The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (9 page)

I ended the last chapter with a discussion of the fate of the Jews after the debacle of their uprising in 66–73
ce
, and the flight to Yavneh, a bustling coastal town not far from present-day Tel Aviv. In this chapter we take a huge fifty-mile leap eastward away from the coast to what is (or at any rate used to be) one of the most desolate places on earth, the western shore of the Dead Sea, about eight miles from Jericho, where we find ourselves standing in the middle of a pile of ruins called Khirbet Qumran. In 68
ce
, two years after the start of the revolt against Rome, when a small religious community that had settled there a century or more earlier was forcibly disbanded, some of its members gathered together a large number of manuscripts that had constituted their precious library, scrambled up the nearby cliffs, and placed them in eleven separate caves—hiding them so successfully that they remained undiscovered for the best part of nineteen centuries.

The first find, by a Bedouin shepherd boy searching for a lost goat, was in the spring of 1947. Soon afterward a hunt took off for more caves and more manuscripts. The eleventh and last of the caves, which were numbered in the order that they came to light, was discovered in 1956, but it was not until 1997, a half-century after the first fortuitous find, that all the manuscripts became available to anyone wanting to inspect them. The tangled story of their agonizingly slow publication is well told by the Jewish scholar Geza Vermes, who declared in 1977 that the protracted delay was becoming “the academic scandal
par excellence
of the twentieth century.”
^[1]
The first edition of his own
Dead Sea Scrolls in English
was published in 1962, and eventually, after three revised and enlarged editions, there came at last, in 1997,
The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English
. Not only does Vermes offer “a bird’s-eye view of fifty years of Dead Sea Scrolls research,”
^[2]
but he also gives us a summary account of the Qumran community, its history and its religious life. A useful and easily accessible introduction.

For three very good reasons historians rapidly became convinced that the people who lived at Qumran must have belonged to a Jewish sect called the Essenes, mentioned by the Roman geographer Pliny the Elder and described, though with some disagreements, by the Jewish Alexandrian philosopher Philo and the historian Josephus.
^[3]
The first reason is that the location given by Pliny for the Essene settlement, on the western shore of the Dead Sea, tallies remarkably well with the actual site of the Qumran community. The second reason is the close correspondence between the account given by Josephus of the admission procedures of the sect (
War
2.137-42) and the very precise delineation of the rules for admission in a section of one of the very first documents to be discovered at Qumran, now generally known as the
Community Rule
(1QS 6:14-23). And the third reason is the fact that various social practices outlined in the Greek sources—the sharing of property, the habit of communal living, and the observation of a strict state of ritual purity—are also outlined in the
Community Rule
.

To the best of my knowledge no other book on the Gospel of John discusses the Dead Sea Scrolls as thoroughly as I am attempting to do here. Most such studies (including my own) contain cursory references to lines or passages in the scrolls that appear to shed light on particular themes that are also of importance in the Gospel, themes such as truth and life. Yet without some fuller discussion such as I am giving here, the light that is shed can only be flickering and fitful. I am convinced that a broader comparison will lead to a fuller understanding—not because there is necessarily a direct indebtedness on the part of the evangelist, but because the scrolls gives us a greater insight into certain characteristics of Second Temple Judaism that throw John’s Gospel into sharp relief. I do not discount the possibility of a direct debt (which I have argued for in the past); but I now believe that an overall comparison is more instructive.
^[4]

We must begin by observing that modern scholarship offers two very different pictures of this sect. Since the discoveries at Qumran, which have brought to light an abundance of genuinely firsthand material, most scholars have focused their attention on the Qumran community itself, and I myself will be taking this path here. If we except the elder Pliny’s remark about money, the rapid sketch that he gives in his
Natural History
seems to have been fairly accurate: “sine ulla femina, omni venere abdicata, sine pecunia, socia palmarum” (5.15.73): no women, no sex, no money, with only palm trees for company—that is to say a reclusive, strictly celibate, monkish community of maybe a couple hundred men, hiding themselves away in the desert on the edge of the Dead Sea. (Pliny adds that with no children ever born to them they were fortunate to have a plentiful supply of new recruits among men who were tired of life!)

A few scholars, however, have shown more interest in what Josephus says about the rest, some four thousand celibate men, holding all that they possess in common, scattered around in most if not all of the towns and villages of Judea (see
War
2.124 and
Ant
. 18.20-21). An especially daring suggestion comes from Brian Capper:

In rejecting the theory that Essenism was a sect in the proper sense, and calling it instead a “virtuoso religion,” even a religious order, Capper ignores the evidence, first, of what is known as the
Damascus Document
, which, as I shall show, cannot be regarded as anything other than the manifesto of a new sect, and, second, of the so-called
Halakhic Letter
(4QMMT), which states that “we have separated ourselves from the majority of the people . . . from intermingling and participating with them in these matters.”
^[6]
Nonetheless, the bold suggestion that one form of Essenism was omnipresent in first-century Judea opens up the possibility that if the evangelist was acquainted with that sect he did not necessarily acquire his knowledge at Qumran.

The Essenes are never mentioned in the New Testament, but it was not long before scholars began to look to the Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran and in a few other places for evidence relating to early Christianity. Some of the wilder speculations are sketched out by Vermes, who mentions in particular an early thesis of the Cambridge scholar Jacob Teicher that two of the most prominent personages mentioned in the scrolls, the Teacher of Righteousness and the Wicked Priest, could be identified, respectively, as Jesus and Saint Paul. Weirdest of all is the theory of the Australian Barbara Thiering that the Wicked Priest was Jesus, a married man with four children.
^[7]
Certain features of the scrolls, such as their interest in messianism and their eschatological expectations, are clearly comparable with similar concerns on the part of the New Testament writers. There is no immediately obvious link between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gospel of John, but in fact there is at least one very important feature shared by the teachers of the community and the fourth evangelist (along, of course, with all other Christian believers), namely,
a readiness to accept further divine revelations.
I will start, however, with a rough description of the Qumran library and a brief history of the Essenes. I have to say something about the library because I shall be drawing very extensively in the remainder of this book upon a number of different documents found in it. About the history of the sect I can afford to say less, because it does not directly affect my argument.

The library is made up of around nine hundred documents, representing several different genres of writing, all of which, in one way or another, are religiously inspired. Some of these were books of the Bible; others were works composed by members of the community. These include rules for living, hymns, halakhic compositions (that is to say, particular legal rulings), and commentaries on Scripture. Still others (such as the book of
Jubilees
), though not composed at Qumran, were clearly highly prized there. If the whole collection (which contains thousands of fragments, some large, but most quite tiny) had been discovered much earlier, not by an Arab but by an orthodox Jew, it would have been either ignored or destroyed. Although we have quite a lot of writings from the Second Temple period besides the Bible, almost all of them have come down to us through Christian channels. Virtually the only exceptions are the books that came to be reckoned as canonical by the scribes. Even thoroughly Jewish works listed under the heading Apocrypha—writings such as the books of Maccabees and the Wisdom of Solomon—would have been lost to us had they not received Christian recognition. The same is true of the works of great Jewish writers like Philo of Alexandria and the historian Flavius Josephus, and also—for the purposes of this book most significant of all—large-scale apocalypses such as
1
and
2 Enoch, Syriac Baruch,
and
4 Ezra
. All but one of these apocalypses were composed after the Qumran community had ceased to exist. I will be reflecting later on the significance of the single exception,
1 Enoch.

None of the writings found at Qumran is historical in the strict sense of the word. Yet there is one text, known as the
Damascus Document
, that provides us with some important information about the sect’s essential nature. It was known to scholars well before the discoveries at Qumran, because significant sections of it had been found decades earlier in Cairo and published by Solomon Schechter in 1910 as
Fragments of a Zadokite Work
. The subsequent discovery at Qumran of fragments of the same document established a direct link between the Qumran community and a sectarian group known to have been already in existence. The Qumran community represents
one branch
of the sect of the Essenes, which according to Josephus, as we have seen, had members in every town in the region. The
Damascus Document
shows that the rules and regulations at Qumran were much the same as those of the Essenes as a whole, with the important exception that the
Document
assumes the presence of women throughout.

Before offering an exegesis of part of this document, I want to say a little about Second Temple Judaism. It has been suggested that the diverse cultural phenomena of Second Temple Judaism may be treated “as a protracted discussion of the question, ‘What is it that really constitutes Israel?’ ”
^[8]
The first task of the Jews on returning from their long exile in Babylon was to rebuild the temple, which immediately became the center of the life of the nation and gave an immediate boost to the social significance both of the priests and of the Torah for which they were responsible. The Torah (the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) directly concerns Israel’s origins and juridical organization, and so had acquired a uniquely authoritative status by providing a necessary ideological basis for the survival of Israel as a people both during the exile and later, under the Persian Empire. In an important essay entitled, significantly, “Interpretation and the Tendency to Sectarianism,” Joseph Blenkinsopp explains how “the interpretation or reinterpretation of tradition expressed in texts determined the self-understanding and self-definition of Judaism in Palestine”; or, put in another way, “how interpretation served as a factor in shaping alternative versions of an ideal envisioned in or presupposed by the texts [that were being interpreted].”
^[9]
Starting with the Second Temple, his essay does not go beyond the Hasmonean monarchy toward the end of the second century
bce
(by which time both Pharisees and Essenes had already emerged as recognizable groups); but Blenkinsopp makes clear that he thinks the same is true for the later period that saw the emergence of the early Christians. In what follows, focusing on the Essenes, I want to argue for a modified version of Blenkinsopp’s thesis: namely, that one crucial factor in the self-understanding of this sect was not just an alternative interpretation of the law but an alternative theory of the very principles of interpretation.

No one has yet given a totally convincing literary analysis of the extraordinary work that we call the
Damascus Document
.
^[10]
Although it is now almost universally acknowledged to have been the foundation document of the sect of the Essenes, I doubt if its author (or authors, for there may have been more than one) thought of it in this way: it was clearly intended as a manifesto, a written declaration of the beliefs and principles of a breakaway sect or party. (In this respect it resembles the Christian Gospels, which, though less obviously so, are also manifestos.) The
Damascus Document
is directed both to believers and to unbelievers, to those already convinced and to those not yet convinced of the truth it proclaims,
which is a new revelation
.

The
Document
opens (1:1) with a formula (“And now listen, all who know righteousness, and understand the actions of God”) that recurs twice, with slight variations, in the first two columns: “And now listen, all who enter the covenant, and I will open your ears to the paths of the wicked” (2:1); “And now, O sons, listen to me and I will open your eyes so that you can see and understand the actions of God” (2:14). His addressees, envisaged as listening to what they are in fact reading, are first invited to “understand the actions of God”; then, in the second paragraph, the writer promises to open their ears, and finally, in the third paragraph, their eyes. Without his assistance, we are entitled to infer, the people he is addressing would be both blind and deaf.