The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

whose position depended on Roman favour, would dare to incur. Given these circumstances, how could Saul of Tarsus, armed with warrants from the high priest, possibly have undertaken his punitive expedition to Damascus — if, that is, ‘Damascus’ is indeed taken to be the city in Syria?

If ‘Damascus’ is understood to be Qumran, however, Saul’s expedition suddenly makes perfect historical sense. Unlike Syria, Qumran did lie in territory where the high priest’s writ legitimately ran. It would have been entirely feasible for the high priest in Jerusalem to dispatch his ‘enforcers’ to extirpate heretical Jews at Qumran, a mere twenty miles away, near Jericho. Such action would have thoroughly conformed to Roman policy, which made a point of not meddling in purely internal affairs. Jews, in other words, were quite free to harry and persecute other Jews within their own domains, so long as such activities did not encroach on the Roman administration. And since the high priest was a Roman puppet, his efforts to extirpate rebellious co- religionists would have been all the more welcome.

This explanation, however, despite its historical plausibility, raises some extremely awkward questions. According to the consensus of the international team, the community at Qumran consisted of Judaic sectarians — the so-called ‘Essenes’, a pacifist ascetic sect having no connection either with early Christianity or with the ‘mainstream’ of Judaism at the time. Yet Saul, according to Acts, embarks for Damascus to persecute members of the ‘early Church’. Here, then, is a provocative challenge both to Christian tradition and to adherents of the consensus, who have studiously avoided looking at the matter altogether. Either members of the ‘early Church’ were sheltering with the Qumran community – or the ‘early Church’ and the Qumran community were one and the same. In either case, the ‘Damascus Document’ indicates that the Dead Sea Scrolls cannot be distanced from the origins of Christianity.

The ‘Habakkuk Commentary’

Found in Cave 1 at Qumran, the ‘Habakkuk Pesher’, or ‘Habakkuk Commentary’, represents perhaps the closest approximation, in the entire corpus of known Dead Sea Scrolls, to a chronicle of the community — or, at any rate, of certain major developments in its history. It focuses in particular on the same dispute cited by the ‘Damascus Document’. This dispute, verging on incipient schism, seems to have been a traumatic event in the life of the Qumran community. It figures not just in the ‘Damascus Document’ and the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’, but in four other Qumran texts as well; and there seem to be references to it in four further texts.²²

Like the ‘Damascus Document’, the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’ recounts how certain members of the community, under the iniquitous instigation of a figure identified as ‘the Liar’, secede, break the New Covenant and cease to adhere to the Law. This precipitates a conflict between them and the community’s leader, ‘the Teacher of Righteousness’. There is mention, too, of a villainous adversary known as ‘the Wicked Priest’. Adherents of the consensus have generally tended to regard ‘the Liar’ and ‘the Wicked Priest’ as two different sobriquets for the same individual. More recently, however, Eisenman has effectively demonstrated that ‘the Liar’ and ‘the Wicked Priest’ are two quite separate and distinct personages.²³ He has made it clear that ‘the Liar’, unlike ‘the Wicked Priest’, emerges from within the Qumran community. Having been taken in by the community and accepted as a member in more or less good standing, he then defects. He is not just an adversary, therefore, but a traitor as well. In contrast, ‘the Wicked Priest’ is an outsider, a representative of the priestly establishment of the Temple. Although an adversary, he is not therefore a traitor. What makes him important for our purposes is the clue he provides to the dating of the events recounted in the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’. If ‘the Wicked Priest’ is a member of the Temple establishment, it means the Temple is still standing and the establishment intact. In other words, the activities of ‘the Wicked Priest’ pre-date the destruction of the Temple by Roman troops.

As in the ‘War Scroll’, but even more explicitly, there are references that can only be to imperial, not republican, Rome — to Rome, that is, in the 1st century AD. The ‘Habakkuk Commentary’, for example, alludes to a specific practice — victorious Roman troops making sacrificial offerings to their standards. Josephus provides written evidence for this practice at the time of the fall of the Temple in ad 70.²⁴ And it is, in fact, a practice that would make no sense under the republic, when victorious troops would have offered sacrifices to their gods. Only with the creation of the empire, when the emperor himself was accorded the status of divinity, becoming the supreme god for his subjects, would his image, or token, or monogram, be emblazoned on the standards of his soldiers. The ‘Habakkuk Commentary’, therefore, like the ‘War Scroll’, the Temple Scroll’ and the ‘Damascus Document’, points specifically to the Herodian epoch.

10. Science in the Service of Faith

According to the consensus of the international team, the historical events reflected in all the relevant Dead Sea Scrolls occurred in Maccabean times — between the mid-2nd and mid-1 st centuries bc. The ‘Wicked Priest’, who pursues, persecutes and perhaps kills the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’, is generally identified by them as Jonathan Maccabaeus, or perhaps his brother Simon, both of whom enjoyed positions of prominence during that epoch; and the invasion of a foreign army is taken to be that launched by the Romans under Pompey in 63 bc.¹ The historical backdrop of the scrolls is thus set safely back in pre-Christian times, where it becomes disarmed of any possible challenge to New Testament teaching and tradition.

But while some of the Dead Sea Scrolls undoubtedly do refer to pre-Christian times, it is a grievous mistake — for some, perhaps, deliberate obfuscation — to conclude that all of them do so. Pompey, who invaded the Holy Land in 63 bc, was, of course, a contemporary of Julius Caesar. At the time of Pompey and Caesar, Rome was still a republic, becoming an empire only in 27 bc, under Caesar’s adoptive son, Octavian, who took the imperial title of Augustus. If the Roman invasion referred to in the scrolls was that of Pompey, it would have involved the armies of republican Rome. Yet the ‘War Rule’ speaks of a ‘king’ or ‘monarch’ of the invaders. And the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’ is even more explicit in its reference to victorious invaders sacrificing to their standards. It would therefore seem clear that the invasion in question was that of imperial Rome — the invasion provoked by the revolt of ad 66.

Professor Godfrey Driver of Oxford found numerous textual references within the scrolls that provide clues to their dating. Focusing in particular on the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’, he concluded that the invaders could only be ‘the Roman legions at the time of the revolt in ad 66’. This conclusion, he added, ‘is put beyond doubt by the reference to their sacrificing to their military standards’.² His statements, however, elicited a vicious attack from Father de Vaux, who recognised that they led inexorably to the conclusion that ‘the historical background of the scrolls therefore is the war against Rome’.³ This, of course, de Vaux could not possibly accept. At the same time, however, he could not refute such precise evidence. In consequence, he contrived to dismiss the evidence and attack only Driver’s general thesis: ‘Driver has started from the pre-conceived idea that all scrolls were post-Christian, and that this idea was based on the fallacious witness of orthography, language and vocabulary.’⁴ It was, he declared, for professional historians ‘to decide whether [Driver’s] motley history… has sufficient foundation in the texts’.⁵ It is interesting that de Vaux, who taught biblical history at the Ecole Biblique, should suddenly (at least when he had to answer Professor Driver) don a cloak of false modesty and shrink from considering himself an historian, taking refuge instead behind the supposed bulwarks of archaeology and palaeography.⁶ In fact, archaeological data reinforce the indications of chronology provided by the internal data of the scrolls themselves. External evidence concurs with internal evidence — evidence of which the consensus would seem to remain oblivious. At times, this has led to an embarrassing faux pas.

De Vaux, it will be remembered, embarked on a preliminary excavation of the Qumran ruins in 1951. His findings were sufficiently consequential to justify a more ambitious enterprise. A characteristic lassitude set in, however, and no full-scale excavation was undertaken until 1953. Annual excavations then continued until 1956;