If you’re not familiar with the saga surrounding the discovery, acquisition, translation and subsequent publications of the Dead Sea Scrolls, you don’t have enough excitement in your life. For the latest criminal investigations involving a major case of lashon hara, read up on the latest article from the New York Times in which a debate regarding the identity of the Qumran community ends up in an arrest for identity theft.
Another article related to my post Jewish Resurrected Messiah Text Causing Buzz can be found on the Biblical Archaeology website here:
http://www.bib-arch.org/bar/article.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=34&Issue=5&ArticleID=14
The New York Times published an article today that already has sparks flying on the internet. It is entitled, “Tablet Ignites Debate on Messiah and Resurrection.” It is a follow-up on an earlier article posted a year ago last April by Haaretz, called “In three days, you shall live.”
The basic premise is that of a Jewish tradition, predating Christianity which has the Messiah dying and resurrecting after three days, as a necessity of his messiahship. Israel Knohl, a professor from the Hebrew University, has been the main voice in this, because it appears to validate what he had already discovered in his studies of the Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts. In 2002, he published a book of his findings called, “The Messiah before Jesus: The Suffering Servant of the Dead Sea Scrolls” which explains his findings (and if anyone wants to get me a copy, I won’t complain).
Knohl takes the references of a Suffering (or Slain) Messiah (Mashiach ben Yosef) found in the Talmud (starting in Sukkah 52a), along with the DSS manuscripts to build a case for a first century expectation for a resurrected messiah. However, with the find of the Gabriel Tablet (the main focus of the two previous articles), Knohl has a very substantial text from the period just prior to the time of Yeshua to back his theory.
Be sure to read both articles, and pick up the book if you have a chance. This is some very interesting information that could prove very valuable in the near future.
Yesterday the New York Times released a follow-up article based on one published in the most recent edition of Biblical Archaeology Review. It seems that there are a small, but growing number of archaeologists who are now re-examining the link between the Qumran Community and the cache of scrolls found among the caves along the Dead Sea. After ten years of working with the Qumran excavations, archaeologists, Yizhak Magen and Yuval Peleg of the Israel Antiquities Authority are now saying that Qumran is in no way connected to the scrolls which have been linked to the community almost since they surfaced in the middle of the last century.
Not only that, but they are denying Qumran’s connection to monasticism and an Essene identity as well. They conclude that the community at Qumran was a secular establishment was no more than a pottery factory, and that the repository of scrolls came from a divergent collection of sources fleeing from Roman persecution. One seemingly tell-tale sign is the conspicuous lack of a single manuscript addressing the topic of celibacy, a cornerstone of Essene doctrine. This, along with an extensive repository of pottery equipment and pottery-related items among the community, as well as the absence of any religious writings actually found “in” the Qumran sector have given this team of archaeologists a fair amount of evidence to support this theory. Read up on it when you have a chance.
