Of all the surviving Jewish writings of the relevant period, the Gospels, especially Matthew, and the letters of Paul recall most closely the Qumran fulfilment interpretation of Old Testament prophecy. Matthew uses specific introductory formulae such as ‘This took place to fulfil what the Lord has spoken by the prophet’ (Matt. 1:22); ‘So it is written by the prophet’ (Matt. 2:5); or ‘This is he who was spoken of by the prophet Isaiah’ (Matt. 3:3). In his turn, Paul, anticipating the rabbis, regularly starts his citations with ‘As it is written’. These expressions correspond to the phrases ‘Interpreted’, ‘The interpretation of this saying concerns’, etc., of the Qumran pesher. Naturally the events and personalities of the Qumran Community and of the Gospels, presented as implementation of biblical prophecy, further signify for the Qumran sectaries and the early followers of Jesus that their respective leaders and their history were predestined and prearranged by God. Although a similar use of the prophetic argument appears also from time to time in rabbinic literature (see chapter VII, p. 162), the massive occurrence of this type of evidence indicates that Qumran and early Christianity shared a common spiritual atmosphere, doctrinal heritage and religious outlook. In consequence, Qumran sheds here a particularly brilliant light on the beliefs and teachings of the primitive Church.
(d) Messianism
In doctrinal matters, the Dead Sea Scrolls display certain subjects in a much more colourful and nuanced manner than does the New Testament. Take, for example, the topic of Messianism. We encounter at Qumran the plain and traditional form of the Davidic Messiah, believed to be the ultimate military commander chosen and commissioned by God, ready to lead the army of the elect to final victory over the armies of Satan and his wicked Jewish and Gentile allies. This Messiah is described as the ‘Branch of David’ (4Q161, 285), the ‘prince of the Congregation’ (1QM 5:1; 4Q285), the ‘Sceptre’ (CD 7:20) or the ‘Messiah of Israel’ (1QSa 2:14, 20). However, in addition to the typical king Messiah, son of David, the Dead Sea Scrolls speak also of ‘the Messiah of Aaron and Israel’ in the singular and of ‘the Messiahs of Aaron and Israel’ (1QS 9:11), that is, an anointed leader descending from Israel and another one from Aaron. The New Testament, in turn, refers to a single royal Messiah. Nevertheless the letter to the Hebrews conceives of Jesus as the heavenly high priest (or priestly Messiah), and the Infancy Gospel of Luke, by describing Mary as the kinswoman of Elizabeth, wife of Zechariah, the priest, tacitly insinuates that Jesus descended from a combined Davidic and priestly ancestral line. Once more, Qumran and the New Testament indirectly testify to a joint ideological background.
(e) Organization
Another important aspect of the relationship between the Qumran sect and the early Church concerns their organization and communal life. After their respective leaders had ceased to be among them, the Qumran sect and the Jesus movement, the latter both in Palestine and in the Diaspora, established their own structure and adopted their peculiar way of life. The Dead Sea sectaries, whether the married or the celibate kind, obeyed single local leaders or Guardians and a superior general, the Guardian of all the units. The single heads were aided by other officers and advisers. The nascent Palestinian Christian sect was also headed by apostles and attended by charity workers or deacons, and the Pauline Churches outside Palestine by individual bishops or overseers like Timothy or Titus. Bishop (episkopos) is the Greek-Christian equivalent of the Qumran Guardian or Overseer (mebaqqer). Such a monarchic regime was unusual among Jews; their communities, both in the Holy Land and in the Diaspora, were governed by democratic councils of elders chaired by a president or archisynagogos. It is reasonable to surmise, therefore, that since the Qumran sect was older than the Christian community, the organizers of the latter could be tempted to imitate in setting up their local congregations the already well-established and tried systems flourishing elsewhere in their society, such as the Qumran-Essene congregations of Judaea.
The religious communism, or more precisely, the sharing of all private property, sanctioned by the apostles in the Jerusalem Church of the earliest period, strongly resembles, and possibly copies, the way of life of the ‘monastic’ Qumran brotherhood, though without being accompanied by compulsory celibacy.
And all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need.
(Acts 2:44–5)
Now the company of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had everything in common.
(Acts 4:32)
Although the handing over to the community of privately owned property and money is nowhere said to be compulsory, as it was among the Qumranites who followed the Community Rule, the moral pressure on Church members to conform seems to have been enormous and could lead to deceitful pretence, as described in the anecdote of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1–11). After selling a plot of land, this couple let it be known that they had given the totality of the proceeds to the apostles, while secretly they kept part of the sum for themselves. Both husband and wife suddenly died one after the other and the tragedy was held to be heavenly punishment for lying to the Holy Spirit. The penalty inflicted on the guilty in the Christian community was incomparably heavier than that awaiting a sectary who ‘lied in matters of property’: the latter was merely excluded from common life for one year during which he was compelled to live on a reduced food ration (1QS 6:24–5). This is not the only example of greater severity in the Church’s treatment of sinners compared to the practice prevailing at Qumran. Sectaries convicted of the greatest sins (rebellion, apostasy, etc.) were simply excommunicated, whereas St Paul condemned the immoral Corinthian Christian, who scandalized everyone by sharing the bed of his father’s wife, to be delivered to Satan ‘for the destruction of the flesh’ (1 Cor. 5:1–5).
(f) Celibacy
A final comparison will be aimed at the practice of celibacy in the ‘monastic’ branch of the Qumran sect and in the teaching of Jesus and Paul. It is generally agreed that, despite the absence of a positive commandment prohibiting marriage, the internal logic of the Community Rule implies that members of the brotherhood subjected themselves to a compulsory and long-lasting celibate existence. On the other hand, since celibacy is nowhere presented positively as a rule, let alone a universal rule, it is not surprising that the Scrolls furnish no explanation or justification for it. Inspired by the customary Jewish male chauvinism, Philo and Josephus attribute Essene renunciation of marriage to the unsuitability of women for communal life, a form of existence, an old-fashioned club life, cherished only by men. It is more likely, however, that the concept of the Community being a spiritual Temple which demanded a constant state of ritual purity on the part of the members was thought to be irreconcilable with a society of married people. If, furthermore, the ‘monastic’ Qumran Community is held to be identical with the Essenes, a sect particularly famous according to Josephus for its practice of prophecy (the forecasting of the future possibly by means of Bible interpretation), abstinence from sex would have been the condition for permanent receptivity to divine communication. According to a Jewish tradition recorded by Philo of Alexandria, Moses, in order to make himself constantly ready for hearing God’s message, had to purge himself of ‘all calls of mortal nature’, including ‘intercourse with women’ (Life of Moses II: 68–9).
In the context of the New Testament, celibacy is nowhere institutionally imposed. Nor is it associated with ritual purity, a subject never considered as of primary importance by Jesus and the Church. As far as Jesus is concerned, he is nowhere said to have had a wife at any time. His bachelor state may be ascribed to his prophetic vocation as well as to the general view that having a wife and children during the end-time hindered total devotion to the cause of the kingdom of God. In the days of the great ultimate tribulation, it was held to be preferable to be without family responsibilities: ‘Alas for those who are with child and for those
who give suck in those days’ (Mark 13:17). St Paul, in his lively expectation of the return of Christ, while not actually condemning marriage, advises single Christians to protect their freedom by remaining unattached, thus following his own example. ‘Do we not’ Paul asks, ‘have the right to be accompanied by a wife, as the other apostles, and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas (=Peter)?’ (1 Cor. 9:5). Peter’s wife is not actually mentioned, but her existence is revealed by Jesus healing Simon Peter’s mother-in-law in Capernaum (Mark 1:30– 31). In his turn, Paul recommends that, if possible, a man should not touch a woman and wishes they all were ‘as I myself am’, clearly implying bachelorhood (1 Cor. 7:1, 7). However, until the start of Christian monasticism in the fourth century, the Church did not advocate formally regulated celibate life. In this respect, the Qumran-Essenes were trailblazers. Apart from them and the Therapeutai, their Jewish imitators in Egypt with separate communities recruited from both sexes (see Philo, Contemplative Life), only hermits pursuing a solitary existence in the desert, like Josephus’ temporary teacher, Bannus, and no doubt John the Baptist, opted for the unmarried way of life among Jews in the days of Qumran and the New Testament.
To end this survey with the billion dollar question, if the older Qumran sect influenced the Palestinian Jesus movement in some way, at what level did this influence penetrate the Church? Through John the Baptist? Through Jesus? Through the later Church?
John the Baptist has often been singled out as the most likely link between the Dead Sea Community and Christianity. His ascetic life in the wilderness and his preaching of a baptism of repentance to prepare for the arrival of God’s kingdom neatly place him between sect and Church. If Luke’s Infancy Gospel can be believed, he, like the members of the leading class of Qumran, was of priestly descent. Moreover, both John and the Dead Sea sect were seen as fulfilling the prediction of Isaiah 40:3. The sectaries read the prophetic words as: ‘A voice cries, In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord’, corresponding to a demand for withdrawal to the desert of Judaea for spiritual renewal. The evangelists, in turn, interpreted it as ‘A voice cries in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the Lord’, by which they portrayed John as the herald of Jesus, preaching in the desert of the Jordan valley the imminence of the kingdom of God.
Nevertheless, to someone familiar with the thought of the Dead Sea sect, the similarity between John and Qumran appears superficial and partial. A sectary, who conformed to the basic rules of the Community, would not have been allowed to proclaim his message indiscriminately to Jewish society at large as John did, and would have been restricted to passing on his teaching to the select few of the chosen. If the Baptist was ever a full member of the Qumran-Essene Community, we must suppose that by the time of his public ministry, reported in the Gospels, he was no longer one of them.
Was, then, Jesus the door through which Qumran influence entered Christianity? Despite a few common doctrinal themes, this seems to be most unlikely. The law-centred religion of Qumran is very far from the paramountly eschatological and ethical turn of mind of Jesus. Besides, the prophet from Nazareth who spent most of his active life in Galilee had few opportunities to encounter members of the Qumran sect whose presence in the northern province is nowhere attested.
John the Baptist and Jesus being discounted, the apostolic Church remains the likeliest candidate for borrowing Qumran ideas and introducing them into evolving Christianity. Logically it would make sense for a budding movement to look around and see how similar societies function, especially when the traditions relating to Jesus do not comprise traits that might account for the given features. Thus, since Jesus did not hand over a blueprint for a future Church – the notion of ‘Church’ (ekklesia) with the exception of two inauthentic passages in Matthew (16:18 and 18:17), is characteristically not to be found anywhere in the sayings attributed to Jesus – the system introduced into the life of the early Jerusalem community may have been inspired by the tried and successful Qumran model. The same can be said about the authoritative single-person leadership, say, for example, James, the brother of Jesus in Jerusalem, Paul and his appointees in the Diaspora Churches, that suited the infant communities better than the more flexible and argumentative councils of elders of the Palestinian Jewish communities and the Diaspora synagogues. On the level of religious thought, the Qumran vision of a small ‘remnant’ led to the final realm of God by the Teacher of Righteousness, himself the intermediary of all necessary revelations, was an excellent pattern for Christianity to be copied by the followers of Jesus. As for the Qumran pesher, it pointed the way towards the type of fulfilment exegesis that we find in the works of the evangelists and Paul.
Back in the late 1940s, scholars enthusiastically prophesied that the newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls would transform beyond all recognition our approach to the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, as well as our understanding of both Judaism and Christianity. In the light of six decades of intense research, study and thought, the prophecy seems to have come true. Thanks to the manuscripts discovered at Qumran, the study of ancient Judaism and early Christianity has made a giant step forward and has laid solid foundations for future scholarly work in generations to come. We have advanced a great deal, yet in a sense we are just at the beginning of integrating the contribution of the Scrolls to the general canvas of Judaism and Christianity. In an odd way, our task will be finished only when Qumran ceases to be a separate subject, having lost its distinctness in the process of becoming a recognized integral part of the Judaeo-Christian culture.
X
Epilogue
In the first chapter of this book, in the ‘Portrait of the story-teller’, I outlined how I initially got involved with the Scrolls. The rest of the volume offers snippets of my further participation in the Qumran saga and its vast contribution to the historical, cultural and religious knowledge of Judaism and Christianity. I feel enormously privileged and am humbly grateful for the part I have been allowed to play in it. This volume has gone to the printers in 2009, the year which eventually saw the completion of the publication of all the Dead Sea Scrolls, with the final volume of the series, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert. It also marks the sixtieth anniversary of my first essay on the Scrolls in the long-defunct Parisian periodical, Cahiers Sioniens (vol. 3, August 1949, pp. 224–33), ‘Nouvelles lumières sur la Bible et le Judaïsme’ (New lights on the Bible and Judaism). The next landmark – let us hope – will come in 2012, the golden jubilee of The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, born in 1962 with a Qumran manuscript on its front cover – printed upside down.
To continue on a lighthearted, cheerful but still personal note, let me end the volume by quoting from the conclusion of a lecture entitled ‘Living with the Dead Sea Scrolls’, which I delivered in the British Museum in 2004. It records three memorable and amusing anecdotes of my life as a Qumran scholar.
Shortly after the publication of The Dead Sea Scrolls in English in 1962, I was asked at a conference in London by an elderly cleric, ‘Young man, are you a relation of the Vermes who writes on the Dead Sea Scrolls?’
Some twenty years later, at a party in Oxford, an Israeli lady who acted as a part-time tourist guide at Qumran, exclaimed when she realized who I was: ‘But I thought Vermes was just a text book!’
Finally, the third episode took place in California in the 1990s. My wife and I were guests at a dinner in the Huntington Library in Pasadena, and we left five-year-old Ian with the daughter of William Moffett, the director of the Library and chief liberator of the Scrolls. Next morning she smilingly reported a conversation she had overheard between her son and Ian, two boys of similar age. ‘My grandad found the Dead Sea Scrolls,’ boasted the Moffett offspring. ‘Oh yeah,’ retorted Ian Vermes, ‘but my daddy wrote them.’
Referring, equally lightheartedly, to this last episode on the occasion of my eightieth birthday, Professor Philip Alexander, formerly a student, later a colleague and collaborator, and always a dear friend of mine, flatteringly remarked: ‘It may be a
n exaggeration to claim that Geza Vermes wrote the Scrolls (unless, unknown to us, he is a reincarnation of the Teacher of Righteousness), but for tens of thousands around the world, both lay and academic, who have been enlightened by his translations of the texts, he is indisputably the man who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls in English.’
Bibliography
Chapter I
Portrait of the Story-teller
Geza Vermes, Providential Accidents: An Autobiography (London, SCM Press; Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 1998)
Biblical studies
P. R. Ackroyd et al. (eds), Cambridge History of the Bible, vols I–III (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1963–70)
R. Morgan and J. Barton, Biblical Interpretation (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988)
Roman Catholic biblical studies
Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (1994)
—— The Jewish People and their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible (2001)
Chapters II–V
General studies
G. R. Driver, The Hebrew Scrolls from the Neighbourhood of Jericho (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1951)
A. Dupont-Sommer, The Jewish Sect of Qumran and the Essenes: New Studies on the Dead Sea Scrolls (London, Valentine, Mitchell, 1954)
M. Burrows, The Dead Sea Scrolls (New York, Viking, 1955)
G. Vermes, Discovery in the Judean Desert (New York, Desclée, 1956); Les manuscrits du désert de Juda (Paris, Desclée, 1953)
The Story of the Scrolls Page 21
