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Robert
Eisenman and Michael Wise (editors)
The
Dead Sea Scrolls
Uncovered
Element Books, 1992
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
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Readers
of this long-awaited collection of the sequestered remainder of the Qumran
Scrolls will naturally be forced to ask themselves: "Was it worth the
wait?" Since the wait was totally
unnecessary
to begin with, probably not. Indeed one cannot help but wonder why the
scholarly cabal of the International Team possibly imagined that fragments like
these required their dilatory attentions (and no one else's) for all those
decades. This collection of fifty documents represents what the editors judge to
be the most interesting and important of the Scrolls hidden away by the
Qumran brotherhood of
Strugnell, de Vaux, Benoit, Milik and the rest. And yet there is little to
merit the preceding hype. At least nothing obvious to the unaided eye.
And that is where the scholarly aid of editors
Eisenman and Wise proves so vital. The Scroll snippets contained here, and
snippets is what most of them are (after reading the introductory notes
describing
the importance of a fragment one may be startled to see how brief and full of
lacunae it is!), assume their real significance only once they are read in the
framework of the paradigm supplied in Eisenman's earlier books Maccabees, Zadokites, Christians and Qumran
and James the Just in the Habakkuk Pesher. There Eisenman argues, marshalling a vast amount of eye-popping
esoterica
from neglected sources, that the Qumran Scrolls represent not a monastery of
Essenes as conventionally defined, that is, as a pacifistic, vegetarian New Age
movement bracketed off from the Zealots, Christians, and other Jewish
movements, but rather a broad popular Zadokite movement stemming from Maccabean times. This
movement was marked by both nationalist and legal zeal, by xenophobia and
messianism. They viewed themselves as a priestly people, taking Phineas-like
zeal as the chief credential for priesthood. They presented the popular
alternative to the Pharisees and Boethusian Sadducees, both Quisling lap dogs
of the Herods and
Rome.
If both what we have conventionally dubbed
Essenes and Zealots were included in this movement, so were the Nazoreans, Ebionites,
or Jewish Christians, though "Christian" is an anachronistic term
better applied to the Hellenized offshoot religion as it began to take form
under the sculpting hands of the pro-Roman, pro-Herod libertine, Paul. In fact,
as Eisenman reads them, Paul himself figures quite prominently in the Scrolls
as "the Man of the Lie" or "the Spouter of Lies" or
"the Scoffer" who repudiated the Torah in the midst of the
Congregation, becoming the Enemy by making himself the friend of men, pursuing "smooth
things" rather than the rigor of the Law.
His opposite number, the Teacher of
Righteousness, is to be identified as James the Zaddik, James the Just. The
number of striking correspondences between the portrait of James in the New
Testament and other sources on the one hand and that of the Teacher in the
Scrolls on the other is very impressive. No less so is the way Eisenman is able
to fit James the Just into the long tradition of popular "Zadokite"
holy men attested from other sources. As Scrolls scholars have long recognized,
in the
Qumran materials we must be
dealing with a major Jewish movement of the day. The only question was: which
one? Why not the "Jewish Christians"?
What Eisenman sees had been invisible until now
because of the consensus dating of the Scrolls a century or two too early.
(Co-editor Wise is not as convinced of the Nazorean identity of the Scroll
sect, leaning to a more conventionally-defined Zealot authorship, like Cecil
Roth before him. Nonetheless, Eisenman has drawn his circle wide enough to
encompass Wise's Zealots, so the
two
can walk together despite some lack of agreement. In any case, most of the
commentary in The
Dead Sea Scrolls
Uncovered
sounds
like Eisenman's prose.)
A good handful of the "new" fragments
and texts are particularly suggestive once one dons the new spectacles Eisenman
has prescribed. 4Q525 The Demons of Death contains in its brief compass a
surprising number of parallels with the New Testament Epistle of James. Both
stress God's willingness to grant wisdom to the asker. Both warn against
slander with the tongue. Both link Wisdom with the Law in the manner of Baruch
3:9ff. Both warn of the futility of seeking anything from God without
singleness of heart. Both advise their readers to accept adversities as divine chastisements.
Both compare sin to poison. Other parallels appear here and there in the texts,
especially in the two Letters on Works Righteousness, where, as in the Habakkuk
pesher, we have
very
Jamesian sentiments on the question of whether works are needed to complement
saving faith. (The second of these Letters, incidentally, would seem to
threaten to overthrow Lloyd Gaston's
contention,
in his Paul and the Torah, that we
nowhere find the phrase "works of the Law" meaning "works that
the Law requires.")
So intriguing and extensive are the Jamesian
parallels between the New Testament epistle and the Qumran texts that one would
love to see Professor Eisenman specifically address the case made by Dibelius
and others that the Epistle of James is a thoroughly Hellenistic product, representing a heavy assimilation of Stoicism
with little Jewish (or Christian!) residue.
Eisenman and Wise argue that the writers of the
Scrolls, whoever they were, seem to have believed in a single Davidic Messiah,
who may nonetheless have had Levite lineage as well, a single "Messiah of
Aaron and
Israel." They admit that
references in previously accessible Scrolls could be plausibly read as denoting
twin priestly and royal Messiahs, but they feel the new materials rule this
interpretation out. It seems, however, that even on Eisenman's theory, it would
not be hard to make sense of a pair of Nazorean Messiahs, the priestly James
playing the role of the
Messiah
of Aaron.
Perhaps the most sensational of the new Scroll
materials is 4Q246 The Son of God, where we find a pseudo-Danielic prophecy of
a kingly birth couched in terms almost identical to the annunciation of Gabriel
in Luke's Gospel. More Lukan messianic exegesis, the allusions to Isaiah 61 in
the
Nazareth synagogue sermon, is paralleled
by 4Q521 The Messiah of Heaven and Earth. Has Luke borrowed from Jewish
messianic lore current in his day? Or do both Luke and the Scrolls depend on
messianic exegesis in the wake of Jesus the Nazorean? On Eisenman's reading the
latter
would
seem to be the case. This issue becomes all the more acute if the texts are to
be read at one or two points as Eisenman and Wise do, referring to the death of
the Messiah. They admit the
text
is grammatically ambiguous, but suppose they are right: do we infer a
pre-Christian "Messiah ben Joseph" doctrine, and thus something of a
pre-Jesus precedent for the notion of a dying Messiah? Or, as the editors
imply, a Jewish Christian reference backward to the execution of Jesus himself?
Of course the very same issues, albeit in a
slightly different form, have vexed scholarly discussion of the Testaments of
the Twelve Patriarchs, where we have messianic predictions which seem uncannily
to match Jesus' career as we read of it in the Gospels. Many scholars have
followed R.H. Charles in bracketing such references as Christian interpolations
in otherwise pre-Christian
Jewish
Pseudepigrapha. The great contemporary authority on the Testaments, M. de
Jonge, argues rather that the Testaments are integrated literary wholes that in
their present form must go back to Christians who have either simply made
extensive use of Jewish sectarian traditions or have so thoroughly reworked
older Jewish texts that the Testaments now read seamlessly as essentially new
(and thoroughly Christian) works. One cannot just chop out the
"suspicious" passages. The new Scroll material would seem in some
measure to back de Jonge's theory, in that Hebrew and Aramaic portions of the
Testaments of Levi and of Naphtali found at Qumran do not quite match the Greek
versions as we have long known them. Thus the more familiar versions do
represent a later stage of the transmission history of the Testaments. But may
we not see as one of the implications of Eisenman's theory the possibility that
the Testaments, with their thinly veiled references to Jesus, are integral
wholes stemming from Nazorean "Christians" of the kind that wrote the
Scrolls, too?
Apparently scholars have thought the references
to Jesus to be too marginal for documents stemming in their entirety from Christian
hands. If they were writing from scratch, would not
Christian
authors have given Jesus more of a central role? Thus, perhaps, the preference
for theories that made the "Christian" passages interpolations into
Jewish works or that made the Testaments as Christian works simply extensive
recastings of pre-existent Jewish works. How else to account for all the Jewish
material? But perhaps "Jewish Christianity" was not so very Christocentric
to begin with! Perhaps Jesus was one of many Zaddikim venerated for his atoning
sufferings. Others' favorite saint might have been John the Baptist or even
James the Just. Christocentrism would have been born in the syncretistic matrix
of the Gentile Mission, once (perhaps a la Sam K. Williams's Jesus' Death as Saving Event) the
sufferings of Jesus had come to be reckoned by Greek-speaking Jews as an
atonement for the Gentiles.
Eisenman and Wise speculate that the language of
the Messianic Branch who will "stand up" or "arise" in the
Last Times might refer to a future resurrection and second coming of the slain
Messiah.
(Of course such references occur in the previously available Scrolls as well.)
Despite Eisenman's admirable propensity for casting his net widely enough to
garner illuminating
Religionsgeschichtliche parallels from
both the Kabbalah and Shi'ite Islam, it is surprising that on the point in
question he does not adduce the title of the Shi'ite eschatological deliverer variously
called the Mahdi and the Qa'im. While the former means "the Rightly Guided
One," the less familiar latter title means "He Who Shall Arise."
Not only would the title of the Qa'im provide a parallel for the role of an
eschatological deliverer, but specifically the Qa'im is a returned Imam, an
inspired teacher of a past generation (one of the descendants of Ali who knew
the esoteric interpretation of the Koran). Thus a Qumran Messiah who arises at
the end of days might well be a returning teacher, too.
If the Messiah of Aaron and
Israel who will arise at the
end of days should indeed be intended as Jesus the Nazorean, brother of James
the Teacher of Righteousness, there is yet another important implication. We
are brought back to the suggestion of C.H. Dodd and others, made long ago now,
to the effect that certain New Testament texts (e.g., the Johannine Farewell
Discourses)
imply
that early Christians did not always have clear in their minds a firm
distinction between the resurrection of Jesus and his second advent. Eisenman's
suggestions would seem to imply that for the Nazorean Messiah to "stand
up" (which equals precisely the Greek word for resurrection, anastasis, "the standing up")
at the end of the age is for him truly to be the firstfruits of the
eschatological resurrection, part of the same process it initiates, unlike in
Paul where the resurrection of Jesus, already years in the past, is more nearly
the prefiguration or the proleptic foreshadowing of the general harvest of the
dead. The band has stretched to the breaking point by the time 1 Corinthians 15
comes to be written.
Can it be, then, that originally the devotees of
the crucified Jesus expected him to rise from the dead as Lord and Christ at the
time of the second advent, in the impending future? And as
that
advent was longer and longer delayed, the Messiahship, as Wrede long ago
suggested, was retrojected into his first coming, and so, it would now appear,
was his resurrection. The resurrection itself would be seen as a piece of
realized eschatology, as theological retrojection from what John A.T. Robinson
once called "the most primitive Christology of all"--why not? Years ago, John Allegro and others whipped up
a storm (thus standing in the rainmaking tradition of Honi the Zaddik,
appropriately enough!) by suggesting that certain possible references to the
passion and
future
returning of the Teacher of Righteousness might make him a Christ before Jesus.
Wouldn't it be ironic if Jesus himself turned out to be the pre-Christian
Christ!
Another text that lights up with new possible
meaning on Eisenman's assumptions is 4Q541 A Firm Foundation (working title: 4Q
Aaron), which looks like a separate fragment of the Testament of Levi. "[Now] I [am
proclai]ming to you parable[s]...
rejoice. Behold, a wise man [will understand that I am seeing] and
comprehending deep Mysteries, thus I am spea[king...] parable[s]. The Greek (?)
[will not understand. But the Knowledge of Wis]dom will come to you, for you
have received... [you] will acquire..." Do we not here have a parallel to
(even perhaps an earlier version of) Matthew 13:11-17? One suspects that
the reference to the Greeks who do not understand the parables is aimed at
Hellenistic Christians who consider themselves able expounders of the parables
of Jesus but in fact twist their meaning (cf. 2 Peter 3:16).
Down the page the same document offers a
prediction of the one who "will make atonement for all the children of his
generation. He will be sent to all the sons of his [generation]." Do we
have
here
a nationalistic exclusivism like that in Matthew 15:24 (cf. 10:5-6), a
restriction of Jesus' mission to fellow Jews? And when we hear it predicted
that "They will invent stories about him.
They
will say shameful things about him," it is hard not to speculate that we
are hearing the Nazorean estimate of what would become Hellenistic Gospel
pericopes in which Jesus is made to set aside this or that provision of the
Torah or Halakah. And this would account for the restriction of the mission of
Jesus: it would serve to discredit and undercut the Gentile Mission whose
leaders
had fabricated "another Jesus" who had come to abolish the Law and
the Prophets instead of fulfilling them.
Also worth mention is a section of the Testament
of Amram (4Q543, 545-548) where we seem to have a variant of the tradition
mentioned in Jude 9 (there derived from the Assumption of Moses) in which
Michael and the devil dispute over Moses' body. In Jude's source, it has
seemed, we are to understand a postmortem dispute in which Satan demands Moses's
corpse, protesting that
Moses
mortgaged it to him when he disobeyed God by striking the rock. But Michael
would have pointed out that Moses' misstep had been adequately paid for by his
exclusion from the Promised Land. Michael carried the day, we must suppose, and
he returned to the presence of God, bringing Moses with him, hence the title of
the book. Maybe so.
But suppose the lost Assumption of Moses read
more like the Testament of his father Amram, in which he tells of his visions,
one of them a dream in which he beholds the struggle that takes place in every
human soul. With nyctaloptic second sight Amram sees "Two (men) fighting
over me... and holding a great contest over me." Asking their identities
Amram learns that they are two mighty princes between whom all the human race
divides its loyalties: the ophidian Watcher named Belial and Melchiresa, the Prince
of Darkness, and his opponent Michael or Melchizedek, the Prince of Light. They
bid him choose between them. He awakens. Could it be that in the Assumption of Moses the great lawgiver gathered
his loved ones to entrust to them his own visions on the eve of his departure
into heaven, as Enoch does? Perhaps one of his visions was like this one
attributed to Amram, a vision of guardian angel and devil wrestling above his
supine "sleeping" body?
Jude has somatikos, not nekros, after all.
Finally, it may be that 4Q318 The
Brontologion casts light on perhaps the most obscure passage in the New
Testament, the suppressed revelation of the Seven Thunders in Revelation
10:3-4. It is interesting that the divination practices of
Qumran combined conventional
astrology with brontology, the discernment of thunderclaps. In view of the
pronounced astrological imagery of the Apocalypse, where, e.g., Draco pursues
Virgo across the heavens in chapter 12, it should be no great surprise to
discover an occurrence of brontological oracles in the same book, though why
the
revelation is sealed up remains a mystery. Eisenman connects brontology in turn
with the tradition of the Zaddikim making rain in times of drought. Noah,
Elijah, and later Honi, Hanan, even James the Just were all credited with this feat.
Eisenman discerns, admittedly in a glass darkly, some relation between the same
tradition and the designation of James and John as "Sons of Thunder,"
especially since it is they who seek to sit at Jesus' right and left hands.
Since the scene they seem to be envisioning is that in Daniel 7 where one like
a son of man comes with clouds (the cloud-cherub chariot of Hadad/Yahweh?) and takes
his throne, Eisenman would make the Sons of Thunder on the right hand and on
the left as equivalent to the thunderheads with which the Son of Man is
flanked.
That the same two names also are
given the title Pillars (Galatians 2:9) seems to Eisenman not to be lacking
astrological significance either. Are we not to think of the cosmic pillars
that
hold
up the earth and the heavens? Eisenman cannot help but link the motif of James
and John as brothers with astrological lore as well, but here he must resort to
Thomas the Twin, pointing out
that
the Hebrew name for Gemini the Twins was Thomiah. Perhaps his missing link to
the sons of Zebedee is the one supplied by fellow Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John
Allegro in his universally
despised
and thus unread book The Sacred Mushroom
and the Cross, in which he hypothesized an unattested but grammatically
feasible Sumerian word/name Gesh-pu-an-ur,
"Upholder of the Vault of Heaven." This would be the Sumerian
equivalent to the Greek name of one of the Heavenly Twins (who are actually
mentioned, remember, in the New Testament in Acts 28:11). And if one imagines
the prefix switching to a suffix (something common enough in Hebrew theophoric
names), one would have the equivalent of "Bo-an-er-ges", the strange coinage
interpreted by Mark as "Sons of Thunder."
Eisenman and Wise managed to edit,
translate, and publish the Scrolls with blinding speed so that speculations
about what the hidden Scrolls contained might be replaced by speculations based
on a reading of their contents. They are to be commended, in the words of the
Dead Sea Scrolls, as "discerning interpreters of wonderful
mysteries."
CopyrightŠ2007 by
Robert M Price
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