PENGUIN BOOKS
THE STORY OF THE SCROLLS
Geza Vermes was born in Hungary in 1924. He studied in Budapest and Louvain, where he read Oriental History and Languages and in 1953 obtained a doctorate in Theology with a dissertation on the Dead Sea Scrolls. From 1957 to 1991 he taught at the universities of Newcastle and Oxford. His pioneering work on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the historical figure of Jesus led to his appointment as the first Professor of Jewish Studies at Oxford, where he is now Professor Emeritus. Since 1991 he has been director of the Forum for Qumran Research at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Professor Vermes is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the European Academy of Arts, Sciences and Humanities, the holder of an Oxford D.Litt. and of honorary doctorates from the universities of Edinburgh, Durham, Sheffield and the Central European University of Budapest.
His books, published by Penguin, include The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (most recent edition, 2004), The Changing Faces of Jesus (2000), The Authentic Gospel of Jesus (2003), Who’s Who in the Age of Jesus (2005) and his trilogy about the life of Jesus, The Passion (2005), The Nativity (2006) and The Resurrection (2007), republished in one volume as Jesus: Nativity – Passion – Resurrection in 2010. His pioneering work, Jesus the Jew (1973; most recent edition, 2001) and his autobiography, Providential Accidents (1998) are available from SCM Press, London.
GEZA VERMES
The Story of the Scrolls
The Miraculous Discovery and True
Significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Penguin Books 2010
Copyright © Geza Vermes, 2010
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-193729-8
Contents
Preface
Maps
Part One
I. The State of Biblical Studies before Qumran
II. Epoch-making Discoveries and Early Blunders
III. The École Biblique, Seedbed of Future Troubles
IV. Somnolence – Politics – Scandal
V. The Battle over the Scrolls and its Aftermath
Part Two
VI. What is New in the Non-Sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls?
VII. The Novelty of the Sectarian Scrolls
VIII. Unfinished Business: Archaeology – Group Identity – History
IX. The Qumran Revolution in the Study of Biblical and Post-biblical Judaism and early Christianity
X. Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
Preface
Graham Greene, my favourite novelist, used to call his lighthearted stories such as Our Man in Havana ‘entertainments’. Taking from him my inspiration, I would define The Story of the Scrolls as an entertainingly informative account of my lifelong entanglement with Qumran. After recounting the old saga, I will set out briefly and neatly conclusions reached in the course of sixty years of wrestling with the Dead Sea Scrolls and share with the readers my mature views on their true significance.
G.V.
The area surrounding the Dead Sea, showing Qumran
The Caves of Qumran
Part One
I
The State of Biblical Studies before Qumran
Old age carries with it a plethora of nuisances, but it possesses unique advantages too: long memories. Events and their context, about which younger generations only learn from hearsay or read in books, belong to their elders’ personal experience. Images are engraved in the mind; they can still be seen, their pristine reality perceived, felt and tasted. Incidents of years ago seem as though they had happened yesterday. Memory, it is true, often plays small tricks which tend to embellish or to distort the past. But events that made a profound impact on one’s mind frequently retain much of their original and authentic import and flavour. Having lived through them makes all the difference. For me, these considerations are especially true for my obsession with the Qumran Scrolls.
By accident or by grace, for over more than half a century I have had the good fortune to be actively involved in the saga of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I have watched the story unfold before my eyes. This is why the reader needs to be acquainted with my credentials.
In 1947, when the first scrolls were discovered at Qumran, I was an undergraduate of twenty-three, with horrible experiences of the war behind me, entailing the loss of my parents in the Holocaust. But I was also fired with curiosity and desperately longed for intellectual challenge and adventure. When I began to write this book in 2007, the sixtieth anniversary year of the first Scrolls find was being celebrated the world over: from Ljubljana in Slovenia, a rather unlikely place for the International Organization of Qumran Studies to foregather, followed by conferences in Britain and Canada, and ending with the mammoth international jamboree of the Society of Biblical Literature and the greatest ever exhibition of original Dead Sea Scrolls in the Natural History Museum in San Diego on the Pacific coast of the United States. Not to be outdone by the rest of the world, the Israeli confraternity of Qumran academics was preparing another sumptuous gala in 2008 to mark, I suppose, the start of the seventh decade of the era of the Scrolls. It was followed by another congress in Vienna and a further one was scheduled in Rome in 2009.
Between 1947 and the present day much water has flowed under the bridges of the many cities where biblical research is pursued. As a result, the Dead Sea texts have lost the novelty they enjoyed in the early days. They have become matter-of-fact reality, something that is imagined to have always been there. Indeed, they had been there before most of the people alive today were born. Also, the then stateless young man, who in 1948 dreamed of becoming one day a recognized Qumran expert, is now the author of The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English in the Penguin Classics series and an Emeritus Oxford professor, though under the ‘has been’ sounding title – ‘emeritus’ is often mistranslated as ‘former’ – continues to lurk much writing and a fair amount of lecturing activity. As for the Scrolls, they have ceased to be ‘t
he recently discovered manuscripts’ as we used to refer to them in the 1950s. Bit by bit, they have found their niche in the curricula of higher education on all the continents, as well as in the pigeon-hole of ‘Church conspiracy’ within the modern myth and folklore created by the international media. Even today, if the proverbial opinion pollster were to inquire in the street about the Dead Sea Scrolls, he would hear half of his clients mutter: ‘The Scrolls… Hmm… Aren’t they old manuscripts kept locked away in the Vatican?’ Readers of this book, if they persevere to the end, will surely know better. They will also learn that 2009 has marked the completion of the publication of all the Qumran texts.
1. The Portrait of the Story-teller
To provide real background for this chronicle, let me summarily introduce myself. My unusual first name (not to mention my accent, which remains undeniable even after more than fifty years of life in England) reveals that I hail from Hungary. I was born in 1924 in an assimilated Jewish family. Shortly before my seventh birthday in the – as it turned out – mistaken belief that it would secure a better future for me, my journalist father and school-teacher mother decided to convert to Roman Catholicism. The three of us were baptized in the town of Gyula in south-east Hungary by the parish priest, the Reverend William Apor, a baronet, scion of a very old aristocratic family, who is now heading towards canonization in the Catholic Church, having been beatified in 1997 by the saintmaker par excellence, Pope John Paul II. From the late 1930s the increasingly oppressive Hungarian anti-Semitic legislation, taking no notice of the family’s baptismal certificates, deprived my father of his livelihood, made my life difficult at my Catholic school and, above all, denied me access to higher education except via a Church-run theological seminary, which I entered in 1942. In March 1944, on Hitler’s order, the half-hearted Germanophile Magyar government was replaced by enthusiastic puppets of the Nazi Reich, and all hell was let loose on the Jews of Hungary. My parents were deported and joined the millions of innocent victims of the Holocaust. Protected by providence, the Church and a great deal of sheer luck, I managed to survive until the arrival of the Red Army in Budapest on Christmas day, 1944. During the previous seven months I was crossing and recrossing the country (fortunately without ever being challenged to identify myself) and ended up with the help of my former parish priest, William Apor, by then bishop of Györ in western Hungary, in the Central Theological Seminary of Budapest. My saintly protector soon had to pay with his life for his constant generosity towards people in need: he was shot dead by drunken Russian soldiers, whilst gallantly trying to shelter a group of women who had sought refuge in the episcopal residence.
Waiting for news from my parents, confused and depressed, I stuck for another eighteen months with my studies in theological college in Nagyvarad. By that time (1945–6), this city (renamed Oradea) and the whole of Transylvania were reoccupied by the Romanians. When by 1946 it became obvious that my parents had perished, I decided to turn my back on the country of my birth, which tolerated, and partly even engineered, the horrors of 1944. I migrated westwards in search of freedom, knowledge and enlightenment. To achieve my dream, I sought admission into the French religious society of the Fathers of Zion (Pères de Sion). Despite the totally unreliable postal service between Romania and the West in 1946, my application was received in Paris, but it was a near miracle that the letter informing me of my acceptance and the duty to present myself in early October at the training establishment of the order in Louvain (now Leuven in Belgium) reached me on 2 June, the date on which I planned a clandestine night-crossing from Romania to Hungary. If that precious envelope had remained in transit just for another twenty-four hours, it would probably never have caught up with me as no postal connection existed in those days between the two unfriendly countries, Romania and Hungary. I distinctly remember keeping a protective hand on the pocket which contained the letter from Louvain to ensure that this virtual passport to freedom would not be lost in the fields where I was trying to evade the Romanian frontier guards.
A few months later, in September 1946, I had again to opt for the illegal crossing of the frontier separating Hungary from Austria. I was faced with the proverbial Gordian knot or a Catch-22. To leave Hungary I needed a Russian exit permit. No such permit could be obtained without a Belgian visa in my passport, indicating that I had somewhere to go. But in the late summer of 1946, there was no Belgian diplomatic representation in Hungary. The nearest consulate was in Vienna, but for entering Austria, I needed a Russian exit stamp in my passport. So having hired a smuggler to guide me through the border forest, I simply walked out of Hungary in full daylight on 18 September 1946 and, having received in Vienna my French and Belgian visas, I embarked on 30 September on a momentous journey, which lasted three days, that took me through the Russian and French zones of occupation in Austria and across devastated southern Germany, to France. Leaving Strasbourg the following day, I reached Louvain on 2 October and I rang the doorbell of the community of the Fathers of Zion at 49 rue des Moutons, or Schaapenstraat in Flemish, as the bilingual numberplate indicated in the as yet linguistically undivided Belgium. It was in that old university town that I started my serious theological and biblical studies after four years of intellectual starvation in the Hungarian seminary.
First I followed a course of theology at the College of St Albert, run by French-speaking Belgian Jesuits, and continued three years later, having gained the licence or BA in theology, with a programme of ancient near-eastern history and philology at the Institut Orientaliste of the University, where I graduated in 1952. My first association with the Dead Sea Scrolls took place in Louvain in 1948 where I became an enthusiastic student of the Hebrew Bible.
Where did this enthusiasm spring from? One thing is certain: it cannot be credited to my family background. Neither my parents nor my other relations were practising Jews or knew any Hebrew or even Yiddish. My conscious memory preserves an anecdote about my awakening desire to learn Hebrew. The venue was my Hungarian-Romanian theological college in Nagyvarad and the date 1945. The seminary was situated in the largely unoccupied massive eighteenth-century episcopal palace where one day I entered a spacious room, previously the study of the director of the college, Geza Folmann, who was also the professor of biblical studies. He was by Hungarian standards an unusually well-trained man, having spent, shortly before the First World War, two years at the famous École Biblique (short for École Biblique et Archéologique Française) of the French Dominicans in Jerusalem. His sizeable library was filled with the large pink-covered tomes of the series Études Bibliques and he was also a subscriber to the École’s influential periodical, the still flourishing Revue Biblique. In the room I chanced to enter, all these volumes were lying scattered on the floor amid general chaos. After the liberation of the city by the Red Army at the end of 1944, the bishop’s palace served as living quarters for Russian soldiers who had no use for learned French books on advanced biblical studies. When they withdrew, they left their mess behind.
The director welcomed my offer to tidy up his office and thus I was given a chance to admire the books. They included Hebrew Bibles, and commentaries filled with Hebrew quotations. Out of intellectual curiosity or maybe atavism, I swore that I would make myself familiar with these fascinating and mysterious texts. Seven years later, on my first stay in the École Biblique in Arab Jerusalem, I met some of the teachers of my erstwhile professor. The world-famous Palestinian archaeologist L. H. Vincent and the great geographer of the Holy Land, F.-M. Abel, were still alive, but sadly neither of them remembered a former Hungarian pupil called Folmann, who never made a name for himself in the international club of biblical scholars.
To implement my vow of mastering Hebrew, I registered for a Hebrew course at the University of Budapest in the autumn semester of 1945, but had to interrupt my study when I was recalled to my provincial seminary. So I did my Hebraizing privately until finally I was given a real opportunity to delve into Hebrew on my arrival in Louvain. By the time I
first had to face the Scrolls in 1948, I was competent in the language.
2. Biblical Studies in the 1940s
The course of study I was to embark on provides a good opportunity to sketch for the reader the state of biblical and post-biblical Jewish studies on the eve of the onset of the Qumran age. It is often claimed that the Dead Sea Scrolls have revolutionized our approach to the Hebrew Scriptures and to the literature of the age that witnessed the birth of the New Testament. Needless to say, my canvas will be schematic; these preliminary remarks are meant to serve only as a summary illustration of the state of play in Hebrew learning with a view to enabling the reader to grasp what was so extraordinary in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
For the general reader of the 1940s, the term ‘Bible’ designated the Holy Scriptures of Judaism and Christianity, divided in Christian parlance into Old Testament and New Testament. The Old Testament had a shorter and a longer version. The Palestinian Jewish Bible was held to consist of books written in Hebrew and Aramaic, while the Jews dispersed in the Greek-speaking countries of the ancient world translated this collection of thirty-nine books, and added to them the Apocrypha, that is, fifteen supplementary works either originally composed in, or later rendered into, Greek. The Christians further enlarged the Greek Bible they inherited from Hellenistic Judaism by twenty-seven books of the New Testament, also written in Greek. In the eyes of the non-specialist, these Holy Scriptures are the source, or one of the two sources, Church and Synagogue tradition being the other, of the Jewish and the Christian religions.
By contrast, those who adopt an academic approach envisage the Bible as a group of ancient texts which, like all other ancient texts, must be read in their original languages and understood in their appropriate historical, cultural and literary contexts. To establish what later generations made of them is the business of the theologian or of the Bible scholar acting as a theologian. By necessity the critical study of ancient texts requires an investigation of the manuscripts which have preserved them and of the relevant literary parallels that are capable of shedding light on their meaning. It was taught in the 1940s that the purpose of textual criticism or comparative study of the manuscripts was the reconstruction of the Urtext, the authentic document composed by the original author, with the help of the variants attested in the surviving copies. Before Qumran, most of these variants were identified as scribal errors or as the result of a deliberate interference with the text by copyists.
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