In 1954, at the age of 14, I was living with my family in Delray Beach, Florida. I would spend summers exploring the Everglades in my kayak, wondering wide-eyed at the alligators and other gar in the clear water, or skin-diving off the coast, scanning the hulks of ships sunk by the Nazis a decade earlier.
My grandfather and father were both Methodist ministers and erudite scholars. They instilled in me a love of church and scripture. But neither could hide from me the ugly face of dogmatism (what appeared to be cold answers devoid of the fire of questioning) and ecclesiasticism (the tendency to assume the church was perfect and had all the answers). Even then I was offended. I often felt I was being force-fed rigid dogma. Looking back from the vantage point of more than 50 years, I think the Dead Sea Scrolls beckoned me when I was 14 because they were challenging the status quo in the church, which at 061that time still saw no problem with two water coolers, one for Whites and one for Blacks.
I was introduced to the scrolls by a Baptist minister, Dr. Turlington (I don’t recall his first name; this was one of the few times during this period when Baptists and Methodists showed respect for one another), who had made the scrolls his hobby. A new world was opened up to me: These scrolls would allow me to explore the past without judgment and condemnation by my superiors. I could examine them without the overlay of what others had thought and concluded for the past two millennia. Moreover, I could look at texts that were once held by contemporaries of Jesus. Suddenly, these scrolls seemed more alluring than the gaze of a barracuda or swimming past “the Little Wreck.”
A year later, The New Yorker magazine published a path-breaking article on the scrolls by the literary critic Edmund Wilson. “We are immediately struck by the resemblance of the Essenes to the Christians,” he wrote. While this widely influential article has been heavily criticized in scholarly circles for exaggerating the connection between the scrolls and Christianity, much of what Wilson said rings true (Wilson’s book was reprinted in 1954, 1955, 1967, 1969 and 1978). The great Israeli archaeologist and Dead Sea Scroll scholar Yigael Yadin once said the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by Bedouin, and their popularity and importance was clarified by a “very scholarly amateur, Edmund Wilson.”
At Ohio Wesleyan University, my freshman thesis was devoted to the Dead Sea Scrolls. My major turned out to be basically a study of Judaism, leading me to strive to combat all forms of anti-Semitism. The fundamental source of my inspiration was the Jewish origin of the New Testament and, of course, the Dead Sea Scrolls. A more sensitive reading of the New Testament was emerging; gradually scholars were becoming successful in helping those in our culture comprehend that Jesus was a very devout Jew, that the Sanhedrin never condemned him and that almost all of his earliest followers were Jews. Moreover, the model of an orthodox and monolithic Judaism was evaporating. In Jesus’ time there were as many as 24 groups and subgroups of Jews, including the Enoch groups, the Baptist groups and, of course, the Palestinian Jesus Movement. After the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., only two types of Judaism survived: a type of Pharisaism that became modern Judaism, and Jesus’ group that became Christianity. We now know, especially from the Dead Sea Scrolls, that what became Christianity was originally a form of Judaism.
I continued my study of the scrolls at Duke Divinity School. The Dead Sea Scrolls were a central interest at Duke since some scrolls had been displayed in the chapel and John Brownlee, who had been a fellow at the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem when three of the Dead Sea Scrolls were brought there in 1948, taught at Duke the first course on Qumran philology. I recall his telling me how the Dead Sea 062Scrolls had focused his career and life.
John Strugnell, who was later to become editor-in-chief of the Scroll-publication team, was at Duke Divinity School. It was he who introduced me to Qumran philology and paleography. I remember his scolding us for treating Hebrew grammar cavalierly. I had to look up “cavalierly”; it seemed to have the scent of an English tutor. (John was, of course, English.)
After completing a Ph.D. at Duke University and post-doctoral research at Edinburgh University, in 1968 I traveled to the Holy Land on a Thayer Fellowship from the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR). During that year, I studied at the École Biblique under the great Roland de Vaux, the Dominican father who had led the excavation of Qumran and served as the first editor-in-chief of the Scroll-publication team, and his kindly, erudite successor, Père Pierre Benoit.
Roland de Vaux was full of life; it seemed God had given him an extra dose of energy. He loved a good cigar with cognac. A cigarette was his constant companion. I remember the Feast of St. Stephen in the École Biblique in the spring of 1969. Downstairs, where the library is now located, with dozens of other students and scholars, I sat before a semicircle of five glasses, each positioned for wine or Verve Clicquot (then the very best champagne from France). After the feast, de Vaux invited me to accompany him to the commons room. I will never forget the brilliant fire in his eyes, the glow about him, and the wonders that seemed to appear when he talked about digging at Qumran and reading the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls from Cave 1. Roland de Vaux was a great mentor; his confidence in me, and words uttered sotto voce, helped me chart my future course.
I must add that only fools castigate de Vaux for calling Qumran an Essene monastery. He never labeled Qumran a monastery. Moreover, he came to the conclusion that the Qumran community was Essene only after others, especially E.L. Sukenik, discerned that likely conclusion.
On my way back from the École Biblique to the American School, I would usually stop and chat with Khalil Kando and play games with his two small sons, Edmund and William. Khalil was an amazingly smart antiquities dealer. I recall his sitting in the chair in his shop, looking at the window straight ahead, and seeing the smoke from a cigarette encircle his red turban. He confided in me. He knew so much, but as much as he told me, confidentially, I knew he was holding much secret information from me. He was clever, shrewd and a dear friend. Though I was only in my late twenties, he treated me as if I were Albright or de Vaux.
I taught at Duke from 1969 until 1984, when I agreed to accept a call at Princeton Theological Seminary. In the mid-1980s some scandalous charges were appearing in the media claiming that the Dead Sea Scrolls had been given to Christians to publish in the late 1940s, that these Jewish texts had not yet been published and that it seemed obvious the reason was because the Christians realized that what was in the scrolls would undermine Christian faith. I talked with the president of our seminary, Tom Gillespie, about what should be done. One avenue would be to simply claim that these critics were fools. Instead, to counter this vicious charge, we decided to launch a major project that would publish (or republish) all the Dead Sea Scrolls that were not simply copies of the Hebrew Bible. Then everyone could read these texts and be able to make an informed judgment. We would enlist the services of all the leading Jewish and Christian experts to produce a critical edition of each of the non-Biblical texts, a translation and a short introduction for all to read. Thus was born the Princeton Theological Seminary Dead Sea Scrolls Project. It was important, however, that this new series not clash or duplicate the series entitled Discoveries in the Judaean Desert. Sometime later I talked with Emanuel Tov, the editor-in-chief of this series. We agreed that he would publish the editio princeps of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and I would publish the critical, improved texts. We also agreed to contribute to each other’s series.
It is often said that all the Dead Sea Scrolls have now been published. This is inaccurate. As long as 10 years ago I knew of more than 35 Dead Sea Scrolls that are still in private hands, purchased decades earlier. I published two of them in Discoveries in the Judaean Desert and will soon announce the recovery of a fragment of Genesis.
Scholars seldom use the word “sensational.” That word belongs to journalists. But scholars do agree that the unique information provided by the Dead Sea Scrolls has revolutionized our understanding of Second Temple Judaism and Christian origins. The Dead Sea Scrolls have helped recreate the world and thought of Jesus of Nazareth.
Some misguided amateurs sometimes 063conclude, without professional nuance, that Jesus was an Essene. They miss the obvious point that Jesus’ teaching on love and his lack of rigid initiation requirements, as well as his rejection of ritual purity, make such a hypothesis impossible.
Was Jesus anti-Essene? That conclusion is conceivable, but it misses the many ways that the Essenes may have influenced Jesus. He seems to have admired their absolute dedication to God and God’s kingdom. He apparently followed them in speaking about the Holy Spirit from God. He may also have been influenced by their sharing of possessions.
Jesus should not be categorized as pro-Essene or anti-Essene. Many of his teachings make sense best, however, when juxtaposed with unique Essene interpretations of Torah.
The Dead Sea Scrolls have challenged me and freed me from stultifying dogma since I was a young boy living on the edge of the Everglades. They have taught me much about the Jewish matrix of earliest Christianity.
In the future we need to explore the many ways the Palestinian Jesus Movement was close to the Essenes and was perhaps influenced by them. In the process, however, we should avoid the myopic vision that focuses only on the Essenes, perhaps caused by a fascination with what has been recovered after 2,000 years.
Jesus was not an Essene, and Christianity is not an Essenism that has survived. Jesus was, however, influenced both negatively and positively by the Essenes. And his followers were influenced by Essene terminology and perceptions. Some members of the Palestinian Jesus Movement most likely were once Essenes.
Speaking more personally, the scrolls have helped me understand who I am, why I feel God speaking in sacred texts and unfamiliar contexts, and they provide for me new meaning “in the ways of light.”
Milik’s Generosity: Younger Scholar Given Jubilees
By James C. VanderKam
There seems to be something almost magical about the Dead Sea Scrolls—texts from a time in world history of extraordinary consequence. No one expected that such ancient texts would ever be preserved in the climate of the Holy Land. And certainly I never thought that these ancient texts would be at the center of my world.
To tell the truth, the first time I came in contact with them, in a religion class at Calvin College in the mid-1960s, they did not make much of an impression on me.
I learned more about the scrolls in a course on the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament, taught by the late Bastiaan Van Elderen at Calvin Theological Seminary in the early 1970s. He brought to class a copy of Frank Cross’s transcription of a fragment from 064the Book of Samuel that had been found in Qumran Cave 4. My assignment was to compare the Hebrew of this copy of Samuel with the Greek text of the Septuagint. Though the comparison of Hebrew and Greek texts showed that Greek translators had worked from a Hebrew model different from our traditional one, the exercise did not arouse in me a great desire to study the scrolls. I assumed I would continue to focus on the Old Testament and other Jewish literature written in the time between the Old and New Testaments.
As things turned out, however, the Dead Sea Scrolls have changed my life. I did not plan to make them the center of my work, and I certainly did not anticipate then that they would be the cause of newspaper headlines, public controversies, many lectures and numerous publishing invitations.
During a Fulbright year in Scotland at the University of St. Andrews, I took a seminar with Matthew Black on the Book of Enoch, a Bible-like book, which in the Western world is considered a book of the pseudepigrapha. Black had been working with J[ózef] T. Milik, a member of the Scroll-publication team, on the publication of the Enoch fragments from Qumran. Through this connection some transcriptions of these fragments were made available to the seminar. That experience did it; it inspired in me a much greater interest in the scrolls. Indeed, up to the present time, the Book of Enoch remains one of the centers of my research interests.
Between 1972 and 1976 I pursued doctoral studies at Harvard, where Cross and John Strugnell were teaching. This gave me a great opportunity to examine the scrolls more intensively. My original plan when I came to Harvard was to study Targums (ancient Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible), not the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was Cross who suggested what has become a lifelong labor, mostly of love: the Book of Jubilees. Cross told me that for some time he had wanted a student to do some research on the Book of Jubilees, another pseudepigraphal work composed by a Jewish writer in the second century B.C.E.—a work that re-presents the stories of Genesis and the first half of Exodus. In its many citations of Genesis and Exodus, Jubilees serves as a witness to the wording of one form of the text of those books at that early time.
Apparently no one had previously taken up Cross’s offer to study this aspect of Jubilees, perhaps because Jubilees is fully preserved only in Ge’ez, the ancient language of Ethiopia.
I had read Jubilees before Cross mentioned it to me, and I found his idea intriguing. It was doubly intriguing because several copies of Jubilees had surfaced among the Dead Sea Scrolls. So I agreed to take on the assignment, which eventually, much expanded, became my doctoral dissertation. I was able to compare the scriptural citations in Ge’ez copies of Jubilees with the Hebrew texts of Jubilees fragments from Qumran—at least those that had 065been published at the time.
I knew there were other fragmentary copies of Jubilees that had not yet been published, but they were simply not available to me. At the time I didn’t even consider the possibility of getting permission to use these unpublished texts, and no one encouraged me to try. It simply was not done.
From 1976 to 1991 I taught at North Carolina State University. Although I did some Scroll research there, not a lot seemed to be happening in the field. The scrolls had generated great excitement in the 1950s, but that excitement had cooled as little was being done. Scholars knew there were more Scroll fragments that remained unpublished, but for the most part they seemed, perhaps grudgingly, willing to wait for their appearance.
Toward the end of that 15-year period, however, the situation changed dramatically. In the mid-to-late 1980s there was a growing outcry regarding the fact that some 40 years after the first scrolls were discovered in 1947, a large number of them not only remained unpublished in the official series but also were unavailable in any form to most scholars. Some efforts to speed up the process of publication were proposed, one of which was the painfully obvious idea of involving more people in the editing work.
The fragments of Jubilees from Qumran Cave 4 had been assigned to J.T. Milik to publish, and it was well known that his complete publishing assignment was vast indeed. John Strugnell, who at the time was chief editor of the official Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (DJD) series, made arrangements with Milik for me to work with him in publishing the Jubilees fragments. I had already spent much of the 1980s preparing a critical edition and English translation of Jubilees, mostly based on the Ge’ez manuscripts along with the available textual evidence in Hebrew, Greek, Syriac and Latin. That two-volume work, which appeared in 1989, was apparently the ticket that gained me entrance to the Scroll-publication team.
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I thought my first step should be to schedule a meeting with Milik so that we could organize our collaboration. I wrote to him in Paris several times. I never received a reply, even though he had agreed with Strugnell to work with me on the Jubilees fragments. Finally I telephoned Milik; he agreed to meet me in Paris in January 1990. (I had experienced what others had: that he almost never answered letters.)
It was an unforgettable meeting. After a lengthy discussion, he simply handed me all his materials for the Jubilees manuscripts—photographs and notes. Milik had already done a great deal of work in deciphering the fragments and locating them in the text. His work was immensely valuable to me. I have kept his notes as a prized possession. When I later sent him drafts of my work for review, he mailed me additional comments. He and I jointly published preliminary editions of several of the manuscripts, and we presented all of the Jubilees material in Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XIII, which appeared in 1994.
After my visit with Milik, I traveled to Jerusalem to spend a couple weeks examining the Jubilees fragments themselves. Studying these fragile manuscripts in the basement of the Rockefeller Museum in 1990, before any systematic work of conservation had been done, was a strange but exhilarating experience. I worked in a small room where the fragments, pressed between glass plates, were stored in metal file cabinets.
I recall that three or four of the copies of Jubilees that I requested permission to study could not be found. Near the end of my stay in Jerusalem, I was told that they had finally been located. It turned out that years earlier they had been sent to the Israel Museum for repair and had neither been returned nor missed.
I moved to the University of Notre Dame in 1991, where, over the years, Eugene Ulrich, who by 1991 had been a member of the publication team for about a decade, and I have collaborated in editing some 17 volumes in the DJD series. We have been blessed with a long line of talented graduate students who have assisted us.
In 1994, I wrote a popular introduction to the scrolls titled The Dead Sea Scrolls Today (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans). I tried to be as balanced as possible in presenting a full and reliable picture of the scrolls at a time when a lot of dubious claims were being made and controversial theses were being advanced. A day or two before the book was scheduled for publication, I received a phone call from Eerdmans asking whether I wanted to make any changes in the text of the book. They were doing a second printing. The first printing had sold out before the publication date! The book has remained in print since then and has been translated into six languages. A new edition is in the planning stages. The experience has impressed on me how great a claim the Dead Sea Scrolls have on the popular imagination
Another experience reinforcing that impression is the series of Scroll exhibits organized in the last several years at various cities in the United States. The exhibits have been set up in different ways by the museums, and each of them has done a wonderful job of showing Scroll fragments and contextualizing them with archaeological finds and with explanatory materials that reflect widespread views about the scrolls. Those institutions have experienced an overwhelming public response, proving the astonishing drawing power of these tattered pieces of leather and papyrus. Hundreds of thousands of people tour the exhibits. They are accompanied by a lecture series, and the number of people who turn out for these lectures is truly inspiring.
Collaborating with scholars from varied backgrounds has been one of the richest features of working on the scrolls. In particular, the opportunity to work with Jewish scholars has been a rewarding and instructive opportunity. I look forward to continuing that collaboration as we move into a new stage of research. Now that all of the scrolls are published, we can study them more as a part of Jewish literature of the time, less as a separate library.
5 Scrolls Still in Private Hands
By James H. Charlesworth
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