Bible Books

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“The First Dead Sea Scroll”

The Damascus Document Reconsidered

Magen Broshi, editor
(Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society/Shrine of the Book, Israel Museum, 1992) 83 pp., $20.00

There is a special fascination about the ancient Hebrew text known as the Damascus Document, or the Zadokite Fragments. Solomon Schechter found tenth and twelfth-century copies of this text in the famous Cairo Genizah and published them in 1910. Even before 1947 when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered at Qumran, there was considerable interest in this text. But when the Damascus Document’s clear affinities with the scrolls were noticed and especially when earlier copies of it were identified among the Cave 4 scrolls by J. T. Milik, the attention it received increased all the more. In Schechter’s publication he gave a transcription of the full text from the Genizah, and he provided a photograph of just a single page. Since his time, no photographs of it have been made available except in Solomon Zeitlin’s edition,^a in which they appear in reduced form. It is thus high time that photographs were published.

They are now available in the beautifully produced volume The Damascus Document Reconsidered. Magen Broshi, curator of the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, provides a short introduction that reviews the scholarship on the Damascus Document and describes the contents of the present book, which is divided into three parts. In the first, Elisha Qimron of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev presents the text. On each left-hand page is an excellent photograph of one page from the Cairo Genizah texts and on the facing page is Qimron’s transcription, which he made by examining the originals in both normal and ultraviolet light. He attempts to reproduce each feature of the originals, including spacing and interlinear letters. At the bottom of the pages are notes listing variant readings found in the Qumran manuscripts, a few textual emendations and some other possible readings of the medieval texts.

The second part of the book is a brief essay by Joseph Baumgarten of Baltimore Hebrew University. He is currently editing the fragments of the Damascus Document from Qumran Cave 4 and here surveys that material. He lists ten items in the Qumran texts that are not present in the Genizah versions and also describes each of the eight copies from Cave 4. They range in date from the first half of the first century B.C.E.^b to the mid-first century C.E. “In all the manuscripts together we have fragments of 689 lines, of which 326 (47%) parallel the text of the Damascus Document known to us from the Genizah. Of this parallel material 144 lines (44%) come from the Admonitions, while 182 lines (56%) come from the corpus of laws,” Baumgarten writes. He adds that, although there are major omissions in the Genizah texts, they are still quite reliable when compared to the far more ancient Qumran copies.

The final section is a bibliography, subdivided by topic, prepared by another distinguished Qumran scholar, Florentino García Martínez, of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. It continues the bibliography that Joseph Fitzmyer published in 1970; hence, it focuses on publications between 1970 and 1989.

By making primary material available in a new and improved form and by bringing the reader up-to-date on the scholarship on the text, The Damascus Document Reconsidered is a remarkably helpful book. Since most of the Damascus Document material from Qumran is still in preparation, it is especially useful that the variants from the Qumran texts are collated with the Genizah versions.

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The Gospel According to Jesus: A New Translation and Guide to His Essential Teachings for Believers and Unbelievers

Stephen Mitchell
(New York: HarperCollins, 1991) 312 pp., $23.00

What you say about Jesus says as much about you as it says about him—and frequently more. Stephen Mitchell’s The Gospel According to Jesus is a sterling example of this maxim. It appears with a recent spate of books about Jesus^c and illustrates beautifully the problem of the historical Jesus.

Although written by a literary critic rather than a historian of early Christianity, The Gospel According to Jesus professes a historical aim: to select and translate from the Gospels “only those passages that seem to me authentic accounts and sayings of Jesus.” Mitchell relies, he says, on “strictly scholarly criteria,” presumably meaning the critical standards developed by New Testament scholars who seek to interrogate the Gospels for historical information, although the consistency with which he applies those standards is no greater (and often less) than that of scholars in the field. In essence, Mitchell means that a search for Jesus requires one to sift through the confessional statements about Jesus to get to Jesus’ own words. Mitchell asserts that,

“Once the sectarian passages are left out, we can recognize that Jesus speaks in harmony with the supreme teachings of all the great religions: the Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching, the Buddhist sutras, the Zen and Sufi and Hasidic Masters.”

Mitchell’s previous scholarly efforts—translations of Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching, Job and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke—have exalted what he sees as the universal truths shared by all truly wise religious leaders, so it is no surprise that his depiction of Jesus fits so neatly with the others. Jesus of Nazareth is, in Mitchell’s view,

“a man who has emptied himself of desires, doctrines, rules—all the mental claptrap and spiritual baggage that separate us from the true life—and has been filled with the vivid reality of the Unnameable. Because he has let go of the merely personal, he is no one, he is everyone…He is like a mirror for us all, showing us who we essentially are.”

This is a “historical” picture that is, however, divorced from all history. There is nothing about this Jesus that identifies him as a first-century Jew from Palestine; his generic spirituality (selflessness, serenity, detachment and so on) could as easily arise in a Greco-Roman Stoic, an Asian mystic or a 20th-century New Age devotee. This is not because Mitchell is necessarily a careless scholar or ignorant of history but because his guide in this quest for the historical Jesus is Thomas Jefferson, the great deist who attempted in his The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth to carry out the program proposed by John Locke in 1695:

“But ’tis not in the epistles that we are to learn what are the fundamental articles of faith. We shall find and discern those great an necessary points out of the history of the evangelists and Acts” (John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures).

That attitude was a fundamental assumption of 19th-century critical life-of-Jesus research, which held (among other things) that the history of the primitive church is one of falling away from the “pure spirituality” of Jesus toward the increasing complexity of cult and dogma. Jesus had religion; Paul and the other early Christians had theology. The rationalism that was Locke’s legacy sought to free the church—and Western culture—from the shackles of ecclesiastical authority and to retrieve the unadulterated religion of Jesus. Those who subscribed to such an approach assumed that Jesus’ unmediated relationship with God and his moral example to human beings were all that was needed to enable humanity to develop its God-given potential. Critical study of the Gospels became one means to that end, stripping away from Jesus of Nazareth the dogmatic disguise that had been imposed on him by succeeding generations of the church.

Much of the earliest study of the Gospels, therefore, took the form of lives of Jesus, designed to rediscover the pure religion of Jesus, as deism saw it, the so-called fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man. The first study was the most radical. An “anonymous” treatise on “The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples” by Hermann Samuel Reimarus, published posthumously in 1778, sought to distinguish what Jesus actually said and did from what his disciples later said about him. Reimarus’ reconstruction had a decidedly antitheological bias to it that reflected his times. He said Jesus was a Jew who announced the coming of God’s kingdom in very secular (that is, political) terms. Only when his death made that hope of God’s kingdom impossible did his disciples “come up with the idea of a suffering spiritual redeemer of the whole human race.” The disciples invented this new theological system in order to hold on to their positions of power and authority, and, by means of the theft of Jesus’ body, they perpetuated the rumor that he had been raised from the dead.

Two things are important to notice here. One is that Reimarus used historical criteria to evaluate the Gospels. He separated confessional statements from allegations of historical fact in the Gospels, and used non-biblical sources about the period, so far as they were available to him, to support or refute those allegations. No one had done that before, and to Reimarus belongs the credit for initiating a purely historical search for Jesus that is continued in Mitchell’s Gospel According to Jesus. Secondly, at Reimarus’ fairly outrageous results indicate, he let his own presuppositions color his results. He was the first to do this, but by no means the last. It is a commonplace of Jesus research that, as the great German New Testament critic 014Rudolph Bultmann put it, “there is no presuppositionless history.” Historians always find at least something of what they look for, whether it is there or not. Mitchell, whose Jesus looks like a self-portrait of the author, is thus in very good company.

Following Reimarus, and usually in reaction to him, came literally dozens of lives of Jesus in which Jesus looked amazingly like the scholars who wrote the books. Albert Schweitzer, whose magisterial Quest of the Historical Jesus appeared in 1906 and told the story of the history of the search, contributed yet another view of Jesus’ life. There is one major difference, however, between Schweitzer’s Jesus and those of scholars before him. Schweitzer evaluated all his predecessors in the quest for Jesus using two criteria: Did they examine Jesus’ life from strictly historical perspectives? And did they recognize the thoroughgoing eschatological force of his life and ministry? When Schweitzer was finished, the picture he painted of Jesus was not that of a 19th-century rationalist intent on bringing about the universal “fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man” as his predecessors had, but of a radical apocalyptic preacher of the kingdom, totally conditioned by his Jewish expectation that God would break into human history at any moment and restore all things.

The only possible response to such a “rediscovery” of Jesus was to go to Africa and be a medical missionary, which is precisely what Schweitzer did. Noble as his response was, though, Schweitzer, too, discovered a Jesus who looked like a theological idea rather than a historical person. But Schweitzer’s Jesus did not look like Schweitzer himself, as most previous lives of Jesus had resembled their authors. Rather Schweitzer’s Jesus ended up being so foreign, so distant from modern sensibilities, that the only response to him is to live for others in the general sense that Jesus had. Schweitzer said, “There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the Life of Jesus.” Schweitzer believed that what history discovers is a Jesus who cannot be brought straight into the modern world. Martin Kähler, the German New Testament scholar of the late 19th century, saw the problem even more keenly than Schweitzer—and understood the real reason for the failure of the quest for the historical Jesus. And it is revealing that in his incredibly thorough history of Jesus scholarship, Schweitzer nowhere even mentioned Kähler, because Kähler’s critique of Jesus research undercut Schweitzer’s own.

In 1896, at a summer continuing education event for pastors, Kähler delivered an address entitled The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ, which predated by ten years the same problem that later elicited Schweitzer’s Quest. The real problem with discovering the Jesus of history, Kähler said, and the reason the quest has been such an apparent failure, is not only that scholars allow their presuppositions to influence their history, as Schweitzer said, nor is it largely that scholars have failed to recognize the foreignness of Jesus. The problem of the historical Jesus is a problem of sources. The Gospels provide virtually our only access to Jesus, and the Gospels are incapable of answering the questions historians ask. Kähler understood with painful clarity how kerygmatic the Gospels are, that is, how they proclaim rather than record as journalism or history—“passion narratives with extended introductions,” he called them. He understood as no one before him how unsuitable the Gospels are as sources for history. The nature of the gospel literature effectively prevents access to the historical Jesus because the Gospels are sermons about Jesus, not biographies of him or historical documents about his life. Christian faith must therefore content itself with the proclamation of the biblical Christ (and that proclamation is itself historic), rather than force the Gospels to relinquish historical data they do not contain.

Both Schweitzer, who documented the quest for the historical Jesus, and Kähler, who advocated the end of that quest, recognized the central dilemma of critical New Testament study: the distance between Jesus and Christian preaching about him. Alfred Loisy, an early 20th-century scholar, said, “Jesus announced the coming of the kingdom and what arrived was the church.”¹ The difference between Liberalism’s quest for the historical Jesus and Kähler’s rebuttal of it is a function of their different resolutions of the dilemma: given the distinction between the historical Jesus and the biblical Christ, one must choose. Schweitzer and classical Liberalism chose Jesus; Kähler and ecclesiastical orthodoxy chose Christ.

In this century, those involved in the “new quest” for the historical Jesus have attempted a rapprochement between those extremes, trying to locate what connections are historically discernible between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. Neoorthodoxy’s insistence on the radical transcendence of God has been tempered by a conviction of the Gospels’ historical foundation, so that the forced choice—Jesus or Christ—is no longer possible historically or theologically, in the ways it once was. As Paul Meyer, professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, puts it, “The historical inquiry into the origins and essential characteristics of early Christianity cannot be divorced from the theological search for the criteria of its authenticity.”²

The problem with Stephen Mitchell’s 015The Gospel According to Jesus is that it addresses the problem of faith and history without any understanding of its nature and scope. The result is a 20th-century version of a 19th-century life of Jesus: Jesus of Nazareth ceases to be a human being conditioned by his own social and historical forces and becomes instead the reflection of a modern author’s religious ideas and convictions.

013

From what I know of Jesus, it seems to me most likely that there was no betrayal [by Judas], and that the legend originated in the disciples’ need for villains…If this story is a legend, Judas may have elicited the other apostles’ enmity because he differed from them in some essential and threatening way. Did he disbelieve in the resurrection? Did he understand that Jesus’s death couldn’t and shouldn’t cause a change in Jesus’ gospel? We’ll never know.

The Gospel According to Jesus, by Stephen Mitchell

The English Bible from KJV to NIV: A History and Evaluation

Jack P. Lewis
(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker. 1991) 2nd ed., 512 pp., $21.95

Of the making of Bible translations there is no end, and a reader who prefers, all things being equal, to make an intelligent choice among them needs a sober, detailed and reliable guide to their sundry strengths and weaknesses. In 1981 biblical scholar Jack Lewis provided such a guide in his massively detailed yet thoroughly readable description of 12 of the most popular English Bible translations (King James Version, American Standard Version, Revised Standard Version, New English Bible, New American Standard Bible, Jerusalem Bible, New American Bible, New World Bible, Living Bible, Today’s English Version [Good News], New International Version and New King James Version). Now, ten years later, he has reprinted his original text (regrettably, without updating any data—or even the title), while adding chapters on two significant translations that have appeared in the interim (Revised English Bible and New Revised Standard Version) and revising his comments on the New King James Version in light of the publication of its Old Testament.

Lewis briefly recounts the “preliterary history” of each translation—the makeup of its committee and the principles under which its members worked. He devotes the preponderance of his text, however, to a detailed description of the characteristics of each translation in terms of accuracy (as he sees it), literary style, theological slant, internal consistency, idiosyncracies and any other special features, with additional comments on such matters as paragraphing, versification, punctuation and typesetting. Each chapter is relatively self-contained. The data Lewis has amassed are prodigious, but the text as a whole remains readable; while he prefers trees to forests, the physiognomy of the landscape emerges nonetheless.

Lewis writes as a conservative evangelical Christian concerned with “the man [sic] in the pew” and with the ability of translations to “[supply] God’s Word in current and understandable English” or, at the very least, to “[set forth] the basic duties toward God and man [sic].” To some readers Lewis’ perspective will appear needlessly parochial: His idea of “every major religious group” is Jews, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, British Protestants and evangelicals. Moreover, the pervasive use of sexist language is particularly offensive in a book that otherwise commends inclusive translation. Nonetheless, in only scattered instances does Lewis’ evangelical orientation influence the tone of his evaluation—as when the NIV is occasionally praised for clarifying obscurities that are in fact problems embedded in the text—and rarely in any circumstance are his judgments heavy-handed (except where one might hope them to be, e.g., the New World translation, famous among translators for its ignorance, or deliberate distortion of Greek grammar).

In his own evangelical context, Lewis has rendered a distinctive service by highlighting the celebrated defects of the so-called Authorized Version, demonstrating the perdurance of these defects in the Authorized Version’s reemergence as the New King James Version and, on the other end of the spectrum, in detailing the fatal foibles of the Living Bible.^d Even more, for readers of all persuasions, he has provided the most extensive and salutary comparisons of major English translations available—a convenient tool to consult and a godsend for pastors and teachers bombarded with the eternal question, Which Bible should I use?

Jewish Lore in Manichaean Cosmogony: Studies in the Book of Giants Traditions

John C. Reeves
(Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1992) 260 pp., $49.95

The title that John Reeves, who teaches at Winthrop College in Rock Hill, South Carolina, gives to his revised dissertation might frighten the reader away from what turns out to be a fascinating exercise in comparative religions. The Manichees were a religious group that followed Mani (a third-century C.E. teacher from Syria). He taught a syncretistic religion, with elements clearly borrowed from Christianity, Gnosticism and Zoroastrianism. Reeves set himself the task of examining the evidence for Jewish influence on Mani’s system of beliefs—a topic that has received unexpected new light from the Qumran discoveries.

Reeves first turns to the evidence provided by a variety of sources in several languages (including Greek, Arabic and Chinese) that a Book of Giants was one of the canonical works of the Manichaeans. The giants in question were the children of marriages between the angels and women^e—a theme that many ancient expositors found expressed in Genesis 6:1–4. These giants and their lawless violence became an important element in explaining the spread of evil in the world. Reeves also surveys modern views about the Book of Giants and the process through which parts of the text have been recovered. The real heart of the work, however, is the long second chapter on the Qumran fragments of the Book of Giants. J. T. Milik identified and published a number of fragments from this work and noted the similarities 048with Mani’s Book of Giants. Milik considered the Book of Giants one of the five original parts of 1 Enoch.

Reeves studies each of the Qumran fragments in great detail. He arranges them somewhat differently than Milik did, he always bases his work on careful comparisons of the fragmentary Aramaic text with what is reported elsewhere about the Book of Giants. The remaining shorter chapters deal with a homily of Severus, patriarch of Antioch from 512 to 518, which some believe describes Mani’s Book of Giants (a view Reeves opposes), and with a broader discussion of Manichaean views of universal origins and their relation to Jewish traditions.

It now appears likely, thanks to Reeves’ study, that Mani read the Qumran Book of Giants or something very much like it, perhaps during the time when he was associated with the Elchasites (a Jewish-Christian sect that held certain forefathers such as Enoch in high regard). Mani then made this the basis for his own Book of Giants, which became an authoritative text in his syncretistic religion. Reeves’ study makes a wide range of materials available in clear form for the study of an unexpected influence of the Qumran group on the beliefs of others.

Power and Politics in Palestine: The Jews and the Governing of their Land 100 B.C.—A.D. 70

James S. McLaren
(Sheffield, UK: JSOT, 1991) 244 pp., $42.50

The more we learn about the society and institutions of Judea during the Hellenistic and Roman periods (330 B.C.E.-70 C.E.), the less we know. As the once-sure results of critical scholarship erode around us, we await the emergence of a new vision, a persuasive view that makes sense of the complexities of the old data. James McLaren’s work on political authority and institutions in Roman Israel successfully undermines the foundations of earlier views, yet contributes little toward the formation of a new consensus.

McLaren focuses on the status, power and nature of the Jerusalem Sanhedrin, an institution defined in 20th-century scholarship through the uncritical harmonization of New Testament references with the Mishnaic tractate Sanhedrin. He examines the Sanhedrin through a new lens. After dismissing the Mishnah as late and irrelevant to historical reconstructions of the Sanhedrin during an earlier period, McLaren shifts his gaze to individual events as recorded in Josephus, Philo, the Gospels and Acts. As a result, the view of the Sanhedrin as a fixed, permanent formal institution governing Judea, especially in religious matters, evaporates into a view of it as an ad hoc group whose composition varied according to the circumstances. A more lasting institution emerges, however—a Jerusalem boule (council). According to McLaren, however, this was merely a figurehead group with daily administrative responsibilities. While Jews did play “a practical and essential part” in political decisions, formal institutions held little sway. Individuals, especially from the “chief priests” and the wealthy laity, could influence governmental authorities (such as the Hasmoneans and the Romans) in cases where conflicts 049of interest arose.

McLaren’s negative conclusions will hold little surprise for those who have witnessed the shift in scholarship on early Judaism initiated in the past 20 years by Jacob Neusner.^f But where are the constructive results of his study? Of course permanent modern bureaucratic institutions did not hold power in antiquity. To believe so in the first place displays an amazing degree of historical naiveté. The Roman empire operated politically within aristocratic patronage systems where rhetoric, not law, ruled. The Sanhedrin appears to have been a center, under priestly dominance, of this kind of system. If McLaren could fit the result into the Roman system—and it could be done—we might be able to reconstruct imaginatively the society out of which normative Judaism and Christianity emerged.

One final point. Why Power and Politics in Palestine, not Judea or Israel? With few exceptions, McLaren examines events centered in Jerusalem, itself a significant fact that reveals that power was exercised from the urban center over the countryside. While Palestine has a nice alliterative ring to it, it is anachronistic for the time span that McLaren examines. One could safely bet that an Israeli scholar would have produced a different title for the same work!

The Secret Identity of the Beloved Disciple

Joseph A. Grassi
(Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1992) 135 pp., $7.95

“Many biblical scholars,” Raymond Brown has observed, “are also passionate readers of detective stories.”^g As its title suggests, The Secret Identity of the Beloved Disciple was written by one such scholar. Joseph Grassi examines the history of scholarship on the authority of John’s Gospel and dissents from the conclusions of most scholars (including Brown’s) before he proposes his own. Most modern scholars acknowledge that the Fourth Gospel is the product of several editorial stages. It is also commonly argued that the eyewitness to Jesus’ crucifixion alluded to in John 19:35 and 21:24 is John the son of Zebedee who, although unnamed in the Gospel of John, is sometimes called “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 13:23, 19:26, 20:2) and sometimes simply “the other disciple” (John 18:15–16, 20:4). Grassi, however, argues that the Beloved Disciple is not only not the son of Zebedee, familiar from the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), nor even one of the Twelve, but an otherwise unknown young native of Jerusalem from a priestly family whom Jesus “adopted … as his own son in a strong affectionate relationship.” Grassi explores the possible background to the portrayal of the Beloved Disciple (whom he does call John) in the Joseph cycle in Genesis, but goes beyond attributing those allusions to the literary and theological artistry of the author and claims instead that the historical author, whom he equates with the Beloved Disciple, modeled himself after Joseph.

This provocative and popularly written little David of a book takes on a Goliath of contemporary scholarship. The stones in its slingshot are perhaps not sufficiently weighty to fell the giant, but its enticement to read the frequently puzzling literary clues of the Fourth Gospel makes the battle an entertaining one.

“The First Dead Sea Scroll”

The Damascus Document Reconsidered