Religion: Out of the Desert

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An oral tradition of Hebrew and Aramaic underlying the Greek of the written Gospels made it necessary to use rough and often clumsy Greek equivalents for Semitic concepts. Hence, the treasury of scroll literature is enabling scholars to achieve new insight into the meaning of many passages. For example, the question of what the angels sang in their well-known announcement of Jesus' birth has long bothered Biblical scholars. "And on earth peace, good will toward men," says the King James version, and the Catholic Douay Bible has it "peace to men of good will." Now in the scrolls the idiom is found in its original form: "good will to men of [God's] favor," i.e., the elect in the apocalyptic age.

The Essene scrolls are closer in feeling and language to the Gospel of St. John than to any other part of the New Testament. And words that seem almost like a paraphrase of John's famous Prologue occur in the Rule of the Community: "And by His knowledge, everything has been brought into being. And everything that is, He established by His purpose; and apart from Him nothing is done." Professor William F. Albright of Johns Hopkins has pointed out that many phrases are duplicated in both, and in both the dualistic coupling of opposites recurs again and again — light and darkness, truth and error, spirit and flesh, death and life. The parallels and similarities are, in fact, so numerous and conclusive that they seriously challenge the theory that the Gospel of John was the latest to be written and that it shows marked Greek influence. Instead, many modern scholars now view John as thoroughly Jewish and his Gospel perhaps the earliest of the four.

The Matrix. The scroll community called itself the people of the New Covenant or New Testament, and some of them may have become Christians after the Romans scattered them from their center on the Dead Sea. But the scholars on the ground agree that they were in no sense Christian or proto-Christian. The Essenes would probably have been the first to cry heresy at the Christian welding of all three messiahs — prophet, priest and king — to have been shocked at Jesus' attitude toward the Law, to have not understood his atoning death.

The only Christians whose faith the scrolls can jolt are those who have failed to see the paradox that the churches have always taught: that Jesus Christ was a man as well as God — a man of a particular time and place, speaking a specific language, revealing his way in terms of a specific cultural and religious tradition. For Christians who want to know more of that matrix in which their faith was born, the People of the Scrolls are reaching a hand across the centuries.