Religion: The Latest on the Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls have already raised more dust in Christendom than anything since Darwin, and will certainly kick up more in years to come. It is well known that the scrolls were the sacred documents of a monastic sect living 20 centuries ago at Qumran, in what is now Jordan, and that the members of the sect hid the scrolls in caves to safeguard them from advancing Roman legions. But who were these people of the Dead Sea? The question is momentous, because they lived near the place where John the Baptist preached the Messiah’s coming, during the time that Jesus taught and the Gospel sources were compiled. And some of their writings seem to show parallels of word and thought with the New Testament itself.

Published last week were two new additions to the growing literature on the Dead Sea Scrolls, taking sharply contrasting points of view.

The Similarities. John M. Allegro (The Dead Sea Scrolls; Pelican; 85¢) is a bright young (33) British expert on Semitic languages who worked for a year on the international team of scholars that is piecing together and translating the scroll fragments in Jerusalem. Back at Manchester University (where he now occupies a teaching post in comparative Semitic philology), bearded John Allegro turned his reputation for brightness to one for brashness; he drew a public rebuke from his fellow scholars (TIME, April 2) when he suggested that the New Testament’s Jesus Christ may have been modeled on the scrolls’ “Teacher of Righteousness,” who said Allegro on the basis of guess work, was also crucified. Allegro’s new book prudently plays down this wild surmise. But together with a vivid account of the discoveries, Allegro gives nonscholarly readers plenty of speculation to chew on, if not necessarily to swallow.

Though he does not see the Qumran sect as the originator of Christianity, Allegro feels that it profoundly influenced the first Christians. Withdrawn into the desert from the persecution of a corrupt priesthood in Jerusalem, holding in contempt the scribes and Pharisees (whom they called “Seekers After Smooth Things”), the Qumran community practiced baptism, chastity, community of goods. They wrote the ritual of a Messianic banquet with breaking of bread and blessing of wine, which Allegro boldly suggests may prefigure the Last Supper and Christian Communion. They expected the imminent end of the world and the coming of two Messiahs—a priest and a king of the Davidic line. Into the latter role, says Allegro, Jesus would fit perfectly—later to have the priestly messiahship added to the kingly one.

The Differences. Like most other scholars, Allegro identifies the Qumran sect with the Essenes, who almost surely had a monastery near the Dead Sea at the same point as the Qumran ruins. The Essenes, says Allegro, had a kind of “Third Order” of laymen living according to a modified rule in the towns and villages of Palestine, and “it seems reasonable to assume that Jesus was acquainted with such people.” He adds: “It is possible that the ‘great company of priests’ who were ‘obedient to the faith,’ mentioned in Acts 6:7, included at least part of the spiritual leadership of this movement.”

But, Allegro suggests, their religion was vastly different from Pauline Christianity, which Allegro seems to consider a Greco-Roman corruption of this early faith—and possibly a corruption of Jesus’ own faith. Asks Allegro: “Did Jesus himself go all the way of the New Testament? Did [He] really believe He was God in the flesh?” The Qumran community, writes Allegro, would have abhorred the concept of a God-man (as do the Jews and Moslems today), and they would not have thought of admitting Gentiles to salvation. But the Pauline emphasis on the resurrection was “an even greater difference. The Covenanters of Qumran were presumably still waiting for the Resurrection of their Master when they were swept away . . . But by then the basic elements of their faith had been given a far wider setting, and a significance for all mankind.”

The Moral Code. Theodor H. Caster’s The Dead Sea Scriptures (Doubleday; $4—Anchor Books; 95¢) is the first complete English translation of the scrolls for laymen. Now visiting professor of history of religions at Columbia University and professor of comparative religion at Dropsie College, Gaster prints the virtually complete text of the scrolls, together with a concordance of passages in the scrolls that also appear in the Old and New Testaments. Most informative is the “Manual of Discipline,” which sets down the moral code of the Qumran sect, with detailed stipulations: “Everyone is to be judged by the standard of his spirituality. Intercourse with him is to be determined by the purity of his deeds, and consort with him by the degree of his intelligence. This alone is to determine the degree to which a man is to be loved or hated.”

Most moving section of the book is that devoted to the hymns (see box). Most puzzling is the strange document called “The War of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness,” which seems like a ritual battle out of Revelation. It is filled with precise detail (“The line troops are to be 40 to 50 years of age . . . The officers, too, are to be from 40 to 50 years of age; and all who strip the dead and collect the spoil and clean up the terrain and keep the weapons and prepare the food are to be between 25 and 30”), and some scholars look on it as a historical account of a real war; e.g., General Yigael Yadin of Israel finds in it various similarities with Roman fighting practices. But despite the military overtones, the document’s elaborate and elusive reading is almost certainly an allegory of the struggle of good against evil.

The Real Testimony. Author Caster’s lucid and factual introduction to the book takes issue with the contention of Allegro and others that the so-called Teacher of Righteousness was a single historical personage, martyred by “the Wicked Priest,” and whose resurrection was awaited. The title, which Gaster prefers to translate “True exponent of the Law,” refers, he says, to “a continuing office rather than a particular individual, and . . . the various allusions to him are not in fact to one and the same person.” He believes that various documents probably refer to different teachers at different times.

Gaster recommends that the Dead Sea scriptures be read as documents in their own right rather than pieces of a puzzle. “The archaeologists tell us that the Dead Sea caves are hot and dark,” he writes. “The same might be said of the controversy which has raged around their contents. At this point, however, it might be healthy to stand back a little from the din and furor and clouds of dust and try to appreciate the scriptures of the Brotherhood simply from the point of view of what they offer to religious thought and insight. They represent an experience which has been repeated often enough in history—the experience of the typical nonconformist who combines, by a strange and wonderful alchemy, an inner quietude with an outer fanaticism, and whose sense of God is a sense of burning fire as well as of radiant light. [The scrolls] are the testimonies of men, who, like their greater forebear, stood in the cleft of a rock and saw the glory of God passing by.”