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The Facts and Fiction about the Dead Sea Scrolls
This month, sixty years ago, a Bedouin shepherd offered for public sale some fragments of writing that he had found in a cave along the Dead Sea. The writings turned out to be 2,000 year old copies of not only books from the Old Testament, but numerous other Jewish writings, stashed away in some caves near the ancient community of Qumran at about the time Jesus lived. Because it took decades for much of the translated writings to be made public, there have been a number of “conspiracy theory” myths that have cropped up about the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS). Popular books like “The DaVinci Code” by Dan Brown have capitalized on this situation, and thus added to the confusion. I would like to address some of the popular myths about the DSS.
MYTH ONE: The DSS Contains Suppressed Gospels about Jesus.
This was perhaps the most egregious fabrication Dan Brown made in The Davinci Code which has misled multitudes of people. He says on page 234 of the book that “Fortunately for historians…some of the gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950s hidden in a cave near Qumran in the Judean desert”.
There were no “Gospels” of any sort with the DSS. Brown apparently confused the DSS which were discovered in 1947 with the Gnostic writings found a decade later at Nag Hammadi, which did have some late, heretical “gospels” written hundreds of years after Jesus started the church. An incredibly sloppy mistake on Brown’s part.
Previous to Brown, a theology professor from Australia, Barabara Thiering published “Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls” which purported that Jesus lived at the Qumran community, was married, divorced, had four children, and was part of a royal lineage. Scholars discount her work, since she provides no substantial evidence for her claims, but her books are best sellers.
MYTH TWO: The DSS Contains Information About the Early Days of Christianity.
One of the first translations of the scrolls from Cave 4 was produced by Robert Eisenman, who presumed that much of the writing was cryptically referring to a struggle within the early church between the followers of the Apostle Paul, and James, the brother of Jesus. Although it is likely that those who lived at the Qumran community were contemporaries of Jesus, James and Paul, the writing itself most likely predates the three, therefore, has nothing to say about those individuals directly. Eisenman’s entire hypothesis was based on a theory with no corroborating evidence.
MYTH THREE: The Christian Church Suppressed the Translation of the DSS because it has something to Hide.
The slow release of the translation of the DSS wasn’t because anyone was suppressing it, but that it was a tedious and difficult job. There were also a number of complex political factors that deterred the translator’s work. Although many have been led to believe by popular literature that somehow the existence of the DSS threatens the foundations of Christianity, in reality, just the opposite is true.
The scrolls actually confirm that the traditional readings from the Old Testament, particularly those from the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament), which the early church fathers relied heavily upon, were accurate and trustworthy. Furthermore, the scrolls provide illumination on certain practices, such as baptism, that we find in the New Testament, but have had limited historical reference before the discovery of the DSS. In addition, there a number of sayings and idioms that are found in the DSS which appear in the Gospels as words of Jesus, which confirms that the Gospel writers were indeed Jewish writers in the mid-first century, as tradition has always supposed.
On the whole, the Dead Sea Scrolls are one of the most remarkable literature discoveries in the world. They proved beyond a shadow of a doubt the integrity of the modern translations of the Old Testament, as well as many of the practices in the New Testament are beyond honest critique. Eric Francke
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