Recalls Abegg: "I was hoping all the time Wacholder was doing these negotiations
that it wasn't just a word list, that it was a key word in context, like
Strong's concordance. Actually, I found it was better than that, because
if you looked up the last word in an entry or in a verse, Strong's wouldn't
give you the next word in the next verse; but this concordance did."
Because the cards were keyed to each other, Abegg could type one card after
the other into his word processor until he had reconstructed whole texts—texts
that had never before been published. When in 1991 the editor of Biblical
Archaeology Review, Hershel Shanks, who since the mideighties had been
calling for the "release" of the scrolls, caught wind of Abegg's reconstructed
texts, he encouraged Abegg to let him publish them.
Abegg found himself facing an ethical dilemma. On the one hand, there was
the academic protocol against publishing other people's work—coding the
3x5 cards represented hundreds of days of piecing the texts together. On
the other hand, says Abegg, "we saw that this material had been done in the
late fifties and could have been published then. They had held on to this
material, were telling everyone it couldn't be published because there had
been no transcriptions. And then we found out that, indeed, there had been
transcriptions back in the fifties—they were pulling the wool over our eyes
all these years."
The texts went to print in September 1991. The Huntington Library in California
quickly followed by making public actual photos of the manuscripts. And finally,
even the Israel Antiquities Authority, which controlled the scrolls, ruled
that it now supported open access to copies of the scrolls. From the New
York Times to Newsweek, Wacholder and Abegg were declared the
liberators of the scrolls. "Andy Warhol talks about your 15 minutes of fame,"
says Abegg, whose steady gaze and conventional haircut make the 47-year-old
father seem anything but a publicity-seeking renegade. "I had my 15 minutes
many times over that year."
The limelight has faded in the six years since. Abegg is now busy doing what
he loves best: teaching and working on the scroll texts themselves. And even
Tov, whom Abegg always deeply admired, has apparently welcomed back his prodigal
son: this past summer Abegg was invited to become one of Tov's official scroll
editors.
OUR OLD TESTAMENT TO THE "T"—ALMOST
( … just as) it is written in the b(ook) of Isaiah the prophet …
—4Q265, fragment 2
Abegg and Flint, who together are codirectors of the Dead Sea Scrolls Institute,
are two of nearly a dozen evangelical scholars who have been added to the
international team of scroll editors in the last decade. Not surprisingly,
says Flint, their presence is influencing the scholarly discussion surrounding
the scrolls. "Just as Jews have helped focus on things like ritual purity,
food laws, and things of interest to Jews, I think evangelicals have helped
focus the interest on the reliability of the Bible, how we got our Bible,
and also on the relation between Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls," he says.
Flint, 46, believes that evangelicals have arrived late on the scene in exploring
the significance of the scrolls for Christian faith. So when Trinity Western—a
school of the Evangelical Free Church begun in 1962—called in 1995, asking
him to help begin the institute in conjunction with the school's graduate
program in biblical studies, he was more than ready. And more than qualified.
Flint is no journalist's dream to interview—he is painstakingly methodical
(try getting him to answer even one question out of the logical order of
the discussion), contentedly introverted, and exasperatingly careful. But
it is exactly those qualities that make him a top candidate for editing something
so intricate as the scrolls.
Raised in a Christian family in South Africa, he eventually came to the United
States with the specific goal of studying with the best of the Dead Sea Scrolls
scholars. His Ph.D. adviser at the University of Notre Dame was Eugene Ulrich,
chief editor of the Dead Sea Scrolls for North America. After serving for
a number of years as Ulrich's research assistant, Flint was asked to join
the official team of scroll editors in 1991. He brought with him his knowledge
of 11 modern and ancient languages.
Like the Jesus Seminar, which over the years has publicized its work on the
Gospels, Flint and his colleagues seek to educate both specialists and laypeople
about their work. They do this by speaking in churches, participating in
learned societies such as the Society of Biblical Literature, presenting
papers at archaeological and ancient-languages seminars, and conducting an
annual Dead Sea Scrolls symposium at Trinity Western. But in marked contrast
to the shock tactics of their ideological counterpart, says Flint, the institute
seeks to instill in its audiences a reasoned confidence in the Scriptures.
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At one level, the Dead Sea Scrolls provide a wonderfully affirming resource
for this job. For years, biblical conservatives have pointed happily to the
Great Isaiah Scroll, which was among the original seven scrolls found in
the first cave in 1947. With all 66 chapters completely preserved, this version
of Isaiah—though copied down around 100 B.C.—matches the A.D. 1000
Masoretic Text upon which all modern Old Testament translations are based 99
percent of the time. Nearly the same level of accuracy is found in the other
biblical manuscripts found at Qumran. "This confirms to us that our Hebrew Bible
was wonderfully preserved," Flint says.
When it comes to the 1 percent that does differ, Flint gives the discrepancies
a positive, pastoral take. "I'm happy to say in a rather dramatic fashion
that the scrolls often sort out problems that we've known about for ages.
They give us in black and white a better reading of the biblical text."
One example is an ambiguous Hebrew phrase in Psalm 22:16. Translators have
often rendered it "They have pierced my hands and feet," following
the reading of the Septuagint (a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures,
the earliest complete manuscripts coming from the late third century
A.D.). The more direct translation from the
Hebrew Masoretic Text, however, is "Like a lion are my hands and feet."
But in a technical monograph, just off the press in July, titled The Dead
Sea Psalms Scrolls (Brill), Flint shows that the "pierced" reading is
indeed the preferred option in the Hebrew Dead Sea Psalms—dispelling charges
that the phrase was a later Christian messianic misrendering. Other interesting
"textual variants" include the following:
—Goliath's height in a Hebrew manuscript of Samuel dated to the mid-third
century B.C. (4QSam-b) is given as six foot,
nine inches, not nine foot, nine inches, as found in the Masoretic Text (4QSam-b
designates the text as being the second—or b—Samuel manuscript found
in Cave 4 at Qumran).
—The number of Jacob's descendants who traveled with him to Egypt
is 70 in the Masoretic Text, but 75 in 4QExod-a. This corresponds to the
number Stephen uses in his sermon in Acts 7:14 as well as to the Septuagint,
which Stephen may have been using.
—A new text found in 4QSam-a contains a paragraph at the end of 1
Samuel 10 that explains that "Nahash, king of the Ammonites, had been grievously
oppressing the Gadites and the Reubenites. He would gouge out the right eye
of each of them and would not grant Israel a deliverer." These words, missing
from our Bibles, provide the context for Nahash's threats to gouge out the
right eyes of the Israelites in chapter 11. The New Revised Standard Version
is the first translation to incorporate this new paragraph.
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While leapfrogging back to a cache of manuscripts a millennium older than
our previous Old Testament texts has affirmed "our" Scriptures, it also lands
us in a murky pond called canon formation. It is a subject, says Flint, that
some of his lay listeners find unsettling.
A case in point is a slide Flint shows of himself in which he is scrutinizing
the original manuscript of 4QPs-a in the editors' workroom at the Rockefeller
Museum in Jerusalem. "I'm holding in my hands the oldest copy of the Book
of Psalms in the entire world," he says with obvious emotion. "It's dated
to about 150 B.C., which is over 1,100 years
older than the Book of Psalms we use in all our seminaries. It is a very
humbling experience as a biblical scholar."
The consensus from almost all
quarters of Bible scholarship
is that the Dead Sea Scrolls
root the Gospels inextricably
within the Jewish tradition.
This particular set of psalms, however, contains only 89 selections—or the
first three books of the five books found in our Masoretic-based Psalters.
Other Qumran Psalters, by contrast, include Psalm 151, which appears in the
Septuagint but not in the Masoretic Text or our modern Bibles (which contain
only 150 psalms). In addition, some of the scrolls contain psalms not previously
known. The different collections and varying orders in which the psalms are
arranged, scholars agree, point to an unsettled canon of sacred Scripture
in use by the Qumran sect.
For Bible historians, this evidence of canon formation at the time is nothing
new—the closure of the Jewish Scriptures is thought to have occurred at
the end of the first century A.D. What is new
are the clues the Qumran scrolls give about varying textual traditions behind
the Jewish Scriptures. The clearest and most dramatic example of this can
be seen in the Qumran copies of Jeremiah.
Some of these Jeremiahs are direct ancestors of the
A.D. 1000 Masoretic Text. The much-touted 99
percent correspondence of the Qumran Scripture texts applies when these
proto-Masoretic versions are compared with their later medieval Masoretic
descendant. But critics soon found that other of the Jeremiah manuscripts
represented a distinct Hebrew text tradition—one that appeared to lie behind
the Greek translation of the Septuagint. As in the Septuagint, this separate
Hebrew Jeremiah presents material in a different order and is about an eighth
shorter than the proto-Masoretic manuscripts. Which of these equally ancient
but independent Hebrew versions of Jeremiah is closer to what Jeremiah and
his scribe actually penned remains an open question.
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"What the scrolls are telling us," says Flint the scholar, "is that when
the canon was incomplete, there were different versions of certain books:
the Septuagints chose one version, and the Masoretics chose the other."
But Flint the evangelical is careful to add: "While we know that at the time
of Jesus there were different canons of the Old Testament because the canonical
process was not yet complete, the glorious truth is that God has invited
humans to be partners in the putting together of Scripture. I think the
implications are that you cannot have Scripture without the community of
faith. It's not just a private revelation. God gives us Scripture, but then
the community of faith, by God's guidance, has to choose what's in and what's
out."
DEMYTHOLOGIZING THE JESUS SEMINAR
If a prophet or interpreter of dreams arises among you and … says, "Let us go and serve other gods" … you shall purge the evil one from your midst.
—Temple Scroll, column 54
In the 1940s, just prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Edgar
Goodspeed wrote his scholarly opinion that "the Gospel is Christianity's
contribution to literature. It is the most potent type of religious literature
ever devised. To credit such a creation to the most barren age of a never
very productive tongue like Aramaic would seem the height of improbability.
For in the days of Jesus the Jews of Palestine were not engaged in writing
books. It is not too much to say that a Galilean or Jerusalem Jew of the
time of Christ would regard writing a book in his native tongue with positive
horror."
That's the kind of quote that gets Craig Evans going. Professor of Biblical
Studies at Trinity Western since the early eighties, he was the driving
inspiration behind starting Trinity's Dead Sea Scrolls Institute. Today he
serves as the institute's spokesman on the relationship of the scrolls to
Jesus and the New Testament. A strapping six-foot-two with a bushy mustache
and a charismatic personality, Evans, 45, is the most articulate of the Trinity
trio. He is also the most prone to hyperbole.
"One after the other, certain nonevangelical so-called critical hypotheses
are being blown out of the water by tidbits of information that the scrolls
provide," he says, showing a text of 4Q246. Its title—"The Aramaic Son of
God Text"—is one that would have made Goodspeed blush. Aramaic, it turns
out, is the language found in one of every six nonbiblical Qumran scrolls.