had created a big enough chunk of text to identify with certainty. He wrote letters to Emile Puech, Wilhelm Nebe, José O’Callaghan, Carsten Peter Thiede and scroll translator Florentino García Martínez. Only Puech responded, with an offer to help Muro publish his findings. In 1998 Muro became the first Disney World carpenter to appear in the prestigious journal Revue de QumraÆn.⁹ (He went back to college two years later.) The three fragments are no longer known only by their individual numbers; they now have a collective name: pap7QEn gr (pap for papyrus, 7Q for Cave 7, En for Enoch and gr for Greek).

The combined research of Nebe, Puech and Muro suggests that six of the previously unidentified Cave 7 fragments—including two of O’Callaghan’s “New Testament fragments”—preserve text from 1 Enoch.¹⁰ They come from the section of 1 Enoch known as the Epistle of Enoch, which concerns the “two ways of the righteous and the sinner” and includes the Apocalypse of Weeks (see James VanderKam’s article in this issue).¹¹

But what about O’Callaghan’s other fragments? Could these otherwise unidentified pieces preserve words from New Testament writings such as Mark’s gospel? Although this remains theoretically possible, they far more likely preserve text from the Septuagint or 1 Enoch.

And what of 7Q5, the most prominent fragment in this whole discussion, the so-called gospel among the scrolls, the fragment O’Callaghan identified as part of Mark?¹²

It appears that almost everyone involved has been discussing a distorted piece of evidence, because part of 7Q5 may come from another scroll altogether! The scroll’s original editor, Maurice Baillet, noted that the fragment seemed to be damaged. He described 7Q5 as “fine papyrus, very much damaged, and displaced at the right.”¹³ More recently, carpenter Muro has been studying this fragment, too, and he agrees that the far right side has been displaced; that is, the right-hand side of the fragment does not seem to line up properly with the left half. (This is clear in Muro’s drawing 052of the papyrus fibers in the sidebar to this article.) According to Muro, the right side may have torn and slipped a few lines, or it could be part of another fragment that somehow became attached to 7Q5.¹⁴ In light of Muro’s findings, the interpretation of this scroll must begin afresh. As Muro says, until a papyrologist examines the fragment more carefully to see what kind of damage it suffered, “it is premature to venture any attempt to identify the scroll.”

The study of the scrolls from Cave 7 continues. So far, we have learned that a Greek copy of 1 Enoch—pap7QEn gr—existed at Qumran.¹⁵ Its presence here not only confirms the importance of this book for the Qumran community but reminds us today that if we wish to understand fully the biblical world, we must study those books that did not make it into the Bible as well as those that did.

This article is adapted and expanded from the recent book The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls, by James VanderKam and Peter Flint (San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 2002).

In 972 the Spanish scholar José O’Callaghan startled the world of biblical scholarship when he announced that he had identified nine New Testament fragments among the Dead Sea Scrolls.1 In the 30 years since, O’Callaghan’s findings have annoyed many scholars, excited a few and left most scratching their heads—wondering if they will ever know for sure what these tiny fragments contain. But now, thanks to the painstaking research of two European scholars and one Disney World carpenter, all this has changed. It seems certain that two of the nine fragments are definitely not New Testament texts, that the same […]