Out of the Desert

The end of the world seemed at hand. The sun beat down on the rock-strewn desert and struck shimmering heat waves from the flat, metallic surface of the Dead Sea. In a room of the community, the elders took council; they were sure that the men of darkness would soon be upon the Children of Light. Reports had come that Vespasian's legionaries, clanking up the road from Caesarea, were already at Jericho, less than seven miles to the north. Before they moved on Jerusalem, the Romans would surely fall upon the Community by the Dead Sea. Perhaps then, at last, the prophesied messiah would appear.

There was much to be done: prayers, lustrations, holy meals—and the sacred scrolls must be taken to the nearby caves and hidden from the impious enemy. Then the Romans came, and in that summer A.D. 68 the Community of the New Covenant at Qumran sank beneath the surging tide of history that laid waste Jerusalem and began the great dispersion of the Jews. For nearly 19 centuries nothing remained of the covenanters but a dim tradition and a ruin in the desert like an enormous graveyard. Christianity spread from Palestine, Rome fell, Mohammed's conquering armies passed within a few miles of that graveyard; so again and again did the Crusaders, never suspecting its secrets. Today Qumran is yielding up those secrets while the world looks on in fascination and awe. For the people of the Dead Sea Community who are appearing through the mists of the past are closer than scholarship has ever come, in time and place and belief, to the men who wrote the Gospels.

Cradle of Christianity? Since a Bedouin shepherd boy named Muhammad adh-Dhib ("The Wolf") first stumbled on them just ten years ago in a cave near Qumran (he had hoped to find buried treasure), the scrolls have stirred up perhaps the most vigorous debate in Christianity since Darwin. One faction, headed by French Orientalist André Dupont-Sommer (whose views were popularized in the U.S. by Amateur Scrollman Edmund Wilson), held that the Dead Sea Community more than Bethlehem might have been the cradle of Christianity. Philologist John Allegro of Britain's University of Manchester strongly implied that the scrolls put into question the uniqueness of Jesus. At the other extreme were theologians who summarily dismissed the scrolls as having no major importance to Christianity.

Only lately have scholars accumulated enough facts to be able to settle down to a sober appraisal of the scrolls' significance. The majority verdict: the scrolls do not shake the foundations of Christianity, but they greatly contribute to the understanding of those foundations. As U.S. Old Testament Scholar Frank Cross of McCormick Theological Seminary puts it: the writers of the scrolls and of the New Testament "draw on common resources of language, theological themes, and concepts . . . The strange world of the New Testament becomes less baffling, less exotic." Says Hebrew Scholar Theodor Caster of Dropsie College: "They recover for us ... the backdrop of the stage on which the first act of the Christian drama was performed."