Threat To Christianity?
Not long after the first group of scrolls was found, reports began to circulate that they contained things that would harm, perhaps gravely harm, the Catholic Church or all Christianity. How true are the reports?
The matter became more acute when the last group of scrolls was finally released. Then in 1991 there appeared a book by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, The Dead Sea Scroll Deception. It charged that the reason for the almost 35 year delay in releasing most of the scrolls was the Vatican, which knew or feared it would be dangerous to the Church.
However, even before the book was published in the U.S., Hershel Shanks, a fine Jewish scholar, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, who had taken the lead in campaigning to have the scrolls released, reviewed the book in his BAR of Nov.-Dec. 1991. He was, rightly, very hard on the book, even said flatly, "the charge is hogwash," and "their central thesis is so badly flawed as to be ludicrous." However, around the same time, John Allegro wrote to John Strugnell, then Chief Editor of the Scrolls, who was considering becoming Catholic, "By the time I've finished, there won't be any Church left for you to join."
But now we have a new book. The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered (Element 1993) by Robert Eisenman, of the University of California at Long Beach, and Michael Wise, an Aramaic Professor at the University of Chicago. These two have done two great services for us.
First, a service they know and intend, their book finally does make available fifty of the scrolls' texts, mostly things never published before. There is an introduction to each document, then the text is printed in Hebrew or Aramaic, then a translation, and finally, notes. This, as we said, is a great service. It also permits us to see for ourselves what is in the scrolls, and at the same time, to readily assess the charges being made that the scrolls are a danger to the Church. The authors say they have selected the fifty most important of the scrolls. So we can finally see where we are at.
It is clear that the authors intended to do this service, and all are indebted to them for it.
But the second great service is one that they almost certainly did not foresee, and hardly intended. Thanks to their comments on the texts, we can now see precisely what the greatest possible danger to the Church is supposed to be, and can see that it is utterly empty.
The authors — with minor differences between them in position — say that now we can see that Christianity was identical with the Scroll Community, or at least, that it emerged from it, and that the first Christian Church taught a righteousness by works, not by faith. They seem to think little of the Gospels, but do appeal to the Epistle of James, who seems to have been a sort of local administrator of the church in Jerusalem. In contrast, they say St. Paul completely reversed this teaching, giving us what they like to call a "mirror image" of what James taught. Paul denied righteousness by works, and taught instead justification by faith.
Did Paul really clash with James? We will not say this if we believe Vatican II, in Dei verbum ยง11-12, which tells us that the Holy Spirit is the Chief Author of all of Scripture, with the result that one book cannot and does not contradict another.
Besides, it is a matter of faith that St. Paul is hard to understand. The Second Epistle of Peter 3:16, speaking of his Epistles, said that, "there are in them many things hard to understand, which the unlearned and the unstable twist, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction." Eisenman and Wise have not noticed these words, or at least do not believe them. They are really following the original simplistic mistake of Luther, who insisted that Scripture is obvious in meaning — if it were not, he could not have used it against the Church.
We will examine what Paul means presently. First, let us see the evidence offered by Eisenman and Wise. There are three exhibits:
1) "The Messiah of Heaven and Earth", 4Q521. It says that all things will obey God's Messiah. E and W say that the scroll has constant emphasis on the themes of the Righteous, the Pious, the Meek, and the Faithful. They note it cites Isaiah 61:1 (RSV): "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted, he has sent me to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound." Yes, the scroll does repeat this thought, and Jesus himself in Luke 4:17-21 at the synagogue in Nazareth read basically that passage and then added: "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."
Did Jesus then get this from the Qumran scroll? Of course not. Both the scrolls and he took it from Isaiah, which was common property.
So this first scroll proves precisely nothing against Christianity.
2) "The Pierced Messiah text": 4Q285. This text does not use the word Messiah, just nasi, which means Leader. The authors are convinced it refers to the Messiah — which may or may not be the case. But, more importantly, it can be read so that either the community killed the Leader, or the Leader killed someone. The reason for the ambiguity is the Hebrew word hmytw. We give only the consonants, since that is the way Hebrew wrote, without vowels. Today it still does not write the vowels. But what vowels do we fill in? It might be read as hemito or it might be hemitu. The former would be a hiphil third singular of the verb mut, to die, which in the hiphil form would mean to cause to die. So this first way of reading would mean that the Leader killed someone. The second vocalization would be third plural and would mean that they, probably the community, killed the Leader. Not only these two authors, but scholars in general recognize the two possibilities. Neither one would nullify or hurt Christianity of course. It would merely mean that a community killed a Leader, or the Leader killed someone else. No real problem at all either way.
3) Three works-righteousness texts. Yes, these do teach justification by works. The fact that they do is not a problem unless one thinks James and Paul are clashing on the matter.
Is it really true that they clash? Not at all. As we said, the Church teaches that the Chief Author of all of Scripture is the Holy Spirit, who will not contradict himself. So James in saying that faith without works is dead was just focusing on a narrow concept of faith, as merely intellectual belief.
But St. Paul's concept of faith included three things: belief in what God says, confidence in his promises, and, especially, obedience to his commands, as in Romans 1:5, "the obedience of faith." Even a standard Protestant reference work, Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, in Supplement, p. 333, says such is the sense of Paul's use of the word faith — which, importantly, is much different from that of Luther. Luther in a letter of August 1, 1521 to Melanchthon (Luther's Works, American Edition, 48, 281-82) wrote: "Be a sinner, and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly . . . No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day." This is, of course, monstrous! Luther thought if one has faith, he can disobey monstrously. He did not know that faith includes obedience, as we saw, and so cannot justify disobedience.
What did Paul mean by saying we are free from the law? The Judaizers had said in effect: Christ is not enough, we need the law too. Paul reacted: We are free from the law. We recall again that 2 Peter 3:16 warns that Paul is hard to understand. Here is a prime case. We know Paul did not mean to say we can disobey with impunity. For in 1 Cor. 6:9-10 and Gal. 5:5 he gives a list of the chief great sins, and says that those who do such things "will not inherit the kingdom of God." That word inherit is crucial. When we inherit from our parents, we do not say we have earned what we inherit. Not at all, we get it because our parents are good, not because we are good or have earned the inheritance. Our Father in Heaven similarly gives a place in his mansions to us, his children, without our having earned it (Cf. DS 1532, 1582).
But yet, children know if they are bad they can be punished, and if bad enough long enough, can be disinherited. So Paul says in Rom. 6:23: "The wages of sin [what we earn] is death, the free gift of God [what we do not earn] is eternal life." So as one of my students put it, speaking of salvation: You can't earn it, but you can blow it.
And of course Jesus himself not only said he came not to destroy but to fulfill, but also insisted over and over again that God is our Father, with the implication that if we reach heaven, we are inheriting, without merit. Fulfilling the law is the opposite of violating it, which as Paul says, would cause us to lose our inheritance.
What then of the claim of Eisenman and Wise? They sadly bought the foolish mistake of Luther, that Paul teaches we can sin a thousand times a day by murder and fornication and it will not hurt us. Paul said such conduct would make us lose our inheritance. Faith, which justifies includes obedience, as we said.
Lutherans say that if one has faith, these warnings of Paul about losing inheritance do not count. But they overlook the fact that faith includes obedience as we saw: a faith that includes obedience does not and cannot warrant murderous, fornicating disobedience even once, to say nothing of a thousand times a day.
So Paul and James do not really clash, and the central thesis of Eisenman and Wise turns out to be founded on a foolish mistake, accepting the unscholarly basic error of Luther. If we really understand Paul, there is no problem at all.
And so the scrolls are no threat at all.
Reverend William G. Most is Professor of Scripture and Theology at the Notre Dame Catechetical Institute in Arlington, Va. His latest books include Catholic Apologetics Today and Free From All Error. He has written for many journals, including Journal for the Study of the New Testament, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, and others. Fr. Most contributed three articles on Scripture to the New Catholic Encyclopedia. His last article in HPR appeared in May 1994.
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