The second book I have just read (see here for the first) from the imaginative Princeton University Press series Lives of Great Religious Books is John J. Collins’ The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Biography. Great stuff, again.
I have waited for a straightforward book about the Scrolls that not only introduced the contents and told the story, but opened up their implications and described the – often bizarre – academic controversies that have arisen around them. This book does it.
I haven’t the time or ability to deal with detailed academic scrutiny, important though that clearly is. I need something that gives me the big picture.
Towards the end of the book Collins concludes:
Despite sensationalist claims, [the Scrolls] are not Christian, and do not witness directly to Jesus of Nazareth and his followers. Nonetheless, they illuminate the context in which Jesus lived, and in which earliest Christianity took shape. (P.240)
Other works that do a similar job are (depending on whether you like film or book) Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Gerd Theissen’s The Shadow of the Galilaean.
January 29, 2014 at 7:33 am
Reblogged this on hungarywolf.
January 29, 2014 at 9:40 pm
…Never mind ‘The Life of Brian’…. I am not getting a life, with all this fascinating and excellent material, that just continues to open new doors and seemingly prevents the conduct of normal life….Meanwhile….
From Hershel Shanks’ Book – ‘The Mystery & Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls’..
‘The French scholar Andre Dupont-Sommer, who was not a member of the scroll publication team, sought to draw a direct line between the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran and Christianity, arguing that Jesus was prefigured by a character in the scrolls known as the Teacher of Righteousness. In a now-famous passage, Dupont-Sommer wrote:
The Galilean Master . . . appears in many respects as an astonishing reincarnation of [the Teacher of Righteousness in the scrolls]. Like the latter, He preached penitence, poverty, humility, love of one’s neighbor, chastity. Like him, He prescribed the observance of the law of Moses, the whole Law, but the Law finished and perfected, thanks to His own revelations. Like him, He was the Elect and Messiah of God, the Messiah redeemer of the world. Like him, He was the object of the hostility of the priests…. Like him He was condemned and put to death. Like him He pronounced judgment on Jerusalem, which was taken and destroyed by the Romans for having put Him to death. Like him, at the end of time, He will be the supreme judge. Like him, He founded a Church whose adherents fervently awaited his glorious return.
Dupont-Sommer greatly influenced the prominent American literary critic Edmund Wilson, who wrote a best-selling book on the scrolls, reprinted from a series of articles that appeared in The New Yorker from 1951 to 1954. Wilson, following Dupont-Sommer, claimed that the Qumran sect and early Christianity were “successive phases of a [single] movement.” Wilson drew out the implications of Dupont-Sommer’s position:
The monastery [at Qumran], this structure of stone that endures, between the waters and precipitous cliffs, with its oven and its inkwells, its mill and its cesspool, its constellations of sacred fonts and the unadorned graves of its dead, is perhaps, more than Bethlehem or Nazareth, the cradle of Christianity……’
There is more….it just gets better…..Please no more books for at least a couple of weeks!!
January 30, 2014 at 12:59 am
And Shanks gets an interesting critique – among others – in this book, Tom!
January 31, 2014 at 11:54 am
I am going to see if I can sneak the Life of Brian onto the Cambvridge theological Federation reading list…
February 3, 2014 at 6:28 pm
Nick Baines, where is the critique of Shanks book?
February 3, 2014 at 7:27 pm
Several critiques are referred to in the Collins overview.