Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls

[Music] foreign [Music] I'm your host Megan Lewis and today I am joined by Dr James table Dr Dave will thank you so much for joining me we are going to talk about the Dead Sea Scrolls because you have a course coming out very shortly with myth Vision podcasts and your course is on the Dead Sea Scrolls so to begin with I just wanted to ask what are the Dead Sea Scrolls I'm sure many people know but um it's always good to start with the basics that's right good to be with you again Megan it's actually Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls so we'll get to that but what are the Dead Sea Scrolls they are a collection of manuscripts that are from 2200 years old to 2000 years old so let's just say since we're doing Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls 100 150 years before the time of Jesus and they were found in 1947 through 50. they were in caves around an ancient ruin called qumran uh q-u-m-r-a-n and we think they were the library of a sect of Judaism some people use the word essene but let's just say the people of the New Covenant because that's what they call themselves and they're about a hundred 150 years before Jesus and they the library contains three things copies of the Hebrew Bible which is really valuable because the oldest copy of the Hebrew Bible have actually got a printed one here was this Leningrad codex this is the Hebrew Bible that you know well and it uh about a 1000 CE or A.D and suddenly we had copies particularly of the book of Isaiah because it's complete that went back to maybe 2100 so uh years before that so that's a big thing also other books like first Enoch and all kinds of Apocrypha books and then most interesting we have the writings of the group itself and whether you call them essenes or the people of the New Covenant or children of light they had a variety of names for themselves uh we can characterize them so by the the fact that we have their writings is just unprecedented and some of them are very close to the time of the sex formation you know how in the New Testament you got quite a gap anywhere from 40 to 100 years before you get to you begin to get writings that are coming from the movement Paul would be the earliest he's probably 20 30 years after the time of Jesus we one of the Scrolls that's called the Thanksgiving hymns it was there were 11 caves with Scrolls and one of them in cave one uh that we call it the Thanksgiving hymns we think it has about a dozen hymns or they're sort of like Poetic they're not exact they're sort of like the Psalms in that sense but they're very personal I think one of them might have been written by their teacher so they had a leader they called him the right teacher you'll usually see it as the teacher of righteousness but it really means the true teacher like they're all these teachers running around but we've got the true one and they believe that he was a prophet like Moses so when you're reading the Scrolls particularly the ones after the teacher arrives some are before he came looking forward to a messiah coming and others are after he came they speak of him in such laudatory terms not divine but the one to whom God has revealed all the mysteries of His prophets of his will so they think he's the final Revelator they think they're at the End of the Age so it's an apocalyptic Messianic group very much like the Jesus movement was 150 years later so that makes it really interesting I mean we don't have anything from Pharisees and Sadducees except later traditions so to have a library of about 800 volumes not complete some are just tiny fragments but representing that many volumes coming from this group is just unprecedented and people couldn't even believe it when they were discovered one of the objections was well things could not survive that long in the Judean desert down by the Dead Sea do we do we know how the Scrolls were used were they used for teaching or for worship or or something else entirely well they really the Scrolls really differ depending on what you're talking about obviously the copies of the scriptures as they would call it were used all the time by people who were reading the different texts of the Bible and they had multiple copies sometimes different versions that don't read exactly the same that makes it really interesting to compare with our very late tradition of the so-called masoretic texts the one I held up the Leningrad codex because you can compare the readings and you'll often hear well they're just about the same our Bible is okay don't worry as if it's like so glad we got it and yeah exactly but you know what uh it's the same meaning if I'm reading Isaiah I'm reading Isaiah and it has the same kind of Divisions but individual readings there are thousands of variants like just like the New Testament you know Bart airbn's done so much on this people always say yeah but basically the letters are probably the same and you say well let me show you 25 or 30 places where they're not the same and it reads very differently and we're not sure which one is right and that's the same thing with the Dead Sea Scrolls there's some my favorite I wrote some of these down and I I have a whole lecture in the course on that question what about the Dead Sea scroll Bible this one is really interesting it's from Malachi 3 in the English Bible and it's this famous passage that is quoted at the very beginning of Mark behold I send my messenger and he will prepare the way before me and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his Temple the messenger of the Covenant whom you desire says Yahweh of host so Christians love that it's John the Baptist he's preparing the way of the Lord who becomes Jesus and so forth in later readings but in the Dead Sea Scrolls they know nothing about that kind of interpretation it actually says behold I send my messenger who will prepare the way before me and the adawn the Lord like the master another figure will come and they will come and the messenger of the Covenant whom you desire but who can endure them when they come so to have a text with two figures not one is very significant and they do believe in two Messiahs they believe in a Priestly Messiah and a davidic messiah and they talk about this in the Scrolls in the New Testament there's a tendency to make everything Jesus he's the prophet he's the priest he's the king Jesus is it but not in the text themselves as you begin to read it people say well who are you John and Jesus says among those born of women there's none greater than John well since Jesus at least had a human mother everybody admits that sounds like John's greater than Jesus uh and then some scribe added but anyone in the kingdom is greater than John and that's clearly a sort of a gloss in the text to kind of handle the problem so you get things like that Deuteronomy is another one really interesting when the most high divided the Nations he separated the sons of Adam according to the number of the children of Israel so this is a very nationalistic idea that Israel's at the center of the world and all the nations are around Israel and the Dead Sea scroll cup is completely different it says when the most high divided the Nations he separated humans sons of Adam according to the number of the sons of God that's the benay Elohim these these Angelic like powers that ruled over the Affairs of different kingdoms that we know from various texts like Psalm 82 is one of the you know the Council of the L or the Elohim so it sounds like there was an attempt as the text developed to kind of domesticate that and make it more about Israel and you you know about the Septuagint of course it's a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible and it comes from we think about 200 BC or 100 maybe and it also says uh the sons of God not the sons of Israel so lots of times the Dead Sea scroll copies of the scripture will agree with the Greek translation which is kind of like a problem because nobody's reading the lxx the Septuagint as their Bible today so you really need a critical Bible text like the new revised Standard Version or one of those because they will put these readings in the notes if not in the text so that you get the full range of interpretation I wanted to ask briefly before we go on to the specifics of the course you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that the the qumran people the community who produced the Scrolls were a Messianic apocalyptic group obviously this has some pretty strong similarities to to Jesus into very early Christians do we know how their beliefs would have compared to other Jewish people at the time or is that impossible to know it's hard to know if if we go by the Dead Sea scroll group let's call them then we're going back around uh say 100 BCE and that's during the time of The Maccabees and as you know the maccabean Jewish rulers take on Hellenistic names and most of them are very hellenized some of them have even put on their coins not Divine names but the idea of Alexander janaeus King of the Jews and so forth which would be a royal title of a of a messiah really not a Hellenistic ruler and so uh we don't know what the population as a whole was thinking but this particular group is one of the opposition groups we think and they believe that because things have become very corrupt they think the temple at Jerusalem is being spoiled by a love of riches and Corruption and they believe that the temple they say for example we're building a temple of people out in the wilderness of Judea and our prayers are our sacrifices and so that reminds you also of things we find in the New Testament with the Jesus movement but as far as how it permeated the population I would say that this group was less open to the outside world unless you join this group after a probation period of three years and were dipped in water you know like Christian baptism in that sense I don't mean it was Christian but the idea it was an initiation into the group you were a son of darkness and that means all the other Jews so it reminds me of John the Baptist preaching if you remember he says to the crowds you Generation of Vipers who's warned you to flee from the Wrath to come not a very nice way to address a general crowd who's come to listen to you and that would be very reflective of the Dead Sea Scrolls now a lot of people think well Jesus was much more accommodating but then when you begin to dig into some of the early sources he'll say things like to his followers to you as given the mystery of the Kingdom for those outside hearing they won't hear uh seeing they won't see and so forth so I see them as pretty separatists and I think the Jesus movement was probably the same way there are lots of other parallels just the thing I mentioned earlier a New Covenant group you know these are the only two groups we know that uh have this kind of rundown apocalyptic Messianic New Covenant they shared their goods in common they were told to sell their possessions and pool their resources and we have texts in the New Testament that indicate that Jesus says sell what you have and come follow me so there's some real strong parallels there are also some strong differences and I cover those in the course so I certainly don't think Jesus was a card-carrying member and if he's coming 150 years later the group has probably changed quite a bit by his time but as far as we know archaeologically from the evidence of the site they're out there and most Scholars have concluded that the Scrolls were hidden right before the Jewish Roman war and that would get us right up to the year 70 CE so uh I'm thinking they're a very minority kind of group uh you know Josephus the Jewish historian describes the S scenes and he says they only numbered uh I think in one place three thousand another place six thousand so it's sort of an elite group but they might have followers that would be broader than that so we just don't know thank you could you tell us um something about the course that you're teaching what kinds of topics you'll be covering and why people should take it sure yeah so it's built around 10 lectures and the lectures are pretty obvious like what are the Dead Sea Scrolls when were they discovered what do we know about their leader these so-called right teacher the teacher of righteousness I Do cover parallels between the Jesus movement and this movement we talk about their views of the future what was their eschatology we actually can get a handle on the chronology that they thought they were living in and they did use terms like we're the last generation uh just to paraphrase this generation will not pass till all of this comes about they really believe that they would live to see the end we have evidence of that also as you know in the New Testament with particularly the Apostle Paul in some of his letters he says the end of all things is at hand and the time has grown very short so they're looking at the same Prophecies of Daniel and they're calculating you know the 490-year period it's supposed supposed to lead up to the end and so uh I cover all of that I already mentioned the Dead Sea scroll Bible what is that all about and then many would not realize that I've got here when I started graduate school let's see this was the book I used for the Dead Sea Scrolls that was in the 70s and this is the book we'll use today it's it's like 600 Pages we can't cover it all but we cover a lot of it and we try to do a survey of all of it so why is why did it grow so much well 40 percent of the Dead Sea Scrolls were not available to scholars in general to the public like in English now like this volume until 1991. and so I have a lecture on what's In Those unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls uh was there a conspiracy to hold them back was it just general academic slowness you know getting things out or what it's probably a mixture of both but there was a quite a bombshell when suddenly all the photographs were available and I had the Good Fortune of being involved in that so that when the photographs got released I got to look at them probably the first five or six people I was one of those and even published a few of them so now they're all out and that kind of dispute is over and anyone can read them and they're plenty of translations uh so basically all 10 lectures uh we just cover every kind of thing that you could think about what was the view of Messiah what were their beliefs how did they change quite a bit about the teacher because he's a major figure did they think he was uh Divine in any way there is a text that seems to say that they believed he was taken up to heaven and seated with God which would remind you of passages in Enoch and the New Testament so it there's nothing like this in ancient Judaism of this period that we can compare to early Christianity in fact the parallels we've mentioned Megan not a single one of the things I've mentioned would apply to the Pharisees or the Sadducees from what we can gather like they weren't Messianic apocalyptic we're the people of the New Covenant our teacher our Rabbi is the Prophet like Moses we don't get any of that and so to find two groups a hundred years apart 150 years apart depending on when you want to start the dating of the group um and that they're so parallel one of the questions that was first asked was uh well did Jesus people copy the Dead Sea scroll people and I don't think it's a matter of copying but coming out of the same kind of milieu and the same sort of culture they're also in the course of a very thick course pack all together it's about a hundred pages with PDFs and other readings I try to teach it like I would a upper level undergraduate course I used some of the same things that I use in my courses when I was teaching I'm retired now from full-time teaching so I love sharing this with a more General audience and I find that the people you and I deal with and all of us deal with on YouTube I mean they're every bit as capable as our students and our courses and you know what [Applause] and it was just amazing they're all ages and they come from all kinds of backgrounds and I could when I went into the zoom meeting I didn't have to worry about I wonder if about five percent have even looked at what we're doing today because they all had I mean they want to do this they're choosing to do this so it's just a great phenomenon thing to to offer this so is wonderful and it's wonderful how open it is to really anyone who who wants to take it and I'll have all of the information about the course in the video description there'll be little bits running across the bottom of your screen so if any of this sounds interesting to you then you can join Dr table through myth Vision podcast courses to learn more about the Dead Sea Scrolls Dr table thank you so much for coming in and telling us about it thank you it's always a pleasure [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Digital Hammurabi

Views: 11,962

Keywords: digital hammurabi, joshua bowen, megan lewis, sumeria, cuneiform, sumer, mesopotamian, mesopotamia, ancient history, dr. josh, assyria, akkad, bible, dead sea scrolls, dr. tabor, was there a messiah before jesus?

Id: K0XKeO3ahYg

Length: 20min 32sec (1232 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 27 2023