Whats the SD on the Dead Sea Scrolls ?

Great Debates
1

You often hear people discuss the Dead Sea Scrolls in the context of trying to prove or disprove the authenticy to New Testament dogma. Most recently in this thread concerning the authenticy of 666 being the number of the beast.

I was under the impression that the scrolls almost entirely pre-date the New Testament and the only connection is a tiny fragment that some people claim is part of the Gospel of Mark. So any attempt to use them this way is pretty unconvincing.

So what’s the straight dope ?

2

From what I see here, the last Cecil Adams column to directly address the DSS dates back to this 1994 installment.

The DSS are essentially “Old Testament” Canonical and Apocryphal texts plus writings attributed to the Essene sect.

From where I sit the idea often comes across not so much that they support the NT content itself, but rather the proponent’s notion of how the NT came into being and what references the Apostles were using in composing it.

The most reasonable take on it is that it can be used to argue that the authors of the NT, whose scriptural/prophetic references and interpretations often are greatly at odds with the mainstream Jewish interpretation (even as to whether they are prophesies at all), need not have pulled Christianity out of thin air, but could have had access or exposure to dissident/heretic schools in the Jewish tradition. This would be a reasonable assumption anyway, but it helps to be able to point to other fringe theological movements in the right time period, whose writings include passages that, it is claimed, resemble those of the sources the Christians were using.

That the recovered scripture passages from c. 1st century are so faithful to the texts carried forward to later centuries was seen as something quite impressive. But in the public opinion that grew into a mystique of the DSS being somehow extra true to the “original” scripture and thus to the “right” interpretation of theological currents of thought at the time of the Judeo-Christian split.

Of course, in popular perception the DSS have further attained some special mystique as to somehow containing some truly smashing revelations, which has yet failed to materialize AFAIK.

3

So why was there a 50 year dealy in publishing the content of them? I remember reading that the scrolls contained some really wild stuff, but nothing ever seemed to come out of them

4

There was no such delay. The bulk of the manuscripts have been published as they have been restored and they have been published into modern language translations almost as swiftly.

The “50 year” bit is in regards to scholastic turf wars.

The initial group who got possession of them was a multi-ethnic/multi-national/multi-faith group of scholars who happened to have a preponderance of Catholics among them. (As the largest single group providing scholarship, that is not, in and of itself, surprising.)

At some point, all of the collected manuscripts were photographed as a backup and the photos were sent to Stanford University for safe keeping. Meanwhile, the originals remained in Israel under the protection of the original group (with a slowly changing membership due to age, retirement, etc.).

Once all the “big” scrolls were translated, the next job was to take the enormous number of fragments and attempt to piece together larger and more coherent scrolls from those fragments. Here, the turf wars began. The society that had possession deemed themselves the only legitimate group sufficiently well versed to handle the reconstructions. Other scholars who asked to review the reconstructions were turned away. Nasty comments were made by each group regarding the other.

At some point, (early 1990s?), someone at Stanford decided that the next best thing to prying open the door to the study society in Israel would be to publish the photographs of the fragments. This was met by loud cheers from the people who had been denied access and much tongue clucking from the study group who issued condemnations of the breach of “trust” along with (some accurate and some wild) claims that studying the photos was inappropriate since the photos could not present the true appearance of the fragments.

Once the photos were published, of course, people could also look at photos of earlier scrolls for which the transcriptions and translations had been challenged. Much was made of that, but I am unaware of any serious challenges to the original scholarship. (They were not incompetent conspirators, just scholars jealous of their turf.)

The fragments are often tiny with a sentence or a word or a letter as the only remaining portion. A few have been pieced together to create mildly interesting (suggested) larger fragments, but there have been no new “books” created from the fragments.

As noted, the study group and its administration were top-heavy with Catholics. This has really fed the fires (outside the realm of scholars) among conspiracy theorists, despite the fact that the RCC has no direct control over the original scrolls and no “Catholic” transcriptions or translations have emerged from the group.

5

Wikipedia’s view of the publication controversy in which I spot no errors.