• Christianity’s Origin and the Dead Sea Scrolls
    The Watchtower—1959 | April 15

    • Christianity’s Origin and the Dead Sea Scrolls

      IN THE spring of 1947 three Bedouins were going about in the town of Bethlehem trying to sell seven ancient manuscripts. These were in the form of leather scrolls, some containing Biblical and some containing sectarian writings, that the Bedouins had found in stone jars in a cave. The cave being situated in the wilderness of Judah not far from the Dead Sea, the scrolls came to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. It took months for the Bedouins finally to dispose of their scrolls, four of them to St. Mark’s Monastery and three to the Hebrew University at Jerusalem. Seven years later the University purchased the other four scrolls, which, in the meantime, had been vainly offered for sale in the United States, for the sum of $250,000. These four included the most prized of them all, a scroll in archaic Hebrew of the complete book of Isaiah, all sixty-six chapters.

      Not without good reason these scrolls have been described as the “greatest manuscript discovery of modern times.” They have been definitely dated as of the second century B.C. by experts in the fields of archaeology, paleography (the science of deciphering ancient writing) and the carbon-14 process. Previously the oldest-known Hebrew witness to God’s Word had been the Nash papyrus, which goes back not quite as far and consists of only one small page, in four fragments, and which never was a part of a scroll. Incidentally, it contains the Ten Commandments and two verses of the Shemá or Jewish declaration of faith as found at Deuteronomy 6:5, 6.

      Since the year 1951 many other similar discoveries have been made, including tens of thousands of fragments of ancient Bible manuscripts. All these having been found in the same general region, they also are referred to as Dead Sea Scrolls.

      Rounding out the story of the Dead Sea Scrolls was the uncovering of the Khirbet (”ruins”) Qumran, located only a mile from the cave where the first scrolls were found. These ruins have been identified as those of a monastery, the headquarters of the sect that had produced the Dead Sea Scrolls, at least those first found. As to the identity of this sect, the “foremost authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls today” tells us that “there is now sufficient evidence . . . to identify the people of the scrolls definitively,” that is, finally and permanently, “with the Essenes,” a Jewish monastic sect that carried on from about the second century B.C. to the destruction of Jerusalem A.D. 70.

      Great has been and is the interest manifested throughout the world in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Why? Chiefly because of the claims of some that the Dead Sea Scrolls spell out the human origin of Christianity.

      What are the facts? Are, indeed, “the rites and precepts of the Gospels and the Epistles both to be found on every other page of the sect” that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls? Is the Qumran monastery, “perhaps more than Bethlehem or Nazareth, the cradle of Christianity”? Did we have to wait until these scrolls were discovered in order, at long last, to “get some sense to the drama that culminated in Christianity”?

      SEEMING PARALLELS

      First of all, let it be noted that when scholars fail to differentiate between Christendom today and Biblical Christianity as taught and practiced in Jesus’ day they are bound to err. And secondly, the similarities that appear between what the Bible says about Christianity and what Josephus, Pliny and Philo and the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls have to say about Essenism are wholly superficial. Basically there is as great a difference between the two as between day and night.

      One of the claimed similarities is the holding of all goods in common. When a man became a member of the Dead Sea Scroll sect he had to surrender all his belongings to the order, to his very last cent. This has been compared to what took place in the early Christian congregation right after Pentecost, with the emphasis on what happened to Ananias and Sapphira for holding back part of the purchase price. What about this?—Acts 4:32 to 5:11.

      The similarity is only superficial. In view of the fact that this matter of having “all things in common” is not mentioned again, either in the book of Acts or in the rest of the Christian Greek Scriptures, it obviously was but a temporary arrangement because of unusual conditions. Further, Christians were not required to surrender their belongings and there was no penalty for failure to do so as there was with the Essenes. Ananias and his wife were not punished for holding anything back but because of playing the role of hypocrites, claiming to have turned over the entire proceeds from the sale of their property when they had actually held back part of it. They thought they could lie to God’s spokesman and get away with it. That was their sin. The having of “all things in common” in the early Christian congregation was temporary and wholly voluntary; the Dead Sea sect’s sharing was permanent and mandatory and failure was severely penalized—all the difference in the world!

      A similarity is also claimed in that both Christians and Essenes made use of symbolic ablutions or baptisms. Here again the similarity is only superficial. As instituted by Christ for himself and his followers baptism does not symbolize or result in remission of sins, for he had none. It is a symbol of one’s having dedicated oneself to do God’s will, is administered but once in the life of a Christian and that by another Christian. Among the Essenes it was performed daily, by oneself, and concerned itself with ritual purity. Could there be any greater contrast?—Matt. 3:13-15.

      Similar arguments apply to the claim that the Lord’s supper was patterned after the Essenes’ communal meal. The Lord’s supper is properly celebrated but once a year, on Nisan 14, to memorialize the death of Christ and is of purely symbolic significance—the apostle Paul reproving those who viewed the Lord’s supper as an occasion to satisfy one’s hunger. On the