Episode 1 | A Stunning Archeological Find | Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls

[Music] i really like those antique shows you know those ones you see on tv they're usually late at night where this guy comes in with the paintings usually in a t-shirt and jeans with holes all over everything he's holding this painting and they're going to evaluate what it's worth and he says well i found this in the trunk of my car it's been there for the last nine years and i was thinking maybe it might be worth something and and you feel the suspense building and building and building and generally a guy's looking at it he's got glasses and a tie he looks very very serious and he's looking at it with a magnifying glass and the guy's like what's it worth like 100 bucks 200 bucks and the guy's like it's worth 10 million dollars and everybody starts crying and all that i think that we possess something of great value but if we're honest we don't recognize it's worth each one of us you and i have been given the gift of faith but do we recognize what it's worth i mean what is the value of the liberating message of jesus christ the worth of his forgiveness his mercy when we think about the church the blessing and the grace that's in the sacraments our history 2 000 years of history the teachings that we have of the church the catechism and all of this it's such a great blessing but do we recognize it's worth we you and i have been given a treasure do we recognize it [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] welcome to jesus in the dead sea scrolls i'm father dave ivanka i'm president of franciscan university of steubenville i'm with dr john burgs my theology professor here at francisca university and also the author of the book jesus in the dead sea scrolls revealing jewish roots of christianity john it's great to have you here with us oh it's my delight like i'm really excited to be able to talk about this book and really open up to a population of people who maybe have heard of the dead sea scrolls but don't really get why they're so important now let me just start at the very beginning what i love about this is the name of this book is jesus and the dead sea scrolls why did you name it that well because really the purpose of the book was to get us to uh see jesus in a new light sometimes we get so used to hearing the gospels at mass in a certain way we have certain ways of imagining how things looked and how jesus would have thought in his contemporaries but what if we could go back and really have a window on jewish life at that time and and come to know him close more closely you know we were we were talking before you know when folks love elvis they go to graceland to see all his personality i guess you know it's a little bit dated now yeah but uh but uh these these scrolls and the place where they're found brings us really close to the time and the culture and the place of our lord yeah actually first off i love this book and that's why we're doing this um but you used the word that was is exactly what i was thinking is what this does is you use the scrolls as a window to be able to see a life in a community and where jesus was living in the time and i think that's one of the coolest things is is that it's like you're kind of peeking in like looking through a little key holder and you get to see things and and the way you make connections to john the baptist and to john and to mary and to elizabeth and everything it's just it's really really great okay so people have a basic idea of the dead sea scrolls other than this beautiful these beautiful images right but what are they where they come from how do we find um why are they significant as an archaeological point sure absolutely so we're talking the winter at the end of 1946 into 1947 somewhere in there three bedouin shepherds what's a better one bedouin basically arab shepherds okay okay cousins driving their goats i believe it was along the shores of dead sea one of them used to entertain himself by tossing rocks into caves just for the heck of it and he heard the crashing of the breaking of pottery in one cave on a winter evening and so i thought you know human artifacts up there maybe we come back later maybe there's gold there's something valuable in the case of something valuable yeah so a couple of days later they came back and investigated and much of their disappointment no gold but they did find these three uh really they look like large cigar-like objects that they pulled out of these jars uh in this cave um well it turned out that they looked like cigars because they were covered with rotten leather but when you unwrapped them turned out to be these old scrolls well that was a big disappointment of course so they put them in a bag and they they swung in the wind on a tent pole for several weeks until they had a chance to go to bethlehem which was you know the the closest uh you know significant town and um when they had a chance to do that eventually they sold them to uh antiquities dealers and and they worked their way up finally uh until they uh got to scholars at the hebrew university and some american old testament scholars who looking at the script realized oh my goodness these things are truly ancient more ancient than anything we've found to date and uh and then once that you know that was about 1948 once that was realized the race was on to find more of them and so we had about a decade of excavation until about 1956 they end up finding 11 caves with scrolls in them turns out they were the remains of the library of a jewish male monastic community that was living there at the shores of the dead sea during the time of our lord and the apostles essentially that's yeah it's kind of indiana jones issue yes they were searching for this but literally have no idea the value the worth or anything like that they did not they sold the first three scrolls for about a moderate equivalent of 100 bucks and then within about 10 years the state of israel was building a multi-million dollar bunker-like museum to hold these things you know in a perfect state of preservation just mind-boggling okay just uh just a few more minutes on just the scrolls themselves so how many uh how large all that kind of stuff sure so we have the remains of what once were a thousand scrolls okay and father that's an amazing library for the first century you know this is a major center of learning maybe you think of like a university you know like a benedictine or a franciscan yeah ethan yeah thanks sorry it's all right well they're very old you know so anyway um uh so we have a thousand uh originally a thousand scrolls in this library most of scrolls were in fragmentary condition but a few were almost perfect like the great isaiah scroll probably the the nicest find among the whole collection which was a perfectly preserved copy of the book of isaiah in the original language hebrew for about 250 bc that's about a thousand years earlier than any complete copy of a business yeah it was just amazing so um uh that's so we discovered so about about a quarter of these scrolls were copies of books of the bible and three quarters were you know all the typical things that you might think you would find in a monastic library biblical commentaries lectionaries liturgical calendars uh prophecies you know uh end times predictions the whole gamut really and a little bit of a history of their order and their rule of life and those things in and of themselves are interesting but when we think of again the title of your book jesus it gives us an insight in the world that jesus was living in absolutely and it brings to light all kinds of little details in the gospel narratives that we just dismiss or we just get used to them you know like oh john the baptist you know he always eats bugs and honey that's what he does you know we don't think twice about it but then a lot of the scrolls and we'll get into this yeah yeah yeah that's one of those things that's exactly right that's one of the things that i really found so interesting is these little things you use the example of john the baptist or the man carrying water oh you read that doesn't matter but in the light of this at the last supper it becomes significant so i think that's just one of the things and it's one thing i want to stress this whole time is our desire is that you are able to encounter the lord in this that ultimately it's jesus and the dead sea scrolls so it helps us understand jesus the church the early church but if it's just something a window looking back and has nothing to say to us today then i think we've missed the boat so that's really our goal and our desire as well correct absolutely perfect okay so you spoke of this community in qumran uh talk a little bit about this community that lived there sure so the maybe in the context of the rest of the jewish life at that time absolutely so we found the scrolls in these caves and these caves are surrounding clearly what was remains of a community of people not private dwellings but like a lot of people living together between 100 and 200 people living in these buildings and we excavate the graveyard find they're all single graves with men buried in them that and that in itself is very unusual father because jews at this time had family tombs that's how they buried their dead so clearly people are living here who aren't practicing regular jewish life well anyway to get to get right to the point we discover that this was a community of a group that was known to us from other historical records called the essenes they were one of three sects of the jews in the time of our lord the other two are better known to us from the gospels obviously the pharisees we see them all the time the sadducees a little bit less but also we see them in the gospels so the pharisees were a scholarly movement very concerned with proper observational law the sadducees were an elitist uh priestly movement that controlled the temple and uh collaborated with the romans to keep power and then there was this third group the essenes who left us this monastery they were like a holiness group a break-off group that moved away from the rest of society kind of lived in their own parts of the different towns or established their own communities like this monastic group and they practiced intense holiness asceticism like denial of the body intense life of prayer meditation on the scriptures they cultivated prophecy so we always think of them as like a an ancient quasi-charismatic group even and they expected the return of the messiah so it's kind of like a little bit of an apocalyptic group in that sense as well um so very very vibrant uh piety and devotion and um and yes and and they do all the souls to the scriptures and and to to scholarship as well and left us this wonderful treasure and so uh qumran is near the dead sea 10 minute 15 minutes from jericho yeah is that about right so just people have a sense nowadays yeah it is right so jesus would have been aware of this community absolutely there's no way he could not have been aware where john the baptist is described as practicing his ministry at the beginning of the gospels is only a few miles up the river from where this uh this community was so our lord definitely was aware of them and i believe he mentions them for example in matthew 19 when he speaks of those who've made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven i grew up completely bum-fuzzled by what that could possibly mean bamfoozled yeah that's that's a technical term it's a creek [Laughter] uh whatever i don't know where i picked that up but uh i had no idea what uh what eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom meant but obviously our lord was speaking about somebody in his own day who was foregoing regular married life in order to devote themselves to a life of singleness while waiting for the kingdom of god and the messiah and these kind of things and i was under the impression growing up that jews just didn't practice celibacy so who could jesus be speaking about but in hindsight he's got to be speaking about the this essene community and and perhaps others like it uh where you have these these men waiting and they were absolutely waiting for the kingdom they used that language the kingdom of god and looking forward to the royal messiah and so on to come and and living in this state of holiness and prayer in expectation that's a beautiful thing and look our lord commends him for it yeah yeah yeah in many ways uh it's the the community the essene community and we'll talk more about this over the next uh several episodes was that yeah i i resonate with that because that's in many ways my life when i take a look at some of the things that you wrote about and things that they said and behaved and acted that this is this is how i live and and you see the connection between that and how we live today and in how the church lives in religious life and communities but then the other is i like the the connection between the essene community john the baptist jesus is community the early so you see all of this coming together and and it allows us i think to have jesus and to be able to see jesus in context again absolutely jesus lived in a place and he lived and saw things and he was impacted by people and sometimes we kind of create jesus apart from all of that like nothing would impact jesus but of course you know he was he he dealt with this and saw it yeah it's a principle of incarnation you know he comes down takes our flesh becomes a jewish man at a very specific time of history and it's you know our faith is not some kind of uh random philosophy that's kind of ethereal or apart from reality but it takes flesh right and this gives us a better sense of that well and that's exactly what what i experienced in your book is that it helped me see jesus better and understand jesus and that's all i'm about you know anything that can help me do that so i've got all kinds of notes so as we're doing this i'm going to be looking at this you've got it all in your head um i i don't know i have it all in my head so let's just take a break for a second when we come back talk a little bit specifically about the role of the seeing community and how they might have impacted the people around them indeed [Music] so the scrolls provide us a window in insight into the early church uh what was was there a one that was particularly surprising was there oh my gosh we never heard that we never knew that what was some of the the particular scrolls that were found that were unique about them oh sure well i mean we mentioned already you know the great isaiah scroll that was astounding uh to have a a copy of a biblical book a thousand years older than what we had had before and we might just mention on that father dave that you know people are curious well what did it look like i mean were there chapters missing extra chapters you know you know thankfully and very reassuringly it was largely like our you know our biblical hebrew that we had had so it kind of confirmed that the text had been accurately translated interesting each page it's like row yeah we never knew this was in here yeah but thankfully there were no no shocks in that manner but it it uh yeah it verified you know the the uh the fidelity of our um our scriptural text you know over the over the centuries so that was that was a big one father but uh you know another scroll that we're going to refer to again and again in these episodes is is called the community rule okay or something is the rule of the community scholars name variations but the reason why this is so important is it's comparable to something like uh the rule of saint benedict or some other uh monastic um or rule of religious life in that it govern their daily life in the community and also gave the theology of their movement and and of their religious practices so we see these these uh kind of quasi-sacraments that they would celebrate together and and how they imagined those working and um you know and how they imagined the future would would unfold and what the messiah would do when he came to meet them and so on so we're going to refer to again again this is very fascinating and most of their thought you know is really crystallized in that rule of the community um and then there's some other you know just fascinating scrolls the famous war scroll that gives her apocalyptic description of armageddon essentially and what their part in it and what weapons they would use and so on and um the temple scroll which is a big description of how they were going to run the temple when the messiah would give it into their control when he returned that was a big deal for them and uh yeah and then some some messianic documents that we'll talk about later that i think shed some light on the gospels and and things that are happening in luke and elsewhere you use the word movement so we we think of movements in the church today all different kinds of movements marriage encounter hercia or open state so this was similar to that right just a movement a group of people sure it was a movement of people that were reacting to kind of the the religious corruption and indifference that they saw around them and much like um saint francis started a movement you know the franciscan movement with different orders uh to for to seek purity and seek holiness and kind of you know get back to authentic faith that's what the essence we're trying to do as well in in various ways and i think that point is really good is to try to get to an authentic faith isn't that what we are continually trying to do is is that we're trying to and and some people have different characters different personalities different but isn't that the desire today is is to try to associate ourselves or connect ourselves with a group of people with a community that can deepen our relationship with the lord absolutely and and in the essenes i think you know we we see a uh feel a profound fraternity with them like a spiritual resonance with them um because the the kinds of corruption and uh indifference that they were dealing with you know we see in every generation in the church as well uh there was a corruption the priesthood there was political movement there had been a political takeover of the priesthood around the year 150 where a king just made himself high priest and that was very disturbing to say the least there was infidelity in the living out of biblical law among these other groups and the essenes had just had enough of that and they said no we want to get back to faithful observance of god's law we want a pure priesthood and this is such a mess only the messiah is going to be able to fix it fix it so let's you know get off by ourselves and just wait for the messiah i don't forgive me if we already mention it what were the dates of the essene community like when do we think they started and and how long did they last sure well we don't know for absolutely sure but the the popular theory among scholars is that around the year 150 when the high priest the high priesthood was taken over for political reasons uh you had politics and religion yeah isn't that amazing um you had a large group of priests as well as a lady [Music] responding to that by going into it like we might call it an internal exile they're just gonna get apart from the rest of society and devote themselves to prayer and just wait for the messiah to come and so around year 150 i think we start seeing this qumran community that that's the geographical name of the creation is qumran with a q and there they go into as i said a kind of internal exile build this uh complex of buildings and and there they begin to wait and then that lasted for about 200 years up until about the time around the year 70 when the romans come in and destroy jerusalem okay one of the questions that we're going to go back to time and time again is this is interesting but what does it have to say to us so yeah when you reflect on this this group of people that want it and it wasn't just men we'll talk about that later but wanted to be able to get away from all that was going on what does that say to us today how do we reconcile that today yeah yeah well one of the one of the comforting things that i find about you know go back and reading this history is just it it recalls the fact that um uh every generation has its struggles and i think you know our temptation is to feel like oh you know uh the difficulties that we deal with whatever kinds of corruption scandal whatever you you know politics and religion that that we're facing in our current day somehow this is unique and everything's falling apart no really read the bible yeah yeah it's kind of always been this way um and and in every generation god has provided a way for those who wish to seek him uh and and provide a community for people who have wished to seek him and you know as we'll mention in future episodes um it's very likely that this essene community was was a place where faith was kept alive and when we read in the the those holy men and women in the early chapters of luke for example we see them doing very essene-like things they probably nourish their faith from this movement and that's a great comfort so in every generation god provides us a way that we can serve him faithfully provides new movements it provides us with community and that gives us a hope for the future i think that that desire for community that they had is that's fundamentally christian i believe i i think everybody's looking for people that they can have relationship with that they can share the faith with and in fact as we were going through the covet thing that was one thing that i thought was really unhealthy was that what it was challenging or making us do was to isolate and to get away from one another and in a spiritual sense but i think also in a very human sense we need relationship we need contact when when i was discerning to be a priest but specifically to be a religious priest that was at the heart of it for me is my desire to be with brothers and to come together yeah yes yeah and and part of my conversion was uh was through the the prelature of opus dei which is also a kind of a brotherhood within the church that kind of drew me in to the catholic church and you know it's one of the interesting things for in my experience father you know growing up uh not as a catholic growing up as a protestant very devout calvinist we'll go into what that means but anyway we had another another day another day yes we had a very negative view of uh catholic religious life and we tended to regard it as one of those many things that was invented by the evil pope sometime in the middle ages and you know imposed on christianity so when you look at protestant forms of christianity you often don't find expressions of the religious life there some exceptions but mostly not but you know in in working on the dead sea scrolls father one of the things i was impressed was how we find that that sense of a religious order or religious community and even you know celibacy and fraternity uh expressed in in a jewish way even before the birth of our lord and they're just working on the text of the old testament if you poke a little further you find that this is a tradition that goes back all the way to like elijah and elisha and these groups that are mentioned as the sons of the prophets that we read about in first and second kings so it's very biblical very jewish you know deeply rooted that's really cool because that that's what i was experiencing when i was reading this was that it connected me i i don't know it's weird i can't get emotional it connected me to things that i knew and believed but but wasn't sure why or oh this makes sense now reading this and looking at this makes sense that what we're doing isn't some new thing but it's it's going on and has gone on from the beginning of our faith and and this the connection that it make again that the window the bringing us back to what we're doing today has been done for two thousand more than two thousand years and it's just it's a great blessing all right i think we're supposed to be done for this first section that's been great all right why don't we pray then uh heavenly father we ask that you'd come in the name of the father the son and the holy spirit uh once again lord uh this is always about encountering you so i pray your blessing in your holy spirit to be upon us that you have brought us the gift that is this the gift that the dead sea scrolls reveal to us and and the way the yearly community lived the way that they wanted to love you the way they wanted to be faithful to you the way they wanted to be pure they came together surrounded themselves and brothers and sisters so as to be able to encounter you lord i pray your blessing upon those who are viewing this session that they would come to know your presence that the dead sea scrolls in our discussion or conversation would be a window into faith a window that would draw them and allow them to see you more clearly we ask your blessing to be upon us lord the father the son and the holy spirit amen amen amen thanks john you're welcome [Music] my [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Franciscan University of Steubenville

Views: 98,792

Rating: 4.8695474 out of 5

Keywords: Franciscan University, Steubenville, Ohio, Catholic, college, Franciscan University of Steubenville, Franciscan University of Steubenville (College / University), Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Fr. Dave Pivonka TOR, Dr. John Bergsma, Dead Sea Scrolls

Id: PFXILEMWV9o

Length: 27min 20sec (1640 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 30 2020