Seeking the Truth About the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jews and Christians

“The Dead Sea Scrolls are famous,” writes Carsten Peter Thiede in “The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Jewish Origins of Christianity.” “But what are they famous for?”

The answer is not as obvious as it may seem. “It has been said that two Dead Sea Scrolls scholars have at least three different opinions,” the author writes. But he proposes to “penetrate the smoke screen of rumors and legends, conflicting theories and wishful thinking” that has obscured the origin and meaning of these ancient writings, and to reveal the discoveries that have been overlooked, if not actually suppressed, by scholars and theologians.

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1946 or 1947--Thiede points out that even the year is subject to debate--was actually “the rediscovery of a rediscovery.” The earliest mention of “caves with jars and scrolls in the northern Dead Sea region,” as Thiede writes, dates to the early 3rd century. Clues to the existence of the scrolls are scattered through the writings of the church fathers and various Jewish sectarians. “In fact,” he insists, “the accidental discovery by some Bedouins remains a stigma on the face of classical archeology.”

Thiede, an Anglican minister who teaches early Christian history at universities in Switzerland and Israel, is especially interested in what the scrolls reveal about the Christian world--in both distant antiquity and the modern era--and the intimate relationship between the first Christians and the Jewish community from which they emerged. Above all, he insists that a proper reading of the scrolls establishes a much earlier date for the oldest texts of the New Testament than many scholars have been willing to accept.

At the heart of his book is the controversial notion that at least two papyri retrieved from the caves at Qumran, cataloged as 7Q 4 and 7Q 5, contain fragments from the New Testament--specifically, Mark 6:52-53 and 1 Timothy 3:16-4:1, 3. According to Thiede’s close reading of the evidence, these writings reached the community at Qumran sometime between AD 30 and AD 68, when the site was abandoned by the desert-dwelling, ascetic Jews, known as Essenes, who anticipated the imminent coming of the Messiah and who probably collected and preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls.

“It goes without saying that the Qumran Essenes heard about the new, personified messianic message during those decades,” Thiede insists. “To put it bluntly, if there is any place where we must expect to find the first writings of these Jesus People, it is the study library of . . . the Essenes.”

Still, Thiede cautions us against the notion, held by some scholars, that Jesus spent his years in the wilderness in an Essene community like the one at Qumran, and he argues that the “Jesus People” and the Essenes were rivals. “They knew of each other, they learned from each other, they rejected each other, giving and taking all the time,” he explains. “The first Christians were no Essenes, and the Essenes did not all of a sudden mutate to Christians.”

Thiede, the author of such bestsellers as “Eyewitness to Jesus,” is addressing a general readership, but he does not oversimplify his argument or evidence. He reproduces the Greek text of the fragments and explains the significance of such arcane details as the spacing of letters and the number of letters per line. And he condemns the theological motives of scholars who refuse to accept even the possibility that the Dead Sea Scrolls include fragments of the New Testament.

“Those who are convinced that there must not be and cannot have been ‘Christian’ texts at Qumran stoop to a polemical approach which includes a palpable misleading of nonspecialist readers,” he writes. “But at the present state of the Jewish-Christian debate about the nature of the first Christian writings as inner-Jewish, messianic and eschatological literature, no harm is done to anyone’s faith, nor to the historical context as such, if 7Q 4 is finally accepted as 1 Timothy and 7Q 5 as Mark.”

Thiede argues that the placement of fragments from the New Testament among the Dead Sea Scrolls ultimately serves to promote solidarity among Christians and Jews. The passages of the New Testament that are often condemned as anti-Jewish, he asserts, reflect only “an inner-Jewish ‘family conflict’ ” among rival factions within the Jewish community of 1st-century Palestine. Indeed, the language of the New Testament “is caressingly mild if compared with the vocabulary employed against fellow Jews by the authors of some of the Hebrew and Aramaic texts found at Qumran.”

Jonathan Kirsch, a contributing writer for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, is the author of, most recently, “The Woman Who Laughed at God: The Untold History of the Jewish People.”