The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

8. The Dilemma for Christian Orthodoxy

There is virtually unanimous agreement among all the concerned parties — apart, of course, from the international team themselves and the Ecole Biblique — that the history of Dead Sea Scroll scholarship does constitute a ‘scandal’. And there would seem to be little doubt that something irregular — licit, perhaps, but without moral or academic sanction — lurks behind the delays, the procrastinations, the equivocation, the restrictions on material. To some extent, of course, this irregularity may indeed stem simply from venal motives — from academic jealousy and rivalry, and from the protection of vested interests. Reputations do, after all, stand to be made or broken, and there is no higher currency in the academic world than reputation. The stakes, therefore, at least for those ‘on the inside’, are high.

They would be high, however, in any sphere where a lack of reliable first-hand testimony had to be redressed by historical and archaeological research. They would be high if, for example, a corpus of documents pertaining to Arthurian Britain were suddenly to come to light. But would there be the same suppression of material as there is in connection with the Dead Sea Scrolls? And would one find, looming as a supreme arbiter in the background, the shadowy presence of an ecclesiastical institution such as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith? The Nag Hammadi Scrolls are a case in point. Certainly, they afforded ample opportunity for venal motives to come into play. Such motives, to one or another degree, may indeed have done so. But the Church had no opportunity to establish control over the texts found at Nag Hammadi. And, venal motives notwithstanding, the entire corpus of Nag Hammadi material found its way quickly into print and the public domain.

The Church’s high-level involvement in Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship must inevitably foster a grave element of suspicion. Can one ignore the possibility of a causal connection between that involvement and the shambles that Qumran research has become? One is compelled to ask (as, indeed, many informed ‘outsiders’ have) whether some other vested interest may be at stake, a vested interest larger than the reputations of individual scholars — the vested interest of Christianity as a whole, for example, and of Christian doctrine, at least as propounded by the Church and its traditions. Ever since the Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered, one single, all-pervasive question has haunted the imagination, generating excitement, anxiety and, perhaps, dread. Might these texts, issuing from so close to ‘the source’, and (unlike the New Testament) never having been edited or tampered with, shed some significant new light on the origins of Christianity, on the so-called ‘early Church’ in Jerusalem and perhaps on Jesus himself? Might they contain something compromising, something that challenges, possibly even refutes, established traditions?

Certainly official interpretation ensured that they did not. There is, of course, nothing to suggest any deliberate or systematic falsification of evidence on the part of the international team. But for Father de Vaux, his most intensely personal convictions were deeply engaged and were bound to have exerted some influence. The key factor in determining the significance of the scrolls, and their relation, or lack of it, to Christianity, consisted, of course, in their dating. Were they pre- or post-Christian? How closely did they coincide with Jesus’ activities, around ad 30? With the travels and letters of Paul, roughly between AD 40 and 65? With the composition of the Gospels, between ad 70 and 95? Whatever the date ascribed to them, they might be a source of possible embarrassment to Christendom, but the degree of embarrassment would be variable. If, for example, the scrolls could be dated from well before the Christian era, they might threaten to compromise Jesus’ originality and uniqueness — might show some of his words and concepts to have been not wholly his own, but to have derived from a current of thought, teaching and tradition already established and ‘in the air’. If the scrolls dated from Jesus’ lifetime, however, or from shortly thereafter, they might prove more embarrassing still. They might be used to argue that the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ who figures in them was Jesus himself, and that Jesus was not therefore perceived as divine by his contemporaries. Moreover, the scrolls contained or implied certain premises inimical to subsequent images of ‘early Christianity’. There were, for example, statements of a militant messianic nationalism associated previously only with the Zealots — when Jesus was supposed to be non-political, rendering unto Caesar what was Caesar’s. It might even emerge that Jesus had never dreamed of founding a new religion or of contravening Judaic law.

The evidence can be interpreted in a number of plausible ways, some of which are less compromising to Christendom than others. It is hardly surprising, in the circumstances, that de Vaux should have inclined towards and promulgated the less compromising interpretations. Thus, while it was never stated explicitly, a necessity prevailed to read or interpret the evidence in accordance with certain governing principles. So far as possible, for example, the scrolls and their authors had to be kept as dissociated as possible from ‘early Christianity’ — as depicted in the New Testament — and from the mainstream of 1st-century Judaism, whence ‘early Christianity’ sprang. It was in adherence to such tenets that the orthodoxy of interpretation established itself and a scholarly consensus originated.

Thus, the conclusions to which Father de Vaux’s team came in their interpretation of the scrolls conformed to certain general tenets, the more important of which can be summarised as follows:

1. The Qumran texts were seen as dating from long prior to the Christian era.

2. The scrolls were regarded as the work of a single reclusive community, an unorthodox ‘sect’ on the periphery of Judaism, divorced from the epoch’s main currents of social, political and religious thought. In particular, they were divorced from militant revolutionary and messianic nationalism, as exemplified by the defenders of Masada.

3. The Qumran community must have been destroyed during the general uprising in Judaea in ad 66-73, leaving all their documents behind, hidden for safety in nearby caves.

4. The beliefs of the Qumran community were presented as entirely different from Christianity; and the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’, because he was not portrayed as divine, could not be equated with Jesus.

5. Because John the Baptist was altogether too close to the teachings of the Qumran community, it was argued that he wasn’t really ‘Christian’ in any true sense of the word, ‘merely’ a precursor.

There are, however, numerous points at which the Qumran texts, and the community from which they issued, paralleled early Christian texts and the so-called ‘early Church’. A number of such parallels are immediately apparent.

First, a similar ritual to that of baptism, one of the central sacraments of Christianity, obtained for the Qumran community. According to the Dead Sea text known as the ‘Community Rule’, the new adherent ‘shall be cleansed from all his sins by the spirit of holiness uniting him to its truth… And when his flesh is sprinkled with purifying water and sanctified by cleansing water, it shall be made clean by the humble submission of his soul to all the precepts of God.’¹

Secondly, in the Acts of the Apostles, the members of the ‘early Church’ are said to hold all things in common: ‘The faithful all lived together and owned everything in common; they sold their goods and possessions and shared out the proceeds among themselves according to what each one needed. They went as a body to the Temple every day…’² The very first statute of the ‘Community Rule’ for Qumran states that ‘All… shall bring all their knowledge, powers and possessions into the Community…’³ According to another statute, ‘They shall eat in common and pray in common…’⁴ And another declares of the new adherent that ‘his property shall be merged and he shall offer his counsel and judgment to the Community’.⁵

Acts 5:1-11 recounts the story of one Ananias and his wife, who hold back some of the assets they are supposed to have donated to the ‘early Church’ in Jerusalem. Both are struck dead by a vindictive divine power. In Qumran, the penalty for such a transgression was rather less severe, consisting, according to the ‘Community Rule’, of six months’ penance.

Thirdly, according to Acts, the leadership of the ‘early Church’ in Jerusalem consists of the twelve Apostles. Among these, according to Galatians, three — James (’the Lord’s Brother’), John and Peter — exercise a particular authority. According to the ‘Community Rule’, Qumran was governed by a ‘Council’ composed of twelve individuals. Three ‘priests’ are also stressed, though the text does not clarify whether these three are included in the twelve of the ‘Council’ or separate from them.⁶

Fourthly, and most important of all, both the Qumran community and the ‘early Church’ were specifically messianic in orientation, dominated by the imminent advent of at least one new ‘Messiah’. Both postulated a vivid and charismatic central figure, whose personality galvanised them and whose teachings formed the foundation of their beliefs. In the ‘early Church’, this figure was, of course, Jesus. In the Qumran texts, the figure is known as the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’. At times, in their portrayal of the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’, the Qumran texts might almost seem to be referring to Jesus; indeed, several scholars suggested as much. Granted, the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ is not depicted as divine; but neither, until some time after his death, was Jesus.

If the Qumran texts and those of the ‘early Church’ have certain ideas, concepts or principles in common, they are also strikingly similar in imagery and phraseology. ‘Blessed are the meek’, Jesus says, for example, in perhaps the most famous line of the Sermon on the Mount, ‘for they shall inherit the earth’ (Matt. 5:5). This assertion derives from Psalm 37:11: ‘But the meek shall possess the land, and delight themselves in abundant prosperity.’ The same psalm was of particular interest to the Qumran community. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, there is a commentary on its meaning: ‘Interpreted, this concerns the congregation of the Poor…’⁷ The ‘Congregation of the Poor’ (or the ‘meek’) was one of the names by which the Qumran community referred to themselves. Nor is this the only such parallel: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’, preaches Jesus (Matt. 5:3); the ‘War Scroll’ from Cave 1 states: ‘Among the poor in spirit there is a power… ‘⁸ Indeed, the whole of the Gospel of Matthew, and especially Chapters 10 and 18, contains metaphors and terminology at times almost interchangeable with those of the ‘Community Rule’. In Matthew 5:48, for instance, Jesus stresses the concept of perfection: ‘You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect.’ The ‘Community Rule’ speaks of those ‘who walk in the way of perfection as commanded by God’.⁹ There will be, the text affirms, ‘no pity on all who depart from the way… no comfort… until their way becomes perfect’.¹⁰ In Matthew 21:42, Jesus invokes Isaiah 28:16 and echoes Psalm 118:22: ‘Have you never read in the scriptures: It was the stone rejected by the builders that became the keystone.’ The ‘Community Rule’ invokes the same reference, stating that ‘the Council of the Community… shall be that tried wall, that precious corner-stone’.¹¹

If the Qumran scrolls and the Gospels echo each other, such echoes are even more apparent between the scrolls and the Pauline texts — the Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s letters. The concept of ‘sainthood’, for example, and, indeed, the very word ‘saint’, are common enough in later Christianity, but striking in the context of the Dead Sea Scrolls. According to the opening line of the ‘Community Rule’, however, ‘The Master shall teach the saints to live according to the Book of the Community Rule…’¹² Paul, in his letter to the Romans (15:25-7), uses the same terminology of the ‘early Church’: ‘I must take a present of money to the saints in Jerusalem.’

Indeed, Paul is particularly lavish in his use of Qumran terms and images. One of the Qumran texts, for example, speaks of ‘all those who observe the Law in the House of Judah, whom God will deliver… because of their suffering and because of their faith in the Teacher of Righteousness’.¹³ Paul, of course, ascribes a similar redemptive power to faith in Jesus. Deliverance, he says in his epistle to the Romans (3:21-3), ‘comes through faith to everyone… who believes in Jesus Christ’. To the Galatians (2:16-17), he declares that ‘what makes a man righteous is not obedience to the Law, but faith in Jesus Christ’. It is clear that Paul is familiar with the metaphors, the figures of speech, the turns of phrase, the rhetoric used by the Qumran community in their interpretation of Old Testament texts. As we shall see, however, he presses this familiarity to the service of a very different purpose.

In the above quote from his letter to the Galatians, Paul ascribes no inordinate significance to the Law. In the Qumran texts, however, the Law is of paramount importance. The ‘Community Rule’ begins: ‘The Master shall teach the saints to live according to the Book of the Community Rule, that they may seek God… and do what is good and right before Him, as He commanded by the hand of Moses and all His servants the Prophets…’¹⁴ Later, the ‘Community Rule’ states that anyone who ‘transgresses one word of the Law of Moses, on any point whatever, shall be expelled’¹⁵ and that the Law will endure ‘for as long as the domain of Satan endures’.¹⁶ In his rigorous adherence to the Law, Jesus, strikingly enough, is much closer to the Qumran texts than he is to Paul. In the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:17-19), Jesus makes his position unequivocally clear — a position that Paul was subsequently to betray:

If Jesus’ adherence to the Law concurs with that of the Qumran community, so, too, does his timing of the Last Supper. For centuries, biblical commentators have been confused by apparently conflicting accounts in the Gospels. In Matthew (26:17-19), the Last Supper is depicted as a Passover meal, and Jesus is crucified the next day. In the Fourth Gospel (13:1 and 18:28), however, it is said to occur before the Passover. Some scholars have sought to reconcile the contradiction by acknowledging the Last Supper as indeed a Passover feast, but a Passover feast conducted in accordance with a different calendar. The Qumran community used precisely such a calendar — a solar calendar, in contrast to the lunar calendar used by the priesthood of the Temple.¹⁷ In each calendar, the Passover fell on a different date; and Jesus, it is clear, was using the same calendar as that of the Qumran community.

Certainly the Qumran community observed a feast which sounds very similar in its ritual characteristics to the Last Supper as it is described in the Gospels. The ‘Community Rule’ states that ‘when the table has been prepared… the Priest shall be the first to stretch out his hand to bless the first-fruits of the bread and new wine’.¹⁸ And another Qumran text, the ‘Messianic Rule’, adds: ‘they shall gather for the common table, to eat and to drink new wine… let no man extend his hand over the first fruits of bread and wine before the Priest… thereafter, the Messiah of Israel shall extend his hand over the bread’.¹⁹

This text was sufficient to convince even Rome. According to Cardinal Jean Danielou, writing with a ‘Nihil Obstat’ from the Vatican: ‘Christ must have celebrated the last supper on the eve of Easter according to the Essenian calendar.’²⁰

One can only imagine the reaction of Father de Vaux and his team on first discovering the seemingly extraordinary parallels between the Qumran texts and what was known of ‘early Christianity’. It had hitherto been believed that Jesus’ teachings were unique — that he admittedly drew on Old Testament sources, but wove his references into a message, a gospel, a statement of’good news’ which had never been enunciated in the world before. Now, however, echoes of that message, and perhaps even of Jesus’ drama itself, had come to light among a collection of ancient parchments preserved in the Judaean desert.

To an agnostic historian, or even to an undogmatic Christian, such a discovery would have been exciting indeed. It probably would have been with a certain sacred awe that one handled documents actually dating from the days when Jesus and his followers walked the sands of ancient Palestine, trudging between Galilee and Judaea. One would undoubtedly, and with something of a frisson, have felt closer to Jesus himself. The sketchy details of Jesus’ drama and milieu would have broken free from the print to which they had been confined for twenty centuries — would have assumed density, texture, solidity. The Dead Sea Scrolls were not like a modern book expounding a controversial thesis; they would comprise first-hand evidence, buttressed by the sturdy struts of 20th-century science and scholarship. Even for a non-believer, however, some question of moral responsibility would have arisen. Whatever his own scepticism, could he, casually and at a single stroke, undermine the faith to which millions clung for solace and consolation? For de Vaux and his colleagues, working as representatives of the Roman Catholic Church, it must have seemed as though they were handling the spiritual and religious equivalent of dynamite — something that might just conceivably demolish the entire edifice of Christian teaching and belief.

9. The Scrolls

10. Science in the Service of Faith

According to the consensus of the international team, the historical events reflected in all the relevant Dead Sea Scrolls occurred in Maccabean times — between the mid-2nd and mid-1 st centuries bc. The ‘Wicked Priest’, who pursues, persecutes and perhaps kills the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’, is generally identified by them as Jonathan Maccabaeus, or perhaps his brother Simon, both of whom enjoyed positions of prominence during that epoch; and the invasion of a foreign army is taken to be that launched by the Romans under Pompey in 63 bc.¹ The historical backdrop of the scrolls is thus set safely back in pre-Christian times, where it becomes disarmed of any possible challenge to New Testament teaching and tradition.

But while some of the Dead Sea Scrolls undoubtedly do refer to pre-Christian times, it is a grievous mistake — for some, perhaps, deliberate obfuscation — to conclude that all of them do so. Pompey, who invaded the Holy Land in 63 bc, was, of course, a contemporary of Julius Caesar. At the time of Pompey and Caesar, Rome was still a republic, becoming an empire only in 27 bc, under Caesar’s adoptive son, Octavian, who took the imperial title of Augustus. If the Roman invasion referred to in the scrolls was that of Pompey, it would have involved the armies of republican Rome. Yet the ‘War Rule’ speaks of a ‘king’ or ‘monarch’ of the invaders. And the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’ is even more explicit in its reference to victorious invaders sacrificing to their standards. It would therefore seem clear that the invasion in question was that of imperial Rome — the invasion provoked by the revolt of ad 66.

Professor Godfrey Driver of Oxford found numerous textual references within the scrolls that provide clues to their dating. Focusing in particular on the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’, he concluded that the invaders could only be ‘the Roman legions at the time of the revolt in ad 66’. This conclusion, he added, ‘is put beyond doubt by the reference to their sacrificing to their military standards’.² His statements, however, elicited a vicious attack from Father de Vaux, who recognised that they led inexorably to the conclusion that ‘the historical background of the scrolls therefore is the war against Rome’.³ This, of course, de Vaux could not possibly accept. At the same time, however, he could not refute such precise evidence. In consequence, he contrived to dismiss the evidence and attack only Driver’s general thesis: ‘Driver has started from the pre-conceived idea that all scrolls were post-Christian, and that this idea was based on the fallacious witness of orthography, language and vocabulary.’⁴ It was, he declared, for professional historians ‘to decide whether [Driver’s] motley history… has sufficient foundation in the texts’.⁵ It is interesting that de Vaux, who taught biblical history at the Ecole Biblique, should suddenly (at least when he had to answer Professor Driver) don a cloak of false modesty and shrink from considering himself an historian, taking refuge instead behind the supposed bulwarks of archaeology and palaeography.⁶ In fact, archaeological data reinforce the indications of chronology provided by the internal data of the scrolls themselves. External evidence concurs with internal evidence — evidence of which the consensus would seem to remain oblivious. At times, this has led to an embarrassing faux pas.

De Vaux, it will be remembered, embarked on a preliminary excavation of the Qumran ruins in 1951. His findings were sufficiently consequential to justify a more ambitious enterprise. A characteristic lassitude set in, however, and no full-scale excavation was undertaken until 1953. Annual excavations then continued until 1956; and in 1958, an associated site at Ein Feshka, less than a mile to the south, was also excavated. In his eagerness to distance the Qumran community from any connection with early Christianity, de Vaux rushed his conclusions about dating into print. In some instances, he did not even wait for archaeological evidence to support him. As early as 1954, the Jesuit professor Robert North noted no fewer than four cases in which de Vaux had been forced to retract on his dating. North also found it distressing that, even on so crucial a matter, no specialists ‘independently of de Vaux’s influence’ were asked to contribute their conclusions.⁷ But it was not de Vaux’s style to invite opinions that might conflict with his own and shed a more controversial light on the material. Nor was he eager to announce his errors when they occurred. Although quick to publish and publicise conclusions that confirmed his thesis, he was markedly more dilatory in retracting them when they proved erroneous.

One important element for de Vaux was a thick layer of ash found to be blanketing the surroundings of the ruins. This layer of ash patently attested to a fire of some sort, which had obviously caused considerable destruction. Indeed, it had led to Qumran’s being partially, if not wholly, abandoned for some years. A study of the coins found at the site revealed that the fire had occurred at some time towards the beginning of the reign of Herod the Great, who occupied the throne from 37 bc until 4 BC. The same data indicated that rebuilding had commenced under the regime of Herod’s son, Archelaus, who ruled (not as king, but as ethnarch) from 4 BC until AD 6.

According to de Vaux’s thesis, the Qumran community consisted of supposedly placid, peace-loving and ascetic ‘Essenes’, on good terms with Herod as with everyone else. If this were the case, the fire which destroyed the community should have resulted not from any deliberate human intention — from an act of war, for example — but from an accident, or a natural disaster. Fortunately for de Vaux, a large crack was found running through a cistern. Although independent researchers found no indication that the crack extended any further, de Vaux claimed to have traced it through the whole of the ruins, the whole of the Qumran community.⁸ Even if it did, a number of experts concluded, it could probably be ascribed to erosion.⁹ For de Vaux, however, the crack, such as it was, seemed the result of one of the many earthquakes the region has suffered over the centuries. Instead of trying to identify the cause of the crack, in other words, de Vaux went rummaging for an earthquake that might have been responsible. As it happened, there was a more or less convenient earthquake on record. Josephus speaks of one that occurred towards the beginning of Herod’s reign, in 31 Be. This, de Vaux concluded, had caused the fire which led to the abandoning of the community. He did not bother to explain why rebuilding did not commence for a quarter of a century before, suddenly, proceeding with noticeable rapidity.

Robert Eisenman points to the strikingly precise timing of the delay in rebuilding. It coincides perfectly with Herod’s reign. No sooner had he died than reconstruction promptly began — and part of this reconstruction consisted of strengthening the defensive towers, as well as creating a rampart. It would thus seem clear, for some reason which de Vaux chose to ignore, that no one dared to rebuild Qumran while Herod remained on the throne. But why should that be the case if the community were on as congenial a footing with Herod as de Vaux maintained, and if the destruction of the community resulted from an earthquake? It would appear much more likely that the community was destroyed deliberately, on Herod’s orders, and that no reconstruction could begin until after his death. But why should Herod order the destruction of a community so placid, so universally loved, so divorced from political activity?

Whether wilfully or through negligence, de Vaux remained oblivious of such questions. Eventually, however, the logic he mustered to support his hypothetical earthquake became too strained even for the closest of his supporters, the then Father Milik. In 1957, Milik wrote of the fire and the alleged earthquake that:

Whether the fire was caused by earthquake or by deliberate human agency cannot be definitively established. Certainly the evidence offers less support to de Vaux than it does to Milik and Eisenman, who, on this unique occasion, are in accord. Nevertheless, many adherents of the consensus still invoke the earthquake, and it still figures with metronomic regularity in their texts.

In another instance, however, de Vaux’s misinterpretation of the evidence — or, to put the matter charitably, wishful thinking — was much more conclusively exposed. Very early in his excavations, he found a heavily oxidised coin on which, he said, he ‘believed’ he could discern the insignia of the Roman 10th Legion.¹¹ Purporting to cite Josephus, he also said that the 10th Legion had conquered Jericho, eight miles away, in June of ad 68. Everything seemed to fit nicely. On the basis of his coin, de Vaux argued that Qumran must have been destroyed by the 10th Legion in ad 68. ‘No manuscript of the caves’, he later declared, waxing dogmatic on the basis of questionable data, ‘can be later than June, ad 68.’¹²

De Vaux had first described his discovery of the coin in 1954, in Revue biblique. He repeated his account five years later, in 1959, in the same journal.¹³ The ‘fact’ of the coin, and de Vaux’s emphatic dating on the basis of it, thus became enshrined in the established corpus of evidence routinely invoked by adherents of the consensus. Thus, for example, Frank Cross would write that the coin stamped with the insignia of the 10th Legion constituted ‘grim confirmation’.¹⁴

De Vaux, however, had made two bizarre errors. In the first place, he had somehow contrived to misread Josephus, ascribing to Josephus precisely the opposite of what Josephus in fact said. Josephus most emphatically did not assert that the 10th Legion captured Jericho in ad 68. As Professor Cecil Roth demonstrated, of the three Roman legions in the vicinity, only the 10th was not engaged in the conquest of Jericho.¹⁵ The 10th Legion had remained a considerable distance to the north, guarding the top of the Jordan Valley. In the second place, the coin de Vaux had found proved not to be from the 10th Legion at all, or, for that matter, from any other. Although badly damaged and oxidised, the coin, when subjected to expert scrutiny, proved to have come from Ashkelon and to date from AD 72 or 73.

Here was a blunder that could not be equivocated away. De Vaux had no choice but to publish a formal retraction. This retraction, however, appeared only as a footnote in his opus L’archeologie et les manuscrits de la mer morte, published in French in 1961 and in English translation in 1973. ‘Mention of this was unfortunate’, de Vaux says laconically, ‘for this coin does not exist.’¹⁶

On the whole, de Vaux tended to be shamelessly cavalier in his conclusions about coins. When he found any that did not conform to his theories, he simply dismissed them. Thus, for example, he found one dating from the period between ad 138 and 161. He shrugged off its possible relevance with the comment that it ‘must have been lost by a passer-by’.¹⁷ By the same token, of course, an earlier coin, on which he attempted to establish his dating and chronology for Qumran, could also have been lost by a passer-by; but de Vaux seems not to have considered this possibility.

Of the archaeological evidence found at Qumran, coins have been particularly important to the international team and the adherents of their consensus. Indeed, it was on the basis of this evidence that they deduced the timespan of the community; and it was through their interpretation of this evidence that they established their dating and chronology. Prior to Eisenman, however, no one had bothered to question their misinterpretation. Roth and Driver, as we have seen, endeavoured to establish a chronology on the basis of the internal evidence of the scrolls themselves. De Vaux and the international team were able to discredit them simply by invoking the external evidence supposedly provided by the coins. That this evidence had been spuriously interpreted went unnoticed. Eisenman recognised that Roth and Driver, arguing on the basis of internal evidence, had in fact been correct. But in order to prove this, he had first to expose the erroneous interpretation of the external evidence. He began with the coin distribution, pointing out that they revealed two periods of peak activity.

Some 450 bronze coins were discovered at Qumran in the course of excavation. They encompassed a span of some two and a half centuries, from 135 BC to AD 136. The following table groups them according to the reigns in which they were minted:

1 coin from 135-104 BC

1 coin from 104 BC

143 coins from 103-76 bc

1 coin from 76-67 bc

5 coins from 67-40 bc

4 coins from 40-37 bc

10 coins from 37-4 bc

16 coins from 4 bc-6 ad

91 coins from 6-41 ad (time of the procurators)

78 coins from 37-44 ad (reign of Agrippa I)

2 Roman coins from 54-68 ad

83 coins from 67 ad (2nd year of the revolt)

5 coins from 68 ad (3rd year of the revolt)

6 additional coins more precisely from the revolt, too oxidised to identify

13 Roman coins from 67-8 ad

1 Roman coin from 69-79 ad

2 coins from 72-3 ad

4 coins from 72-81 ad

1 Roman coin from 87 ad

3 Roman coins from 98-117 ad

6 coins from 132-6 ad (revolt of Simeon bar Kochba)¹⁸

The distribution of coins would appear to indicate two periods when the community at Qumran was most active — that between 103 and 76 bc, and that between ad 6 and 67. There are a total of 143 coins from the former period, 254 from the latter. For adherents of the consensus, this did not mesh as neatly as they would have liked with their theories. According to their reading of the scrolls, the ‘Wicked Priest’ was most likely to be identified as the high priest Jonathan, who lived between 160 and 142 bc — half a century before the first concentration of coins. In order to support his thesis, Father de Vaux needed a very early date for the founding of the Qumran community. He was thus forced to argue that the solitary coin dating from between 135 and 104 bc served to prove the thesis correct — even though common sense suggests that the community dates from between 103 and 76 BC, the period from which there is a concentration of 143 coins. The earlier coin, on which de Vaux rests his argument is much more likely to have been merely one that remained in circulation for some years after it was minted.

De Vaux ascribed particular significance to the disappearance of Judaic coins after ad 68 and the nineteen Roman coins subsequent to that year. This, he maintained, ‘proves’ that Qumran was destroyed in ad 68; the Roman coins, he argued, indicated that the ruins were ‘occupied’ by a detachment of Roman troops. On this basis, he proceeded to assign a definitive date to the deposition of the scrolls themselves: ‘our conclusion: none of the manuscripts belonging to the community is later than the ruin of Khirbet Qumran in AD 68.’¹⁹

The spuriousness of this reasoning is self-evident. In the first place, Judaic coins have been found which date from Simeon bar Kochba’s revolt between ad 132 and 136. In the second place, the coins indicate only that people were wandering around Qumran and dropping them; they indicate nothing, one way or the other, about the deposition of manuscripts, which could have been buried at Qumran as late as bar Kochba’s time. And finally, it is hardly surprising that the coins subsequent to ad 68 should be Roman. In the years following the revolt, Roman coins were the only currency in Judaea. This being the case, they need hardly have been dropped solely by Romans.

Eisenman is emphatic about the conclusions to be drawn from de Vaux’s archaeology. If it proves anything, he states, it proves precisely the opposite of what de Vaux concludes — proves that the latest date for the scrolls having been deposited at Qumran is not ad 68 but ad 136. Any time up to that date would be perfectly consistent with the archaeological evidence.²⁰ Nor, Eisenman adds, is the consensus correct in assuming that the destruction of the main buildings at Qumran necessarily meant the destruction of the site.²¹ There are, in fact, indications that at least some cursory or rudimentary rebuilding occurred, including a ‘crude canal’ to feed water into a cistern. Rather unconvincingly, de Vaux claimed this to have been the work of the Roman garrison supposed, on the basis of the coins, to have occupied the site.²² But Professor Driver pointed out that the sheer crudeness of the reconstruction does not suggest Roman work.²³ De Vaux maintained that his theory, conforming as it did to the alleged destruction of Qumran in ad 68, was in accord with ‘les données d’histoire’ the ‘accepted givens of history’ — ‘having forgotten’, as Professor Driver observed drily, ‘that the historical records say nothing of the destruction of Qumran in ad 68 by the Romans’. In short, Driver concluded, ‘the “données d’histoire” are historical fiction’.²⁴

There is another crucial piece of archaeological evidence which runs diametrically counter to the interpretation of the consensus. De Vaux himself studiously, and justifiably, avoided referring to the ruins at Qumran as a ‘monastery’. As he explained, he ‘never used the word when writing about the excavations at Qumran, precisely because it represents an inference which archaeology, taken alone, could not warrant’.²⁵ It is clear, however, that he nevertheless thought of Qumran as a species of monastery. This is reflected by his uninhibited use of such monastic terms as ‘scriptorium’ and ‘refectory’ to describe certain of the structures. And if de Vaux himself had some reservations about dubbing Qumran a ‘monastery’, other adherents of the consensus did not. In his book on the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, Cardinal Danielou babbled happily about the ‘monks of Qumran’, even going so far as to state that ‘the monasticism of Qumran can be considered as the source of Christian monasticism’.²⁶

What de Vaux, his colleagues and adherents of the consensus chose consistently to overlook was the distinctly and unmistakably military character of some of the ruins. When one visits Qumran today, one will inevitably be struck initially by the remains of a substantial defensive tower, with walls of some feet in thickness and an entrance only on the second storey. Less obvious, but just across a small passageway from the tower, there is another structure whose function may not be immediately apparent. In fact, it is what remains of a well-built forge — complete with its own water supply for tempering the tools and weapons crafted within it. Not surprisingly, the forge is something of an embarrassment to the scholars of the international team, clinging to their image of placid, pacifist ‘Essenes’. Thus de Vaux scuttled away from the issue as fast as tongue and pen could carry him:

Which is rather like not venturing to define the purpose of empty cartridge cases and spent projectiles of lead scattered around the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. Professor Cross, following in de Vaux’s footsteps but incapable of the same disingenuousness, grudgingly alludes to ‘what appears to have been a forge’.²⁸

In fact, arrows were found inside the ruins of Qumran; and while one could argue that these were loosed by attacking Romans, they are, as Professor Driver asserted, ‘as likely to have belonged to the occupants’²⁹ — if not, indeed, more likely. On the whole, the military character of the ruins is so flagrant that another independent scholar, Professor Golb of the University of Chicago, has gone so far as to see in them an entirely martial installation.³⁰ According to Golb, the scrolls were never composed or copied at Qumran at all, but were brought there, from Jerusalem, specifically for protection. ‘No fragment of parchment or papyrus’, Golb has pointed out, ‘was ever found in the debris… nor any tools of scribes… ‘³¹

Apart from coins and the physical ruins, the most important body of external evidence used by the international team for dating the Dead Sea Scrolls derived from the tenuous science of palaeography. Palaeography is the comparative study of ancient calligraphy. Assuming a strictly chronological and linear progression in the evolution of handwriting, it endeavours to chart developments in the specific shape and form of letters, and thus to assign dates to an entire manuscript. One might find, for example, an old charter or some other document in one’s attic. On the basis not of its content, but of its script alone, one might guess it to date from the 17th as opposed to the 18th century. To that extent, one would be practising a species of amateur palaeography. The procedure, needless to say, even when employed with the most scientific rigour, is far from conclusive. When applied to the texts found at Qumran, it becomes feeble indeed — and sometimes tips over into the ludicrous. Nevertheless, de Vaux invoked palaeography as another corpus of external evidence to discredit the conclusions, based on internal evidence, of Roth and Driver. It was, therefore, the alleged palaeographical evidence pertaining to Qumran that Eisenman had next to demolish.

Palaeography, according to Frank Cross of the international team, ‘is perhaps the most precise and objective means of determining the age of a manuscript’. He goes on to explain:

Why internal evidence should necessarily be more ‘subjective’ than that of archaeology and palaeography Cross does not bother to clarify. In fact, this statement inadvertently reveals why palaeography should be deemed so important by adherents of the consensus: it can be used to counter the internal evidence of the documents — evidence which makes sense only in the context of the 1st century AD.

The most prominent palaeographical work on the Dead Sea Scrolls was done by Professor Solomon Birnbaum of the University of London’s School of Oriental Studies. Birnbaum’s endeavours received fulsome endorsement from Professor Cross, who hailed them as ‘a monumental attempt to deal with all periods of Hebrew writing’.³³ Attempting to parry the copious criticism to which Birnbaum’s exegesis was subjected, Cross asked his readers to remember ‘that it was written by a professional paleographer tried to the limit by the Lilliputian attacks of non-specialists’.³⁴ Such is the intensity of academic vituperation generated by the question of palaeographical evidence.

Birnbaum’s method is bizarre to say the least, reminiscent less of the modern scientific method with which he purports to dignify it than of, say, the nether reaches of numerology. Thus, for example, he presupposes — and the whole of his subsequent procedure rests on nothing more than this unconfirmed presupposition — that the entire spectrum of the texts found at Qumran extends precisely from 300 bc to ad 68. Thus, in one instance, he takes a text of Samuel found in Cave 4 at Qumran. Having methodically combed this text, he cites forty-five specimens of a particular calligraphic feature, eleven specimens of another. ‘Mit der Dummheit’, Schiller observed, ‘kämpfen Götter selbst vergeben.’ For reasons the gods themselves must find mind-boggling, Birnbaum then proceeds to set up an equation: the proportion of 56 to 11 equals 368 to x (368 being the number of years the texts span, and x being the date he hopes to assign to the text in question). The value of x — calculated, legitimately enough, in purely mathematical terms — is 72, which should then be subtracted from 300 bc, Birnbaum’s hypothetical starting point. He arrives at 228 BC; ‘the result’, he claims triumphantly, ‘will be something like the absolute date’ for the Samuel manuscript.³⁵ To speak of ‘something like’ an ‘absolute date’ is rather like speaking of ‘a relatively absolute date’. But quite apart from such stylistic solecisms, Birnbaum’s method, as Eisenman says, ‘is, of course, preposterous’.³⁶ Nevertheless, Birnbaum employed his technique, such as it was, to establish ‘absolute dates’ for all the texts discovered at Qumran. The most alarming fact of all is that adherents of the consensus still accept these ‘absolute dates’ as unimpugnable.

Professor Philip Davies of Sheffield states that ‘most people who take time to study the issue agree that the use of paleography in Qumran research is unscientific’, adding that ‘attempts have been made to offer a precision of dating that is ludicrous’.³⁷ Eisenman is rather more scathing, describing Birnbaum’s endeavours as ‘what in any other field would be the most pseudo-scientific and infantile methods’.³⁸ To illustrate this, he provides the following example.³⁹

Suppose two scribes of different ages are copying the same text at the same time, and the younger scribe were trained more recently in a more up-to-date ‘scribal school’? Suppose the older scribe were deliberately using a stylised calligraphy which he’d learned in his youth? Suppose either or both scribes, in deference to tradition or the hallowed character of their activity, sought deliberately to replicate a style dating from some centuries before — as certain documents today, such as diplomas or certificates of award, may be produced in archaic copper-plate? What date could possibly be assigned definitively to their transcriptions?

In his palaeographic assumptions, Birnbaum overlooked one particularly important fact. If a document is produced merely to convey information, it will, in all probability, reflect the most up-to-date techniques. Such, for example, are the techniques employed by modern newspapers (except, until recently, in England). But everything suggests that the Dead Sea Scrolls weren’t produced merely to convey information. Everything suggests they had a ritual or semi-ritual function as well, and were lovingly produced so as to preserve an element of tradition. It is therefore highly probable that later scribes would deliberately attempt to reproduce the style of their predecessors. And, indeed, all through recorded history, scribes have consistently been conservative. Thus, for example, illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages contrived to reflect a sacred quality of antiquity, not the latest technological progress. Thus many modern Bibles are reproduced in ‘old-fashioned’ print. Thus one would not expect to find a modern Jewish Torah employing the style or technique used to imprint a slogan on a T-shirt.

Of the calligraphy in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Eisenman concludes that ‘they simply represent a multitude of different handwriting styles of people working more or less at the same time within the same framework, and tell us nothing about chronology at all’.⁴⁰ Cecil Roth of Oxford was, if anything, even more emphatic: ‘In connection for example with the English records, although a vast mass of dated manuscript material exists covering the entire Middle Ages, it is impossible to fix precisely within the range of a generation the date of any document on the basis of palaeography alone.’ He warned that ‘a new dogmatism’ had arisen in the field of palaeography, and that ‘without any fixed point to serve as a basis, we are already expected to accept as an historical criterion a precise dating of these hitherto unknown Hebrew scripts’. He even, in his exasperation at the complacency and intransigence of the international team, had recourse to the unscholarly expedient of capital letters:

11. The Essenes

The reader by now will be familiar with the conclusions of the consensus view of the international team and, as expressed through its journals, the Ecole Biblique, as well as with the processes by which those conclusions were reached. It is now time to return to the evidence and see whether any alternative conclusions are possible. In order to do so, certain basic questions must again be posed. Who, precisely, were the elusive and mysterious denizens of Qumran, who established their community, transcribed and deposited their sacred texts, then apparently vanished from the stage of history? Were they indeed Essenes? And if so, what exactly does that term mean?

The traditional images of the Essenes come down to us from Pliny, Philo and Josephus, who described them as a sect or sub-sect of 1st-century Judaism.¹ Pliny, as we have seen, depicted the Essenes as celibate hermits, residing, with ‘only palm-trees for company’, in an area that might be construed as Qumran. Josephus, who is echoed by Philo, elaborates on this portrait. According to Josephus, the Essenes are celibate — although, he adds, almost as an afterthought, ‘there is a second order of Essenes’ who do marry.² The Essenes despise pleasure and wealth. They hold all possessions in common, and those who join their ranks must renounce private property. They elect their own leaders from amongst themselves. They are settled in every city of Palestine, as well as in isolated communities, but, even in urban surroundings, keep themselves apart.

Josephus portrays the Essenes as something akin to a monastic order or an ancient mystery school. Postulants to their ranks are subjected to a three-year period of probation, the equivalent of a novitiate. Not until he has successfully undergone this apprenticeship is the candidate officially accepted. Full-fledged Essenes pray before dawn, then work for five hours, after which they don a clean loincloth and bathe — a ritual of purification performed daily. Thus purified, they assemble in a special ‘common’ room and partake of a simple communal meal. Contrary to later popular misconceptions, Josephus does not describe the Essenes as vegetarian. They are said to eat meat.

The Essenes, Josephus says, are well versed in the books of the Old Testament and the teachings of the prophets. They are themselves trained in the arts of divination, and can foretell the future by studying sacred texts in conjunction with certain rites of purification. In their doctrine, according to Josephus, the soul is immortal but trapped in the prison of the mortal and corruptible body. At death, the soul is set free and soars upwards, rejoicing. Josephus compares Essene teaching to that of ‘the Greeks’. Elsewhere, he is more specific, likening it to the principles of the Pythagorean schools.³

Josephus mentions Essene adherence to the Law of Moses: ‘What they reverence most after God is the Lawgiver, and blasphemy against him is a capital offence.’⁴ On the whole, however, the Essenes are portrayed as pacifist, and on good terms with established authority. Indeed, they are said to enjoy the special favour of Herod, who ‘continued to honour all the Essenes’;⁵ ‘Herod had these Essenes in such honour and thought higher of them than their mortal nature required… ‘⁶ But at one point, Josephus contradicts himself — or perhaps slips his guard. The Essenes, he says:

In this one reference, at variance with everything else Josephus says, his Essenes begin to sound suspiciously like the militant defenders of Masada, the Zealots or Sicarii.

With the exception of this one reference, Josephus’ account was to shape popular images of the Essenes for most of the ensuing two thousand years. And when the Aufklärung, the so-called ‘Enlightenment’, began to encourage ‘free-thinking’ examination of Christian tradition, commentators began to make connections between that tradition and Josephus’ Essenes. Thus, in 1770, no less a personage than Frederick the Great wrote definitively that ‘Jesus was really an Essene; he was imbued with Essene ethics’.⁸ Such apparently scandalous assertions proceeded to gain increasing currency during the latter half of the next century, and in 1863 Renan published his famous Vie de Jesus, in which he suggested that Christianity was ‘an Essenism which has largely succeeded’.⁹

Towards the end of the 19th century, the revival of interest in esoteric thought consolidated the association of Christianity with the Essenes. Theosophy, through the teachings of H.P. Blavatsky, postulated Jesus as a magus or adept who embodied elements of both Essene and Gnostic tradition. One of Blavatsky’s disciples, Anna Kingsford, developed a concept of ‘esoteric Christianity’. This roped in alchemy as well and portrayed Jesus as a Gnostic thaumaturge who, prior to his public mission, had lived and studied with the Essenes. In 1889, such ideas were transplanted to the Continent through a book called The Great Initiate, by the French theosophist Edouard Schure. The mystique surrounding the Essenes had by now begun to associate them with healing, to credit them with special medical training and to represent them as a Judaic equivalent of the Greek Therapeutae. Another influential work, The Crucifixion by an Eye-Witness, which appeared in German towards the end of the 19th century and in English around 1907, purported to be a genuine ancient text composed by an Essene scribe. Jesus was depicted as the son of Mary and an unnamed Essene teacher, whose fund of secret Essene medical knowledge enabled him not just to survive the Crucifixion, but also to appear to his disciples afterwards as if ‘risen from the dead’. George Moore undoubtedly drew on this work when, in 1916, he published The Brook Kerith and scandalised Christian readers across the English-speaking world. Moore, too, portrayed Jesus as a protégé of Essene thought, who survives the Crucifixion and retires to an Essene community in the general vicinity of Qumran. Here, years later, he is visited by a fanatic named Paul, who, quite unknowingly, has come to promulgate a bizarre mythologised account of his career and, in the process, promote him to godhood.

The Essenes depicted in The Brook Kerith derive ultimately from the ‘stereotyped’ Essenes of Pliny, Josephus and Philo, imbued now with a mystical character which endeared them to esoteric-oriented writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To the extent that educated readers knew anything of the Essenes at all, this was the prevailing image of them. And something of this image was retained even by more critical commentators, such as Robert Graves, who in other respects sought to demystify Christian origins.

When the Dead Sea Scrolls came to light, they seemed, on the surface at least, not to contain anything that conflicted with the prevailing image of the Essenes. It was only natural, therefore, that they should be associated with the established conceptions.

As early as 1947, when he first saw the Qumran texts, Professor Sukenik had suggested an Essene character for their authorship. Father de Vaux and his team also invoked the traditional image of the Essenes. As we have noted, de Vaux was quick to identify Qumran with the Essene settlement mentioned by Pliny. ‘The community at Qumran’, Professor Cross concurred, ‘was an Essene settlement.’¹⁰ It soon became regarded as an established and accepted fact that the Dead Sea Scrolls were essentially Essene in their authorship, and that the Essenes were of the familiar kind — pacifist, ascetic, celibate, divorced from public and particularly political issues.

The community at Qumran, the consensus view contends, built upon the much earlier remains of an abandoned Israelite fortress dating from the 6th century BC. The authors of the scrolls arrived at the site some time around 134 bc, and the major buildings were erected around 100 bc and thereafter — a chronology safely and uncontroversially pre-Christian. The community was said to have thrived until it was decimated by an earthquake, followed by a fire, in 31 bc. During the reign of Herod the Great (37-4 bc), Qumran was abandoned and deserted, and then, in the reign of Herod’s successor, the ruins were reoccupied and rebuilding undertaken. According to the consensus, Qumran then flourished as a quietist, politically neutral and disengaged enclave until it was destroyed by the Romans in ad 68, during the war that also involved the sack of Jerusalem. After this the site was occupied by a Roman military garrison until the end of the 1st century. When Palestine rose in revolt again between ad 132 and 135, Qumran was inhabited by rebel ‘squatters’.¹¹ It was a neat, conveniently formulated scenario which effectively defused the Dead Sea Scrolls of whatever explosive potential they might have. But the evidence seems to have been ignored when expediency and the stability of Christian theology so dictated.

There is a contradiction, quite apart from the geographical question, in de Vaux’s assertion that the passage from Pliny, quoted here on page 20, refers to Qumran — a contradiction which pertains to the dating of the scrolls. Pliny is referring, in this passage, to the situation after the destruction of Jerusalem. The passage itself indicates that Engedi has likewise been destroyed — which it was. The Essene community, however, is described as still intact, and even taking in a ‘throng of refugees’. Yet even de Vaux acknowledged that Qumran, like Jerusalem and Engedi, was destroyed during the revolt of AD 66-73. It would thus seem even more unlikely that Pliny’s Essene community is in fact Qumran. What is more, Pliny’s community, as he describes it, contains no women, yet there are women’s graves among those at Qumran. It is still, of course, possible that the occupants of Qumran were Essenes, if not of Pliny’s community, then of some other. If so, however, the Dead Sea Scrolls will themselves reveal how ill informed about the Essenes Pliny was.

The term ‘Essene’ is Greek. It occurs only in classical writers — Josephus, Philo and Pliny — and is written in Greek as ‘Essenoi’ or ‘Essaioi’. Thus, if the inhabitants of Qumran were indeed Essenes, one would expect ‘Essene’ to be a Greek translation or transliteration of some original Hebrew or Aramaic word, by which the Qumran community referred to themselves.

Accounts of the Essenes by classical writers are not consistent with the life or thought of the community as revealed by either the external evidence of archaeology or the internal evidence of the texts themselves. Josephus, Philo and Pliny offer portraits of the Essenes which are often utterly irreconcilable with the testimony of Qumran’s ruins and of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The evidence at Qumran, both internal and external, repeatedly contradicts their accounts. Some of these contradictions have been cited before, but it is worth reviewing the most important of them.

1. Josephus acknowledges that there is ‘another order’ of Essenes who do marry, but this, he indicates, is atypical.¹² In general, Josephus says, echoing Philo and Pliny, the Essenes are celibate. Yet the graves of women and children have been found among those excavated at Qumran. And the ‘Community Rule’ contains regulations governing marriage and the raising of children.

2. None of the classical writers ever mentions anything to suggest that the Essenes used a special form of calendar. The Qumran community, however, did — a unique, solar-based calendar, rather than the conventional Judaic calendar, which is lunar-based. If the Qumran community were indeed Essenes, surely so strikingly noticeable a characteristic would have been accorded some reference.

3. According to Philo, the Essenes differed from other forms of ancient Judaism in having no cult of animal sacrifices.¹³ Yet the ‘Temple Scroll’ issues precise instructions for such sacrifices. And the ruins of Qumran revealed animal bones carefully placed in pots, or covered by pots, and buried in the ground under a thin covering of earth.¹⁴ De Vaux speculated that these bones might be the remains of ritual meals. They might indeed. But they might equally be the remains of animal sacrifices, as stipulated by the ‘Temple Scroll’.

4. The classical writers use the term ‘Essene’ to denote what they describe as a major sub-division of Judaism, along with the Pharisees and Sadducees. Nowhere in the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, is the term ‘Essene’ found.

5. Josephus declares the Essenes to have been on congenial terms with Herod the Great, who, he says, ‘had these Essenes in such honour and thought higher of them than their mortal nature required’.¹⁵ Yet the Qumran literature indicates a militant hostility towards non-Judaic authorities in general, and towards Herod and his dynasty in particular. What is more, Qumran appears to have been abandoned and uninhabited for some years precisely because of persecution by Herod.

6. According to classical writers, the Essenes were pacifist. Philo specifically states that their numbers included no makers of weapons or armour.¹⁶ Josephus emphatically distinguishes between the non-violent Essenes and the militantly messianic and nationalistic Zealots. Yet the ruins of Qumran include a defensive tower of a manifestly military nature, and what ‘can only be described as a forge’.¹⁷ As for the Qumran literature, it is often martial in the extreme, as exemplified by such texts as the ‘War Scroll’. Indeed, the bellicose character of such texts would seem to have less in common with what Josephus says of the Essenes than with what he and others say of the so-called Zealots — which is precisely what Roth and Driver claimed the Qumran community to be, thereby incurring the fury of de Vaux and the international team.

The Qumran community wrote mostly not in Greek, but in Aramaic and Hebrew. So far as Aramaic and Hebrew are concerned, no accepted etymology for the origins of the term ‘Essene’ has hitherto been found. Even the classical writers were mystified by its derivation. Philo, for example, suggested that, in his opinion, the name stemmed from the Greek word for ‘holy’, ‘oseeos’, and that the Essenes were therefore the ‘Oseeotes’, or ‘Holy Ones’.¹⁸

One theory has enjoyed a certain qualified currency among certain modern scholars, notably Geza Vermes of Oxford University. According to Vermes, the term ‘Essene’ derives from the Aramaic word ‘assayya’, which means ‘healers’.¹⁹ This has fostered an image in some quarters of the Essenes as medical practitioners, a Judaic equivalent of the Alexandrian ascetics known as the ‘Therapeutae’. But the word ‘assayya’ does not occur anywhere in the corpus of Qumran literature; nor is there any reference to healing, to medical activities or to therapeutic work. To derive ‘Essene’ from ‘assayya’’, therefore, remains purely speculative; and there would be no reason to credit it at all unless there were no other options.

In fact, there is another option — not just a possibility, but a probability. If the Qumran community never refer to themselves as ‘Essenes’ or ‘assayya’, they do employ a number of other Hebrew and Aramaic terms. From these terms, it is clear that the community did not have a single definitive name for themselves. They did, however, have a highly distinctive and unique concept of themselves, and this concept is reflected by a variety of appellations and designations.²⁰ The concept rests ultimately on the all-important ‘Covenant’, which entailed a formal oath of obedience, totally and eternally, to the Law of Moses. The authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls would thus refer to themselves as, for example, ‘the Keepers of the Covenant’. As synonyms for ‘Covenant’ and ‘Law’, they would often use the same words that figure so prominently in Taoism — ‘way’, ‘work’ or ‘works’ (’ma’asim’ in Hebrew). They would speak, for instance, of’the Perfect of the Way’, or ‘the Way of Perfect Righteousness’^{21 —} ‘way’ meaning ‘the work of the Law’, or ‘the way in which the Law functions’, ‘the way in which the Law works’. Variations of these themes run all through the Dead Sea Scrolls to denote the Qumran community and its members.

In the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’, Eisenman, continuing this line of thought, found one particularly important such variation — the ‘Osei ha-Torah’, which translates as the ‘Doers of the Law’.²² This term would appear to be the source of the word ‘Essene’, for the collective form of ‘Osei ha-Torah’ is ‘Osim’, pronounced ‘Oseem’. The Qumran community would thus have constituted, collectively, ‘the Osim’. They seem, in fact, to have been known as such. An early Christian writer, Epiphanius, speaks of an allegedly ‘heretical’ Judaic sect which once occupied an area around the Dead Sea. This sect, he says, were called the ‘Ossenes’.²³ It is fairly safe to conclude that the ‘Essenes’, the ‘Ossenes’ of Epiphanius and the ‘Osim’ of the Qumran community were one and the same.

Thus the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls may be thought of as ‘Essenes’, but not in the sense as defined and described by Josephus, Philo and Pliny. The accounts of the classical chroniclers prove to be altogether too circumscribed. They have also prevented many modern scholars from making the necessary connections — perhaps, in some cases, because it was not deemed desirable to do so. If the connections are made, a different and broader picture emerges — a picture in which such terms as ‘Essene’ and ‘the Qumran community’ will prove to be interchangeable with others. Eisenman effectively summarises the situation:

This, precisely, is what we are dealing with — changeable metaphors, a variety of different designations used to denote the same people or factions. Recognition of that point was urged as early as 1969 by an acknowledged expert in the field, Professor Matthew Black of St Andrews University, Scotland. The term ‘Essene’ was acceptable, Professor Black wrote:

There is support for Professor Black’s contention in the work of Epiphanius, the early Christian writer who spoke of the ‘Ossenes’. Epiphanius states that the original ‘Christians’ in Judaea, generally called ‘Nazoreans’ (as in the Acts of the Apostles), were known as ‘Jessaeans’. These ‘Christians’, or ‘Jessaeans’, would have conformed precisely to Professor Black’s phraseology — a ‘widespread movement of anti-Jerusalem, anti-Pharisaic non-conformity’. But there is an even more crucial connection.

Among the terms by which the Qumran community referred to themselves was ‘Keepers of the Covenant’, which appears in the original Hebrew as ‘Nozrei ha-Brit’. From this term derives the word ‘Nozrim’ one of the earliest Hebrew designations for the sect subsequently known as ‘Christians’.²⁶ The modern Arabic word for Christians, ‘Nasrani’, derives from the same source. So, too, does the word ‘Nazorean’ or ‘Nazarene’, which, of course, was the name by which the ‘early Christians’ referred to themselves in both the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. Contrary to the assumptions of later tradition, it has nothing whatever to do with Jesus’ alleged upbringing in Nazareth, which, the evidence (or lack of it) suggests, did not even exist at the time. Indeed, it seems to have been the very perplexity of early commentators encountering the unfamiliar term ‘Nazorean’ that led them to conclude Jesus’ family came from Nazareth, which by then had appeared on the map.

To sum up, then, the ‘Essenes’ who figure in classical texts, the ‘Ossenes’ mentioned by Epiphanius, and the ‘Osi’m’, the Qumran community, are one and the same. So, too, are the ‘Jessaeans’, as Epiphanius calls the ‘early Christians’. So, too, are the ‘Nozrei ha-Brit’, the ‘Nozrim’, the ‘Nasrani’ and the ‘Nazoreans’. On the basis of this etymology, it becomes clear that we are indeed dealing with Professor Black’s ‘widespread movement’, characterised, as Eisenman says, by shifting metaphor, a variety of slightly different designations used for the same people, shifting with time, translation and transliteration, just as ‘Caesar’ evolves into ‘Kaiser’ and ‘Tsar’.

It would thus seem that the Qumran community was equivalent to the ‘early Church’ based in Jerusalem — the ‘Nazoreans’ who followed James, ‘the Lord’s brother’.²⁷ Indeed, the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’ states explicitly that Qumran’s ruling body, the ‘Council of the Community’, was actually located at the time in Jerusalem.²⁸ And in Acts 9:2, the members of the ‘early Church’ are specifically referred to as ‘followers of the Way’ — a phrase identical with Qumran usage.

12. The Acts of the Apostles

Apart from the Gospels themselves, the most important book of the New Testament is the Acts of the Apostles. For the historian, in fact, Acts may be of even greater consequence. Like all historical documents issuing from a partisan source, it must, of course, be handled sceptically and with caution. One must also be cognisant of whom the text was written for, and whom it might have served, as well as what end. But it is Acts, much more than the Gospels, which has hitherto constituted the apparently definitive account of the first years of ‘early Christianity’. Certainly Acts would appear to contain much basic information not readily to be found elsewhere. To that extent alone, it is a seminal text.

The Gospels, it is generally acknowledged, are unreliable as historical documents. Mark’s, the first of them, was composed no earlier than the revolt of ad 66, and probably somewhat later. All four Gospels seek to evoke a period long predating their own composition — perhaps by as much as sixty or seventy years. They skim cursorily over the historical backdrop, focusing essentially on the heavily mythologised figure of Jesus and on his teachings. They are ultimately poetic and devotional texts, and do not even purport to be chronicles.

Acts is a work of a very different order. It cannot, of course, be taken as absolutely historical. It is, for one thing, heavily biased. Luke, the author of the text, was clearly drawing on a number of different sources, editing and reworking material to suit his own purposes. There has been little attempt to unify either doctrinal statements or literary style. Even Church historians admit that the chronology is confused, the author having had no direct experience of many of the events he describes and being obliged to impose his own order upon them. Thus certain separate events are fused into a single occurrence, while single occurrences are made to appear to be separate events. Such problems are particularly acute in those portions of the text pertaining to events that predate the advent of Paul. Further, it would appear that Acts, like the Gospels, was compiled selectively, and was extensively tampered with by later editors.

Nevertheless, Acts, unlike the Gospels, aspires to be a form of chronicle over a continuous and extended period of time. Unlike the Gospels, it constitutes an attempt to preserve an historical record, and, at least in certain passages, to have been written by someone with a first-, or second-, hand experience of the events it describes. Although there is bias, the bias is a highly personal one; and this, to some extent, enables the modern commentator to read between the lines.

The narrative recounted in Acts begins shortly after the Crucifixion — generally dated at ad 30 but possibly as late as ad 36 — and ends somewhere between ad 64 and 67. Most scholars believe the narrative itself was composed, or transcribed, some time between ad 70 and 95. Roughly speaking, then, Acts is contemporary with some, if not all, of the Gospels. It may predate all four. It almost certainly predates the so-called Gospel of John, at least in the form that that text has come down to us.

The author of Acts is a well-educated Greek who identifies himself as Luke. Whether he is the same as ‘Luke the beloved physician’, mentioned as Paul’s close friend in Colossians 4:14, cannot be definitively established, though most New Testament scholars are prepared to accept that he is. Modern scholars also concur that he would seem, quite clearly, to be identical with the author of Luke’s Gospel. Indeed, Acts is sometiiries regarded as the ‘second half of Luke’s Gospel. Both are addressed to an unknown recipient named ‘Theophilus’. Because both were written in Greek, many words and names have been translated into that language, and have probably, in a number of instances, altered in nuance, even in meaning, from their Hebrew or Aramaic originals. In any case, both Acts and Luke’s Gospel were written specifically for a Greek audience — a very different audience from that addressed by the Qumran scrolls.

Although focusing primarily on Paul, who monopolises the latter part of its narrative, Acts also tells the story of Paul’s relations with the community in Jerusalem composed of Jesus’ immediate disciples under the leadership of James, ‘the Lord’s brother’ — the enclave or faction who only later came to be called the first Christians and are now regarded as the early or original Church. In recounting Paul’s association with this community, however, Acts offers only Paul’s point of view. Acts is essentially a document of Pauline — or what is now deemed to be ‘normative’ — Christianity. Paul, in other words, is always the ‘hero’; whoever opposes him, whether it be the authorities or even James, is automatically cast as villain.

Acts opens shortly after Jesus — referred to as ‘the Nazorene’ (in Greek ‘Nazoraion’) — has disappeared from the scene. The narrative then proceeds to describe the organisation and development of the community or ‘early Church’ in Jerusalem and its increasing friction with the authorities. The community is vividly evoked in Acts 2:44—6: ‘The faithful all lived together and owned everything in common; they sold their goods and possessions and shared out the proceeds among themselves according to what each one needed. They went as a body to the Temple every day but met in their houses for the breaking of bread…’ (It is worth noting in passing this adherence to the Temple. Jesus and his immediate followers are usually portrayed as hostile to the Temple, where, according to the Gospels, Jesus upset the tables of the moneychangers and incurred the passionate displeasure of the priesthood.)

Acts 6:8 introduces the figure known as Stephen, the first official ‘Christian martyr’, who is arrested and sentenced to death by stoning. In his own defence, Stephen alludes to the murder of those who prophesied the advent of the ‘Righteous One’, or the ‘Just One’. This terminology is specifically and uniquely Qumranic in character. The ‘Righteous One’ occurs repeatedly in the Dead Sea Scrolls as ‘Zaddik’ ¹ The ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ in the scrolls, ‘Moreh ha-Zedek’ derives from the same root. And when the historian Josephus speaks of a teacher, apparently named ‘Sadduc’ or ‘Zadok’, as the leader of a messianic and anti-Roman Judaic following, this too would seem to be a faulty Greek rendering of the ‘Righteous One’.² As portrayed in Acts, then, Stephen uses nomenclature unique and specifically characteristic of Qumran.

Nor is this the only Qumranic concern to figure in Stephen’s speech. In his defence, he names his persecutors (Acts 7:53) — ‘You who had the Law brought to you by angels are the very ones who have not kept it.’ As Acts portrays it, Stephen is obviously intent on adherence to the Law. Again, there is a conflict here with orthodox and accepted traditions. According to later Christian tradition, it was the Jews of the time who made an austere and puritanical fetish of the Law. The ‘early Christians’ are depicted, at least from the standpoint of that stringency, as ‘mavericks’ or ‘renegades’, advocating a new freedom and flexibility, defying custom and convention. Yet it is Stephen, the first ‘Christian martyr’, who emerges as an advocate of the Law, while his persecutors are accused of dereliction.

It makes no sense for Stephen, a self-proclaimed adherent of the Law, to be murdered by fellow Jews extolling the same Law. But what if those fellow Jews were acting on behalf of a priesthood which had come to an accommodation with the Roman authorities — were, in effect, collaborators who, like many of the French under the German occupation, for example, simply wanted ‘a quiet life’ and feared an agitator or resistance fighter in their midst might lead to reprisals?³ The ‘early Church’ of which Stephen is a member constantly stresses its own orthodoxy, its zealous adherence to the Law. Its persecutors are those who contrive to remain in good odour with Rome and, in so doing, lapse from the Law, or, in Qumran terms, transgress the Law, betray the Law.⁴ In this context, Stephen’s denunciation of them makes sense, as does their murder of him. And as we shall see, James — James ‘the Just’, the ‘Zaddik’ or ‘Righteous One’, the ‘brother of the Lord’ who best exemplifies rigorous adherence to the Law — will subsequently, according to later tradition, suffer precisely the same fate as Stephen.

According to Acts, it is at the death of Stephen that Paul – then called Saul of Tarsus — makes his debut. He is said to have stood watch over the discarded clothes of Stephen’s murderers, though he may well have taken a more active role. In Acts 8:1, we are told that Saul ‘entirely approved of the killing’ of Stephen. And later, in Acts 9:21, Saul is accused of engineering precisely the kind of attack on the ‘early Church’ which culminated in Stephen’s death. Certainly Saul, at this stage of his life, is fervent, even fanatic, in his enmity towards the ‘early Church’. According to Acts 8:3, he ‘worked for the total destruction of the Church: he went from house to house arresting both men and women and sending them to prison’. At the time, of course, he is acting as a minion of the pro-Roman priesthood.

Acts 9 tells us of Saul’s conversion. Shortly after Stephen’s death, he embarks for Damascus to ferret out members of the ‘early Church’ there. He is accompanied by his hit-squad and bears arrest warrants from his master, the high priest. As we have noted, this expedition is likely to have been not to Syria, but to the Damascus that figures in the ‘Damascus Document’.⁵

En route to his destination, Saul undergoes some sort of traumatic experience, which commentators have interpreted as anything from sunstroke, to an epileptic seizure, to a mystical revelation (Acts 9:1-19; 22:6-16). A ‘light from heaven’ purportedly knocks him from his horse and ‘a voice’, issuing from no perceptible source, demands of him: ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ Saul asks the voice to identify itself. ‘I am Jesus, the Nazorene,’ the voice replies, ‘and you are persecuting me.’ The voice further instructs him to proceed to Damascus, where he will learn what he must subsequently do. When this visitation passes and Saul regains a semblance of his former consciousness, he finds he has been stricken temporarily blind. In Damascus, his sight will be restored by a member of the ‘early Church’ and he will allow himself to be baptised.

A modern psychologist would find nothing particularly unusual in Saul’s adventure. It may indeed have been produced by sunstroke or an epileptic seizure. It could equally well be ascribed to hallucination, hysterical or psychotic reaction or perhaps nothing more than the guilty conscience of a susceptible man with blood on his hands.

Saul, however, interprets it as a true manifestation of Jesus, whom he never knew personally; and from this his conversion ensues. He abandons his former name in favour of ‘Paul’. And he will subsequently be as fervent in promulgating the teachings of the ‘early Church’ as he has hitherto been in extirpating them. He joins their community, becomes one of their apprentices or disciples. According to his letter to the Galatians (Gal. 1:17-18), he remains under their tutelage for three years, spending much of that time in Damascus. According to the Dead Sea Scrolls, the probation and training period for a newcomer to the Qumran community was also three years.⁶

After his three-year apprenticeship, Paul returns to Jerusalem to join the leaders of the ‘community’ there. Not surprisingly, most of them are suspicious of him, not being wholly convinced by his conversion. In Galatians 1:18-20, he speaks of seeing only James and Cephas. Everyone else, including the apostles, seems to have avoided him. He is obliged repeatedly to prove himself, and only then does he find some allies and begin to preach. Arguments ensue, however, and, according to Acts 9:29, certain members of the Jerusalem community threaten him. As a means of defusing a potentially ugly situation, his allies pack him off to Tarsus, the town (now in Turkey) where he was born. He is, in effect, being sent home, to spread the message there.

It is important to understand that this was tantamount to exile. The community in Jerusalem, like that in Qumran, was preoccupied almost entirely with events in Palestine. The wider world, such as Rome, was relevant only to the extent that it impinged or encroached on their more localised reality. To send Paul off to Tarsus, therefore, might be compared to a Provisional IRA godfather sending a new, ill-disciplined and overly energetic recruit to muster support among the ‘Shining Path’ guerrillas of Peru. If, by improbable fluke, he somehow elicits men, money, materiel or anything else of value, well and good. If he gets himself disembowelled instead, he will not be unduly missed, having been more nuisance than asset anyway.

Thus arises the first of Paul’s three (according to Acts) sorties abroad. Among other places, it takes him to Antioch, and, as we learn from Acts 11:26, ‘It was at Antioch that the disciples were first called “Christians”.’ Commentators date Paul’s journey to Antioch at approximately ad 43. By that time, a community of the ‘early Church’ was already established there, which reported back to the sect’s leadership in Jerusalem under James.

Some five or more years later, Paul is teaching in Antioch when a dispute arises over the content of his missionary work. As Acts 15 explains, certain representatives of the leadership in Jerusalem arrive in Antioch, perhaps, Eisenman suggests, with the specific purpose of checking on Paul’s activities.⁷ They stress the importance of strict adherence to the Law and accuse Paul of laxity. He and his companion, Barnabas, are summarily ordered back to Jerusalem for personal consultation with the leadership. From this point on, a schism will open and widen between Paul and James; and the author of Acts, so far as the dispute is concerned, becomes Paul’s apologist.

In all the vicissitudes that follow, it must be emphasised that Paul is, in effect, the first ‘Christian’ heretic, and that his teachings — which become the foundation of later Christianity — are a flagrant deviation from the ‘original’ or ‘pure’ form extolled by the leadership. Whether James, ‘the Lord’s brother’, was literally Jesus’ blood kin or not (and everything suggests he was), it is clear that he knew Jesus, or the figure subsequently remembered as Jesus, personally. So did most of the other members of the community, or ‘early Church’, in Jerusalem — including, of course, Peter. When they spoke, they did so with first-hand authority. Paul had never had such personal acquaintance with the figure he’d begun to regard as his ‘Saviour’. He had only his quasi-mystical experience in the desert and the sound of a disembodied voice. For him to arrogate authority to himself on this basis is, to say the least, presumptuous. It also leads him to distort Jesus’ teachings beyond all recognition — to formulate, in fact, his own highly individual and idiosyncratic theology, and then to legitimise it by spuriously ascribing it to Jesus. For Jesus, adhering rigorously to Judaic Law, it would have been the most extreme blasphemy to advocate worship of any mortal figure, including himself. He makes this clear in the Gospels, urging his disciples, followers and listeners to acknowledge only God. In John 10:33-5, for example, Jesus is accused of the blasphemy of claiming to be God. He replies, citing Psalm 82, ‘Is it not written in your Law, I [meaning God in the psalm] said, you are Gods? So the Law uses the word gods of those to whom the word of God was addressed.’

Paul, in effect, shunts God aside and establishes, for the first time, worship of Jesus — Jesus as a kind of equivalent of Adonis, of Tammuz, of Attis, or of any one of the other dying and reviving gods who populated the Middle East at the time. In order to compete with these divine rivals, Jesus had to match them point for point, miracle for miracle. It is at this stage that many of the miraculous elements become associated with Jesus’ biography, including, in all probability, his supposed birth of a virgin and his resurrection from the dead. They are essentially Pauline inventions, often wildly at odds with the ‘pure’ doctrine promulgated by James and the rest of the community in Jerusalem. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that James and his entourage should be disturbed by what Paul is doing.

Yet Paul knows full well what he is doing. He understands, with a surprisingly modern sophistication, the techniques of religious propaganda;⁸ he understands what is necessary to turn a man into a god, and he goes about it more astutely than the Romans did with their emperors. As he himself pointedly acknowledges, he does not pretend to be purveying the historical Jesus, the individual whom James and Peter and Simeon knew personally. On the contrary, he acknowledges, in 2 Corinthians 11:3-4, that the community in Jerusalem are promulgating ‘another Jesus’. Their representatives, he says, call themselves ‘servants of righteousness’ — a characteristic Qumranic usage. They are now, to all intents and purposes, Paul’s adversaries.

In accordance with instructions issued to him, Paul returns from Antioch to Jerusalem — around ad 48-9, it is generally believed — and meets with the community’s leadership. Not surprisingly, another dispute ensues. If Acts is to be believed, James, for the sake of peace, agrees to compromise, thereby making it easier for ‘pagans’ to join the congregation. Somewhat improbably, he consents to relax certain aspects of the Law, while remaining adamant on others.

Paul pays lip service to the leadership. He still, at this point, needs their endorsement — not to legitimise his teachings, but to legitimise, and ensure the survival of, the communities he has founded abroad. He is already, however, bent on going his own way. He embarks on another mission of travel and preaching, punctuated (Acts 18:21) by another visit to Jerusalem. Most of his letters date from this period, between ad 50 and 58. It is clear from his letters that he has, by that time, become almost completely estranged from the leadership in Jerusalem and from their adherence to the Law.⁹ In his missive to the Galatians (c. ad 57), he alludes scathingly to ‘these people who are acknowledged leaders — not that their importance matters to me’ (Gal. 2:6). His theological position has also deviated irreparably from those who adhere rigorously to the Law. In the same letter to the Galatians (2:16), he states that ‘faith in Christ rather than fidelity to the Law is what justifies us, and… no one can be justified by keeping the Law’. Writing to the Philippians (3:9), he states: ‘I am no longer trying for perfection by my own efforts, the perfection that comes from the Law…’ These are the provocative and challenging statements of a self-proclaimed renegade. ‘Christianity’, as it will subsequently evolve from Paul, has by now severed virtually all connection with its roots, and can no longer be said to have anything to do with Jesus, only with Paul’s image of Jesus.

By ad 58, Paul is again back in Jerusalem — despite pleas from his supporters who, obviously fearing trouble with the hierarchy, have begged him not to go. Again, he meets with James and the leadership of the Jerusalem community. Employing the now familiar Qumranic formulation, they express the worry they share with other ‘zealots of the Law’ — that Paul, in his preaching to Jews living abroad, is encouraging them to forsake the Law of Moses.¹⁰ It is, of course, a justified accusation, as Paul has made clear in his letters. Acts does not record his response to it. The impression conveyed is that he lies, perjures himself and denies the charges against him. When asked to purify himself for seven days — thereby demonstrating the unjustness of the allegations and his continued adherence to the Law — he readily consents to do so.

A few days later, however, he again runs foul of those ‘zealous for the Law’, who are rather less temperate than James. On being seen at the Temple, he is attacked by a crowd of the pious. ‘This’, they claim in their anger, ‘is the man who preaches to everyone everywhere… against the Law’ (Acts 21:28ff). A riot ensues, and Paul is dragged out of the Temple, his life in danger. In the nick of time, he is rescued by a Roman officer who, having been told of the disturbance, appears with an entourage of soldiers. Paul is arrested and put in chains — on the initial assumption, apparently, that he is a leader of the Sicarii, the Zealot terrorist cadre.

At this point, the narrative becomes increasingly confused, and one can only suspect that parts of it have been altered or expurgated. According to the existing text, Paul, before the Romans can trundle him off, protests that he is a Jew of Tarsus and asks permission to address the crowd who had just been trying to lynch him. Weirdly enough, the Romans allow him to do so. Paul then expatiates on his Pharisaic training under Gamaliel (a famous teacher of the time), on his initial hostility towards the ‘early Church’, on his role in the death of Stephen, on his subsequent conversion. All of this — or perhaps only a part of it, though one cannot be certain which part — provokes the crowd to new ire. ‘Rid the earth of this man!’ they cry. ‘He is not fit to live!’ (Acts 22:22)

Ignoring these appeals, the Romans carry Paul off to ‘the fortress’ — presumably the Antonia fortress, the Roman military and administrative headquarters. Here, they intend to interrogate him under torture. Interrogate him for what? To determine why he provokes such hostility, according to Acts. Yet Paul has already made his position clear in public — unless there are elements of his speech that, in a fashion not made clear by the text, the Romans deemed dangerous or subversive. In any case, torture, by Roman law, could not be exercised on any individual possessing full and official Roman citizenship — which Paul, having been born of a wealthy family in Tarsus, conveniently does. Invoking this immunity, he escapes torture, but remains incarcerated.

In the meantime, a group of angry Jews, forty or more in number, meet in secret. They vow not to eat or drink until they have brought about Paul’s death. The sheer intensity and ferocity of this antipathy is worth noting. One does not expect such animosity — not to say such a preparedness for violence — from ‘ordinary’ Pharisees and Sadducees. Those who display it are obviously ‘zealous for the Law’. But the only such passionate adherents of the Law in Palestine at the time were those whose sacred texts came subsequently to light at Qumran. Thus, for example, Eisenman calls attention to a pivotal passage in the ‘Damascus Document’ which declares of a man that ‘if he transgresses after swearing to return to the Law of Moses with a whole heart and soul, then retribution shall be exacted from him’.¹¹

How can the violent action contemplated against Paul be reconciled with the later popular image, put forward by the consensus, of placid, ascetic, quietist Essenes? The clandestine conclave, the fervent vow to eradicate Paul — these are more characteristic of the militant Zealots and their special assassination units, the dreaded Sicarii. Here again there is an insistent suggestion that the Zealots on the one hand, and the ‘zealous for the Law’ at Qumran on the other, were one and the same.

Whoever they are, the would-be assassins, according to Acts, are thwarted by the sudden and opportune appearance of Paul’s hitherto unmentioned nephew, who somehow learns of their plot. This relative, of whom we know nothing more, informs both Paul and the Romans. That night, Paul is removed, for his own safety, from Jerusalem. He is removed with an escort of 470 troops — 200 infantry under the command of two centurions, 200 spearmen and 70 cavalry!¹² He is taken to Caesarea, the Roman capital of Judaea, where he appears before the governor and Rome’s puppet king, Agrippa. As a Roman citizen, however, Paul has a right to have his case heard in Rome, and he invokes this right. As a result, he is sent to Rome, ostensibly for trial. There is no indication of what he will be tried for.

After recounting his adventures on the journey — including a shipwreck — Acts ends. Or, rather, it breaks off, as if the author were interrupted in his work, or as if someone had removed the original ending and inserted a perfunctory finale instead. There are, of course, numerous later traditions — that Paul was imprisoned, that he obtained a personal audience with the emperor, that he was freed and went to Spain, that Nero ordered his execution, that he encountered Peter in Rome (or in prison in Rome), that he and Peter were executed together. But neither in Acts nor in any other reliable document is there a basis for any of these stories. Perhaps the original ending of Acts was indeed excised or altered. Perhaps Luke, the author, simply did not know ‘what happened next’ and, not being concerned with aesthetic symmetry, simply allowed himself to conclude lamely. Or perhaps, as Eisenman has suggested — and this possibility will be considered later — Luke did know, but deliberately cut short his narrative (or was cut short by later editors) in order to conceal his knowledge.

The last sections of Acts — from the riot inspired in the Temple on — are muddled, confused and riddled with unanswered questions. Elsewhere, however, Acts is ostensibly simple enough. On one level, there is the narrative of Paul’s conversion and subsequent adventures. But behind this account looms a chronicle of increasing friction between two factions within the original community in Jerusalem, the ‘early Church’. One of these factions consists of ‘hardliners’, who echo the teachings of Qumranic texts and insist on rigorous observance of the Law. The other, exemplified by Paul and his immediate supporters, want to relax the Law and, by making it easier for people to join the congregation, to increase the number of new recruits. The ‘hardliners’ are less concerned with numbers than with doctrinal purity, and seem to have only a cursory interest in events or developments outside Palestine; nor do they display any desire for an accommodation with Rome. Paul, on the other hand, is prepared to dispense with doctrinal purity. His primary objective is to disseminate his message as widely as possible and to assemble the largest possible body of adherents. In order to attain this objective, he goes out of his way to avoid antagonising the authorities and is perfectly willing to come to an accommodation with Rome, even to curry favour.

The ‘early Church’, then, as it appears in Acts, is rent by incipient schism, the instigator of which is Paul. Paul’s chief adversary is the enigmatic figure of James, ‘the Lord’s brother’. It is clear that James is the acknowledged leader of the community in Jerusalem that becomes known to later tradition as the ‘early Church’.¹³ For the most part, James comes across as a ‘hardliner’, though he does — if Acts is to be believed — display a willingness to compromise on certain points. All the evidence suggests, however, that even this modest flexibility reflects some licence on the part of the author of Acts. James could not, obviously, have been excised from the narrative — his role, presumably, would have been too well-known. In consequence, he could only be played down somewhat, and portrayed as a conciliatory figure — a figure occupying a position somewhere between Paul and the extreme ‘hardliners’.

In any case, the ‘sub-text’ of Acts reduces itself to a clash between two powerful personalities, James and Paul. Eisenman has demonstrated that James emerges as the custodian of the original body of teachings, the exponent of doctrinal purity and rigorous adherence to the Law. The last thing he would have had in mind was founding a ‘new religion’. Paul is doing precisely that. Paul’s Jesus is a full-fledged god, whose biography, miracle for miracle, comes to match those of the rival deities with whom he is competing for devotees — one sells gods, after all, on the same marketing principles that obtain for soap or pet food. By James’s standards — indeed, by the standards of any devout Jew — this, of course, is blasphemy and apostasy. Given the passions roused by such issues, the rift between James and Paul would hardly have been confined, as Acts suggests it was, to the level of civilised debate. It would have generated the kind of murderous hostility that surfaces at the end of the narrative.

In the conflict between James and Paul, the emergence and evolution of what we call Christianity stood at a crossroads. Had the mainstream of its development conformed to James’s teachings, there would have been no Christianity at all, only a particular species of Judaism which might or might not have emerged as dominant. As things transpired, however, the mainstream of the new movement gradually coalesced, during the next three centuries, around Paul and his teachings. Thus, to the undoubted posthumous horror of James and his associates, an entirely new religion was indeed born — a religion which came to have less and less to do with its supposed founder.

13. James ‘The Righteous’

If James played so important a role in the events of the time, why do we know so little about him? Why has he been relegated to the status of a shadowy figure in the background? Those questions can be answered simply enough. Eisenman stresses that James, whether he was literally Jesus’ brother or not, had known Jesus personally in a way that Paul never did. In his teachings, he was certainly closer to ‘the source’ than Paul ever was. And his objectives and preoccupations were often at variance with Paul’s — were sometimes, indeed, diametrically opposed. For Paul, then, James would have been a constant irritant. With the triumph of Pauline Christianity, therefore, James’s significance, if it couldn’t be obliterated completely, had, at the very least, to be diminished.

Unlike a number of personalities in the New Testament, James does seem to have been an historical personage, and, moreover, one who played a more prominent role in the affairs of his time than is generally recognised. There is, in fact, a reasonably copious body of literature pertaining to James, even though most of it lies outside the canonical compilation of the New Testament.

In the New Testament itself, James is mentioned in the Gospels as one of Jesus’ brothers, though the context is generally vague or confusing and has obviously been tampered with. In Acts, as we have discussed, he assumes rather more prominence, though it is not until the second part of Acts that he emerges in any kind of perspective. Then, with Paul’s letter to the Galatians, he is clearly identified as the leader of the ‘early Church’, who resides in Jerusalem and is attended by a council of elders.¹ Apart from those that impinge on Paul, however, one learns little of his activities, and even less about his personality and biography. Neither is the Letter of James in the New Testament of much value in this respect. The letter may indeed derive from a text by James, and Eisenman has drawn attention to its Qumranic style, language and imagery.² It contains (James 5:6) an accusation whose significance will become apparent shortly — an accusation to the effect that ‘you murdered the righteous [or just] man’.³ Again, however, no personal information is vouchsafed.

Such is James’s role in scripture proper. But if one looks further afield, a portrait of James does begin to emerge. This is the research which Eisenman has been pursuing over the last few years. One source of information he has emphasised is an anonymous text of the ‘early Church’, the so-called ‘Recognitions of Clement’, which surfaced very early in the 3rd century. According to this document, James is preaching in the Temple when an unnamed ‘enemy’, accompanied by an entourage of followers, bursts in. The ‘enemy’ taunts James’s listeners and drowns out his words with noise, then proceeds to inflame the crowd ‘with revilings and abuse, and, like a madman, to excite everyone to murder, saying “What do ye? Why do ye hesitate? Oh, sluggish and inert, why do we not lay hands upon them, and pull all these fellows to pieces?”’⁴ The ‘enemy’ does not confine himself to a verbal assault. Seizing a brand of wood, he begins to flail about with it at the assembled worshippers, and his entourage follow suit. A full-scale riot ensues:

James, however, is not dead. According to the ‘Recognitions’, his supporters carry him back to his house in Jerusalem. The next morning, before dawn, the injured man and his supporters flee the city, making their way to Jericho, where they remain for some time — presumably while James convalesces.⁶

For Eisenman, this attack on James is pivotal. He notes the parallels between it and the attack on Stephen as recounted in Acts. He suggests that Stephen may be an invented figure, to disguise the fact that the attack — as Acts could not possibly have admitted — was really directed at James. And he points out that Jericho, where James flees for refuge, is only a few miles from Qumran. What is more, he argues, the flight to Jericho has a ring of historical truth to it. It is the kind of incidental detail that is unlikely to have been fabricated and interpolated, because it serves no particular purpose. As for the ‘enemy’, there would seem to be little doubt about his identity. The ‘Recognitions of Clement’ concludes:

The surviving editions of Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews contain only one reference to James, which may or may not be later interpolation. The chronicle reports that the Sanhedrin, the religious high court, call before them James, ‘the brother of Jesus who was called Christ’.⁸ Accused (most improbably) of breaking the Law, James and certain of his companions are found guilty and accordingly stoned to death. Whether this account is accurate, doctored or wholly invented, the most important aspect of it is the date to which it refers. Josephus indicates that the events he has described occurred during an interval between Roman procurators in Judaea. The incumbent procurator had just died. His successor, Lucceius Albinus, was still en route to Palestine from Rome. During the interregnum, effective power in Jerusalem was wielded by the high priest, an unpopular man named Ananas. This allows the account of James’s death to be dated at around ad 62 — only four years before the outbreak of the revolt in ad 66. Here, then, is at least some chronological evidence that James’s death may have had something to do with the war that ravaged the Holy Land between ad 66 and 73. For further information, however, one must turn to later Church historians.

Perhaps the major source is Eusebius, 4th-century Bishop of Caesarea (the Roman capital of Judaea) and author of one of the most important early Church histories. In accordance with the conventions of the time, Eusebius quotes at length from earlier writers, many of whose works have not survived. In speaking of James, he cites Clement, Bishop of Alexandria (c. ad 150-215). Clement refers to James, we are told, as ‘the Righteous’, or, as it is often translated, ‘the Just’ — ‘Zaddik’ in Hebrew.⁹ This, of course, is the by now familiar Qumranic usage, whence derives the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’, the leader of the Qumran community. According to Clement, Eusebius reports, James was thrown from a parapet of the Temple, then beaten to death with a club.¹⁰

Later in his chronicle, Eusebius quotes extensively from a 2nd-century Church historian, Hegesippus. All of Hegesippus’ works were reputedly extant as late as the 16th or 17th century. Everything has since disappeared, though copies may well exist in the Vatican, as well as in the library of one or another monastery — in Spain, for example.¹¹ At present, however, almost everything we have by Hegesippus is contained in the excerpts from his work cited by Eusebius.

Quoting Hegesippus, Eusebius states that James ‘the Righteous’ ‘was holy from his birth’:

At this point, it is worth interrupting the text to note certain intriguing details. James is said to wear linen, or priestly robes. This was the prerogative of those who served in the Temple and belonged to one of the priestly families, traditionally the Sadducean ‘aristocracy’ who, during the 1st century, came to an accommodation with Rome and the Herodian dynasty of Roman puppets. Again, Eisenman points out, Epiphanius, another Church historian, speaks of James wearing the mitre of the high priest.¹³ Then, too, only the high priest was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctum and most sacred spot in the Temple. What, then, can James be doing there — and without eliciting any explanation or expression of surprise from Church historians, who seem to find nothing untoward or irregular in his activities? Did he, perhaps, by virtue of his birth, have some legitimate right to wear priestly apparel and enter the Holy of Holies? Or might he have been acting, as Eisenman suggests, in the capacity of a kind of ‘opposition high priest’ — a rebel who, defying the established priesthood’s accommodation with Rome, had taken upon himself the role they had betrayed?¹⁴ Certainly the established priesthood had no affection for James. According to Hegesippus, the ‘Scribes and Pharisees’ decide to do away with him, so that the people ‘will be frightened and not believe him’. They proclaim that ‘even the Righteous one has gone astray’,¹⁵ and invoke a quote from the Old Testament — in this case from the prophet Isaiah (Isa. 3:10) — to justify their actions. They note that Isaiah had prophesied the death of the ‘Righteous One’. In murdering James, therefore, they will simply be bringing Isaiah’s prophecy to fulfilment. But also, in using this quote from Isaiah, they are following a technique employed in both the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament. Eisenman points out that, just as this quote is used in order to describe the death of James, so the Qumran community employs similar ‘Righteousness’ passages from the New Testament in order to describe the death of the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’.¹⁶ Eusebius goes on to describe the death of James in the following manner:

Vespasian, who became emperor in AD 69, commanded the Roman army that invaded Judaea to put down the revolt of ad 66. Here again, then, is a chronological connection between James’s death and the revolt. But Eusebius goes further. The connection for him is more than just chronological. The entire ‘siege of Jerusalem’, he says, meaning presumably the whole of the revolt in Judaea, was a direct consequence of James’s death — ‘for no other reason than the wicked crime of which he had been the victim’.¹⁸

To support this startling contention, Eusebius invokes Josephus. The passage of Josephus he quotes, although no longer to be found in any extant version of Josephus, was unquestionably what Josephus wrote, because Origen, one of the earliest and most prolific of the Church Fathers, quotes precisely the same passage. Referring to the revolt of AD 66 and the Roman invasion that followed, Josephus states that ‘these things happened to the Jews in requital for James the Righteous, who was a brother of Jesus known as Christ, for though he was the most righteous of men, the Jews put him to death’. ¹⁹

From these fragments pertaining to James, a scenario begins to take form. James, the acknowledged leader of the ‘early Church’ in Jerusalem, represents a faction of Jews who, like the Qumran community, are ‘zealous for the Law’. This faction is understandably hostile towards the Sadducee priesthood and the high priest Ananas (appointed by Herod²⁰), who have betrayed their nation and their religion by concluding an accord with the Roman administration and its Herodian puppet-kings. So intense is this hostility that James arrogates to himself the priestly functions which Ananas has compromised.²¹ Ananas’ supporters respond by contriving James’s death. Almost immediately thereafter, the whole of Judaea rises in revolt, and Ananas is himself one of the first casualties, assassinated as a pro-Roman collaborator. As the rebellion gains momentum, Rome is forced to react, and does so by dispatching an expeditionary force under Vespasian. The result is the war which witnesses the sack of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in AD 68, and which does not end until the fall of Masada in AD 74.

The only uncertain element in this scenario is the nature and magnitude of the part played by James’s death. Did it merely coincide chronologically? Or was it, as Josephus and Eusebius assert, the primary causal factor? The truth, almost certainly, lies somewhere in between: the revolt stemmed from enough contributing factors for the historian not to have had to fall back on James’s de2th as a sole explanation. On the other hand, the evidence unquestionably indicates that James’s death was not just a marginal incident. It would seem to have had at least something to do with the course of public events.

In any case James, as a result of Eisenman’s analysis, indubitably emerges as a more important personage in 1st-century history than Christian tradition has hitherto acknowledged. And the ‘early Church’ emerges in a very different light. It is no longer a congregation of devotees eschewing politics and public affairs, pursuing a course of personal salvation and aspiring to no kingdom other than that of heaven. On the contrary, it becomes one of the manifestations of Judaic nationalism at the time — a body of militant individuals intent on upholding the Law, deposing the corrupt Sadducee priesthood of the Temple, toppling the dynasty of illegitimate puppet-kings and driving the occupying Romans from the Holy Land. In all these respects, it conforms to conventional images of the Zealots.

But what has all this to do with Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls?

From the Acts of the Apostles, from Josephus and from early Christian historians, there emerges a coherent, if still incomplete, portrait of James, ‘the Lord’s brother’. He appears as an exemplar of’righteousness’ — so much so that ‘the Just’, or ‘the Righteous’, is appended as a sobriquet to his name. He is the acknowledged leader of a ‘sectarian’ religious community whose members are ‘zealous for the Law’. He must contend with two quite separate and distinct adversaries. One of these is Paul, an outsider who, having first persecuted the community, then converts and is admitted into it, only to turn renegade, prevaricate and quarrel with his superiors, hijack the image of Jesus and begin preaching his own doctrine — a doctrine which draws on that of the community, but distorts it. James’s second adversary is from outside the community — the high priest Ananas, head of the Sadducee priesthood. Ananas is a notoriously corrupt and widely hated man. He has also betrayed both the God and the people of Israel by collaborating with the Roman administration and their Herodian puppet-kings. James publicly challenges Ananas and eventually meets his death at the hands of Ananas’ minions; but Ananas will shortly be assassinated in turn. All of this takes place against a backdrop of increasing social and political unrest and the impending invasion of a foreign army.

With this scenario in mind, Eisenman turned to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and particularly the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’. When the fragmentary details of the Qumran texts had been assembled into a coherent sequence, what emerged was something extraordinarily similar to the chronicle of Acts, Josephus and early Christian historians. The scrolls told their own story, at the centre of which was a single protagonist, the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ — an exemplar of the same virtues associated with James. Like James, the ‘Teacher’ was the acknowledged leader of a ‘sectarian’ religious community whose members were ‘zealous for the Law’. And like James, the ‘Teacher’ had to contend with two quite separate and distinct adversaries.

One of these was dubbed the ‘Liar’, an outsider who was admitted to the community, then turned renegade, quarrelled with the ‘Teacher’ and hijacked part of the community’s doctrine and membership. According to the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’, the ‘Liar’ ‘did not listen to the word received by the Teacher of Righteousness from the mouth of God’.²² Instead, he appealed to ‘the unfaithful of the New Covenant in that they have not believed in the Covenant of God and have profaned His holy name’.²³ The text states explicitly that ‘the Liar… flouted the Law in the midst of their whole congregation’.²⁴ He ‘led many astray’ and raised ‘a congregation on deceit’.²⁵ He himself is said to be ‘pregnant with [works] of deceit’.²⁶ These, of course, are precisely the transgressions of which Paul is accused in Acts — transgressions which lead, at the end of Acts, to the attempt on his life. And Eisenman stresses Paul’s striking hypersensitivity to charges of prevarication and perjury.²⁷ In 1 Timothy 2:7, for example, he asserts indignantly, as if defending himself, that ‘I am telling the truth and no lie’. In II Corinthians 11:31, he swears that: ‘The God and Father of the Lord Jesus… knows that I am not lying.’ These are but two instances; Paul’s letters reveal an almost obsessive desire to exculpate himself from implied accusations of falsity.

According to the Dead Sea Scrolls, the ‘Liar’ was the adversary of the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ from within the community. The ‘Teacher’s’ second adversary was from outside. This was the ‘Wicked Priest’, a corrupt representative of the establishment who had betrayed his function and his faith.²⁸ He conspired to exterminate the ‘Poor’ — those ‘zealous for the Law’ — said to be scattered about Jerusalem and other places. He harried the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ wherever the ‘Teacher’ sought refuge. At the hands of the ‘Wicked Priest’s’ minions, the ‘Teacher’ suffered some serious injury and possibly — the text is vague on the matter — death. Subsequently, the ‘Wicked Priest’ was himself assassinated by followers of the ‘Teacher’, who, after killing him, ‘took vengeance upon his body of flesh’ — that is, defiled his corpse.²⁹ The parallels between the ‘Wicked Priest’ of the scrolls and the historical figure of the high priest Ananas are unmistakable.

In his book on James, Eisenman explores these parallels — James, Paul and Ananas on the one hand, the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’, the ‘Liar’ and the ‘Wicked Priest’ on the other — in exhaustive detail. He goes through the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’ and other texts line by line, comparing them with information vouchsafed by Acts, by Josephus and by early Christian historians. In our own pages, it would be impossible to do adequate justice to the weight of evidence he amasses. But the conclusions of this evidence are inescapable. The ‘Habakkuk Commentary’ and certain other of the Dead Sea Scrolls are referring to the same events as those recounted in Acts, in Josephus and in the works of early Christian historians.

This conclusion is reinforced by the striking and pervasive recurrence of Qumranic philosophy and imagery in Acts, in the Letter of James and in Paul’s copious epistles. It is also reinforced by the revelation that the place for which Paul embarks and in which he spends three years as a postulant is in fact Qumran, not the city in Syria. Even the one fragment that would not, at first, appear to fit — the fact that the persecution and death of James occurs quite specifically in Jerusalem, while the Dead Sea Scrolls have been assumed to chronicle events in Qumran — is explained within the texts themselves. The ‘Habakkuk Commentary’ states explicitly that the leadership of the community were in Jerusalem at the relevant time.³⁰

There is another point which Eisenman stresses as being particularly important. In the Letter to the Romans (1:17), Paul states that ‘this is what reveals the justice of God to us: it shows how faith leads to faith, or as scripture says: the upright man finds life through faith’. The same theme appears in the Letter to the Galatians (3:11): ‘the Law will not justify anyone in the sight of God, because we are told: the righteous man finds life through faith’.

These two statements constitute, in effect, ‘the starting-point of the theological concept of faith’. They are ultimately, as Eisenman says, ‘the foundation piece of Pauline theology’.³¹ They provide the basis on which Paul is able to make his stand against James — is able to extol the supremacy of faith, while James extols the supremacy of the Law.

From where does Paul derive this principle of the supremacy of faith? It was certainly not an accepted part of Judaic teaching at the time. In fact, it derives from the original Book of Habakkuk, a text of Old Testament apocrypha believed to date from the mid-7th century BC. According to Chapter 2, Verse 4 of the Book of Habakkuk, ‘the upright man will live by his faithfulness’. Paul’s words in his letters are clearly an echo of this statement; and the Book of Habakkuk is clearly the ‘scripture’ to which Paul refers.

More important still, however, is the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’ — the gloss and exegesis on part of the Book of Habakkuk found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The ‘Habakkuk Commentary’ cites the same statement and then proceeds to elaborate upon it:

This extraordinary passage is tantamount, in effect, to a formulation of early ‘Christian’ doctrine. It states explicitly that suffering, and faith in the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’, constitute the path to deliverance and salvation. From this passage in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Paul must have derived the foundation for the whole of his own theology. But the passage in question declares unequivocally that suffering and faith in the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ will lead to deliverance only among ‘those who observe the Law in the House of Judah’.³³ It is just such emphasis on adherence to the Law that Paul contrives to ignore, thereby precipitating his doctrinal dispute with James and the other members of the ‘early Church’.

14. Zeal for the Law

According to Robert Eisenman, the Qumran community emerges from the Dead Sea Scrolls as a movement of a very different nature to that of the Essenes of popular tradition. This movement has centres not just in Qumran, but in a number of other places as well, including Jerusalem. It can exercise considerable influence, can wield considerable power, can command considerable support. It can dispatch Paul, as well as many others, on embassies of recruitment and fund-raising abroad. It can organise riots and public disturbances. It can plot assassinations (such as that attempted on Paul at the end of Acts and, subsequently, that of Ananas). It can put forward its own legitimate alternative candidate for the position of the Temple’s high priest. It can capture and hold strategically important fortresses such as Masada. Most significantly of all, it can galvanise the entire population of Judaea around it and instigate a full-fledged revolt against Rome — a revolt which leads to a major conflict of seven years’ duration and necessitates the intervention not of a few detachments, but of an entire Roman army. Given the range and magnitude of these activities, it is clear that traditional images of the Essenes and of the ‘early Church’ are woefully inadequate. It is equally clear that the movement which manifested itself through the Qumran community and the ‘early Church’ also manifested itself through other groups generally deemed to be separate — the ‘Zadokites’, for example, the Zealots and the Sicarii.

Eisenman’s research has revealed the underlying simplicity of what had previously seemed a dauntingly complicated situation. As he says, ‘terms like: Ebionim, Nozrim, Hassidim, Zaddikim (i.e., Ebionites, Palestinian Christians, Essenes, and Zadokites), turn out to be variations on the same theme’¹, while ‘the various phraseologies the community at Qumran used to refer to itself, e.g. ‘sons of light’… do not all designate different groups, but function as interchangeable metaphors’.²

The militant Zealots and Sicarii will prove similarly to be variations on the same theme, manifestations of the same movement. This movement is militant, nationalistic, revolutionary, xenophobic and messianic in character. Although rooted in Old Testament times, it coalesces during the Maccabean period of the 2nd century BC; but the events of the 1st century of the Christian era will imbue it with a new and particularly ferocious momentum. At the core of the movement lies the question of dynastic legitimacy — legitimacy not just of the ruling house, but of the priesthood. In the beginning, indeed, priestly legitimacy is the more important.

The legitimacy of the priesthood had become crucial in Old Testament times. It was supposed to descend lineally from Aaron through the Tribe of Levi. Thus, throughout the Old Testament, the priesthood is the unique preserve of the Levites. The Levite high priests who attend David and Solomon are referred to as ‘Zadok’ — though it is not clear whether this is a personal name or an hereditary title.³ Solomon is anointed by Zadok, thereby becoming ‘the Anointed One’, the ‘Messiah’ — ‘ha-mashi’ah’ in Hebrew. But the high priests were themselves also anointed and were also, in consequence, ‘Messiahs’. In Old Testament times, then, the people of Israel are, in effect, governed by two parallel lines of’Messiahs’, or ‘Anointed Ones’. One of these lines presides over spiritual affairs and descends from the Tribe of Levi through Aaron. The other, in the form of the kingship, presides over secular affairs and traces itself, through David, to the Tribe of Judah. This, of course, explains the references in the Dead Sea Scrolls to ‘the Messiah(s) of Aaron and of Israel’, or ‘of Aaron and of David’. The principle is essentially similar to that whereby, during the Middle Ages in Europe, Pope and Emperor were supposed to preside jointly over the Holy Roman Empire.

The priestly line invoking a lineage from Aaron maintained their status until the Babylonian invasion of 587 BC. In 538 BC, when the ‘Babylonian Captivity’ ended, the priesthood quickly re-established itself, again claiming a descent (metaphorical, if not literal) from Aaron. In 333 BC, however, Alexander the Great overran the Holy Land. For the next 160-odd years, Palestine was to be ruled by a succession of Hellenistic, or Greek-oriented, dynasties. The priesthood, during this period, spawned a bewildering multitude of claimants, many of whom adapted, partially or completely, to Hellenistic ways, Hellenistic life-styles, Hellenistic values and attitudes. As is often the case in such circumstances, the general liberalising tendency engendered a ‘hard-line’ conservative reaction. There arose a movement which deplored the relaxed, heterodox and ‘permissive’ atmosphere, the indifference to old traditions, the defilement and pollution of the ancient ‘purity’, the defiance of the sacred Law. This movement undertook to rid Palestine of Hellenised collaborators and libertines, who had, it was felt, by their very presence, desecrated the Temple.

According to the first book of Maccabees, the movement first asserted itself — probably around 167 BC — when Mattathias Maccabaeus, a country priest, was ordered by a Greek officer to sacrifice on a pagan altar, in defiance of Judaic law. Enraged by this blasphemous sight, Mattathias, who ‘burned with zeal for the Law’ (1 Mace. 2:26), summarily killed a fellow Jew who complied, along with the Greek officer. In effect, as Eisenman has said, Mattathias thus became the first ‘Zealot’.⁴ Immediately after his action in the Temple, he raised the cry of revolt: ‘Let everyone who is zealous for the Law and supports the Covenant come out with me’ (1 Mace. 2:27). Thereupon, he took to the countryside with his sons, Judas, Simon, Jonathan and two others, as well as with an entourage called the ‘Hasidaeans’ — ‘mighty warriors of Israel, every one who offered himself willingly for the Law’ (1 Mace. 2:42). And when Mattathias, a year or so later, lay on his deathbed, he exhorted his sons and followers to ‘show zeal for the Law and give your lives for the Covenant of our fathers’ (1 Mace. 2:50).

On Mattathias’s death, control of the movement passed to his son, Judas, who ‘withdrew into the wilderness, and lived like wild animals in the hills with his companions, eating nothing but wild plants to avoid contracting defilement’ (2 Mace. 5:27). This attests to what will eventually become an important principle and ritual — that of purifying oneself by withdrawing into the wilderness and, as a species of initiation, living for a time in seclusion. Here, Eisenman suggests, is the origin of remote communities such as Qumran, the first foundation of which dates from Maccabean times.⁵ It is, in effect, the equivalent of the modern ‘retreat’. In the New Testament, of course, the supreme exemplar of self-purification in remote solitude is John the Baptist, who ‘preached in the wilderness’ and ate ‘locusts and honey’. But it must be remembered that Jesus, too, undergoes a probationary initiatory experience in the desert.

From the fastnesses to which they had withdrawn, Judas Maccabaeus, his brothers and his companions embarked on a prolonged campaign of guerrilla operations which escalated into a full-scale revolt and mobilised the people as a whole. By 152 bc, the Maccabeans had wrested control of the Holy Land, pacified the country and installed themselves in power. Their first act, on capturing the Temple, was to ‘purify’ it by removing all pagan trappings. It is significant that though the Maccabeans were simultaneously de facto kings and priests, the latter office was more important to them. They hastened to regularise their status in the priesthood, as custodians of the Law. They did not bother to call themselves kings until the fourth generation of their dynasty, between 103 and 76 bc.

From the bastion of the priesthood, the Maccabeans promulgated the Law with fundamentalist ferocity. They were fond of invoking the Old Testament legend of the ‘Covenant of Phineas’, which appears in the Book of Numbers.⁶ Phineas was said to be a priest and a grandson of Aaron, active after the Hebrews had fled Egypt under Moses and established themselves in Palestine. Shortly thereafter, their numbers are devastated by plague. Phineas turns on one man in particular, who has taken a pagan foreigner to wife; seizing a spear, he promptly dispatches the married couple. God, at that point, declares that Phineas is the only man to ‘have the same zeal as I have’. And He makes a covenant with Phineas. Henceforth, in reward for his zeal for his God (1 Mace. 2:54), Phineas and his descendants will hold the priesthood for all time.

Such was the figure to whom the Maccabean priesthood looked as a ‘role model’. Like Phineas, they condemned all relations, of any kind, with pagans and foreigners. Like Phineas, they insisted on, and sought to embody, ‘zeal for the Law’. This ‘xenophobic antagonism’ to foreign ways, foreign wives etc. was to be passed on as a legacy, and ‘would seem to have been characteristic of the whole Zealot/Zadokite orientation’.⁷

Whether the Maccabeans could claim a literal pedigree from Aaron and from David is not certain. Probably they couldn’t. But their ‘zeal for the Law’ served to legitimise them. During their dynasty, therefore, Israel could claim both a priesthood and a monarchy that conformed more or less to the stringent criteria of Old Testament authority.

All of this ended, of course, with the accession of Herod in 37 bc, installed as a puppet by the Romans who had overrun Palestine a quarter of a century before. At first, before he had consolidated his position, Herod was also preoccupied by questions of legitimacy. Thus, for example, he contrived to legitimise himself by marrying a Maccabean princess. No sooner was his position secure, however, than he proceeded to murder his wife and her brother, rendering the Maccabean line effectively extinct. He also removed or destroyed the upper echelons of the priesthood, which he filled with his own favourites and minions. These are the ‘Sadducees’ known to history through biblical sources and through Josephus. Eisenman suggests that the term ‘Sadducee’ was originally a variant, or perhaps a corruption, of’Zadok’ or ‘Zaddikirn — the ‘Righteous Ones’ in Hebrew, which the priesthood of the Maccabeans unquestionably were.⁸ The ‘Sadducees’ installed by Herod were, however, very different. They were firmly aligned with the usurping monarch. They enjoyed an easy and comfortable life of prestige and privilege. They exercised a lucrative monopoly over the Temple and everything associated with the Temple. And they had no concept whatever of ‘zeal for the Law’. Israel thus found itself under the yoke of a corrupt illegitimate monarchy and a corrupt illegitimate priesthood, both of which were ultimately instruments of pagan Rome.

As in the days of Mattathias Maccabaeus, this situation inevitably provoked a reaction. If Herod’s puppet priests became the ‘Sadducees’ of popular tradition, their adversaries — the ‘purists’ who remained ‘zealous for the Law’ — became known to history under a variety of different names.⁹ In certain contexts — the Qumran literature, for example — these adversaries were called ‘Zadokites’ or ‘Sons of Zadok’. In the New Testament, they were called ‘Nazorenes’ — and, subsequently, ‘early Christians’. In Josephus, they were called ‘Zealots’ and ‘Sicarii’. The Romans, of course, regarded them as ‘terrorists’, ‘outlaws’ and ‘brigands’. In modern terminology, they might be called ‘messianic revolutionary fundamentalists’.¹⁰

Whatever the terminology one uses, the religious and political situation in Judaea had, by the beginning of the 1st century AD, provoked widespread opposition to the Herodian regime, the pro-Herodian priesthood and the machinery of the Roman Empire, which sustained and loomed behind both. By the 1st century ad, there were thus two rival and antagonistic factions of ‘Sadducees’. On the one hand, there were the Sadducees of the New Testament and Josephus, the ‘Herodian Sadducees’; on the other hand, there was a ‘true’ or ‘purist’ Sadducee movement, which repudiated all such collaboration and remained fervently loyal to three traditional governing principles — a priesthood or priestly ‘Messiah’ claiming descent from Aaron, a royal ‘Messiah’ claiming descent from David and, above all, ‘zeal for the Law’.¹¹

It will by this time have become clear to the reader that ‘zeal for the Law’ is not a casually used phrase. On the contrary, it is used very precisely in the way that such phrases as ‘brethren of the craft’ might be used in Freemasonry; and whenever the phrase, or some variant of it, occurs, it offers a vital clue to the researcher, indicating to him a certain group of people or movement. Given this fact, it becomes strained and disingenuous to argue — as adherents of the consensus do — that there must be some distinction between the Qumran community, who extol ‘zeal for the Law’, and the Zealots of popular tradition.

The Zealots of popular tradition are generally acknowledged to have been founded at the dawn of the Christian era by a figure known as Judas of Galilee, or, more accurately perhaps, Judas of Gamala. Judas launched his revolt immediately after the death of Herod the Great in 4 bc. One particularly revealing aspect of this revolt is cited by Josephus. At once, ‘as soon as mourning for Herod was over’, public demand was whipped up for the incumbent Herodian high priest to be deposed and another, ‘of greater piety and purity’, to be installed in his place.¹² Accompanied by a priest known as ‘Sadduc’ — apparently a Greek transliteration of ‘Zadok’, or, as suggested by Eisenman, Zaddik, the Hebrew for ‘Righteous One’ — Judas and his followers promptly raided the royal armoury in the Galilean city of Sepphoris, plundering weapons and equipment for themselves. Around the same time — either just before or just after — Herod’s palace at Jericho, near Qumran, was attacked by arsonists and burned down.¹³ These events were to be followed by some seventy-five years of incessant guerrilla warfare and terrorist activity, culminating in the full-scale military operations of AD 66-73.

In The Jewish Wars, written in the volatile aftermath of the revolt, Josephus states that Judas of Galilee had founded ‘a peculiar sect of his own’.¹⁴ Josephus’ second major work, however, Antiquities of the Jews, was composed a quarter of a century or so later, when the general atmosphere was rather less fraught. In this work, therefore, Josephus could afford to be more explicit.¹⁵ He states that Judas and Sadduc ‘became zealous’, implying something tantamount to a conversion — a conversion to some recognised attitude or state of mind. Their movement, he says, constituted ‘the fourth sect of Jewish philosophy’, and the youth of Israel ‘were zealous for it’.¹⁶ From the very beginning, the movement was characterised by Messianic aspirations. Sadduc embodied the figure of the priestly Messiah descended from Aaron. And Judas, according to Josephus, had an ‘ambitious desire of the royal dignity’ — the status of the royal Messiah descended from David.¹⁷

Judas himself appears to have been killed fairly early in the fighting. His mantle of leadership passed to his sons, of whom there were three. Two of them, Jacob and Simon, were well-known ‘Zealot’ leaders, captured and crucified by the Romans some time between AD 46 and 48. The third son (or perhaps grandson), Menahem, was one of the chief instigators of the revolt of AD 66. In its early days, when the revolt still promised to be successful, Menahem is described as making a triumphal entry into Jerusalem, ‘in the state of a king’ — another manifestation of messianic dynastic ambitions.¹⁸ In AD 66, Menahem also captured the fortress of Masada. The bastion’s last commander, known to history as Eleazar, was another descendant of Judas of Galilee, though the precise nature of the relationship has never been established.

The mass suicide of ‘Zealot’ defenders at Masada has become a familiar historical event, the focus of at least two novels, a cinema film and a television mini-series. It has already been referred to in this book, and there will be occasion to look at it more closely shortly. Masada, however, was not the only instance of such mass suicide. In AD 67, responding to the rebellion sweeping the Holy Land, a Roman army advanced on Gamala In Galilee, the original home of Judas and his sons. Four thousand Jews died trying to defend the town. When their efforts proved futile, another five thousand committed suicide. This reflects something more than mere political opposition. It attests to a dimension of religious fanaticism. Such a dimension is expressed by Josephus, who, speaking of the ‘Zealots’, says: ‘They… do not value dying any kinds of death, nor indeed do they heed the deaths of their relations and friends, nor can any such fear make them call any man Lord…’¹⁹ To acknowledge a Roman emperor as a god, which Rome demanded, would have been, for the ‘Zealots’, the most outrageous blasphemy.²⁰ To such a transgression of the Law, death would indeed have been preferable.

’Zeal for the Law’ effectively brings the ‘Zealots’ — usually envisaged as more or less secular ‘freedom fighters’ — into alignment with the fervently religious members of the Qumran community; and, as we have already noted, Qumranic texts were found in the ruins of Masada. ‘Zeal for the Law’ also brings the ‘Zealots’ into alignment with the so-called ‘early Church’, to whose adherents the same ‘zeal’ is repeatedly ascribed. The figure cited in the Gospels as ‘Simon Zelotes’, or ‘Simon the Zealot’, attests to at least one ‘Zealot’ in Jesus’ immediate entourage; and Judas Iscariot, whose name may well derive from the Sicarii, might be another. Most revealing of all, however, is Eisenman’s discovery — the original Greek term used to denote members of the ‘early Church’. They are called, quite explicitly, ‘zelotai of the Law’ — that is, ‘Zealots’.²¹

There thus emerges, in 1st-century Palestine, a kind of fundamentalist dynastic priesthood claiming either genealogical or symbolic descent from Aaron and associated with the expected imminent advent of a Davidic or royal Messiah.²² This priesthood maintains itself in a state of perpetual self-declared war with the Herodian dynasty, the puppet priests of that dynasty and the occupying Romans. Depending on their activities at a given moment, and the perspective from which they are viewed, the priesthood and its supporters are variously called ‘Zealots’, ‘Essenes’, ‘Zadokites’, ‘Nazoreans’ and a number of other things — including, by their enemies, ‘brigands’ and ‘outlaws’. They are certainly not passive recluses and mystics. On the contrary, their vision, as Eisenman says, is ‘violently apocalyptic’, and provides a theological corollary to the violent action with which the ‘Zealots’ are usually associated.²³ This violence, both political and theological, can be discerned in the career of John the Baptist — executed, according to the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, for condemning the marriage of Herod Antipas to his niece because it ‘is against the Law for you to have her’. And, indeed, Eisenman has even suggested that John the Baptist may have been the mysterious ‘Sadduc’ who accompanied Judas of Galilee, leader of the ‘Zealots’ at the time of Jesus’ birth.²⁴

To recapitulate, then, there emerge, from the confusing welter of sobriquets and nomenclature, the configurations of a broad movement in which ‘Essenes’, ‘Zadokites’, ‘Nazoreans’, ‘Zealots’ and other such supposed factions effectively fuse. The names prove to be merely different designations — or, at most, different manifestations — of the same religious and political impetus, diffused throughout the Holy Land and beyond, from the 2nd century BC on. The ostensibly separate factions would have been, at most, like the variety of individuals, groups and interests which coalesced to form the single movement known as the ‘French Resistance’ during the Second World War. At most. For Robert Eisenman personally, any distinction between them is but a matter of degree; they are all variations on the same theme. But even if some subtle gradations between them did exist, they would still have been unified by their joint involvement in a single ambitious enterprise — the ridding of their land of Roman occupation, and the reinstatement of the old legitimate Judaic monarchy, together with its rightful priesthood.

That enterprise, of course, did not end with the destruction of Jerusalem and Qumran between ad 68 and 70, nor with the fall of Masada in ad 74. In the immediate aftermath of the debacle, large numbers of ‘Zealots’ and Sicarii fled abroad, to places where there were sizeable Judaic populations — to Persia, for example, and to Egypt, especially Alexandria. In Alexandria, they attempted to mobilise the local Jewish population for yet another uprising against Rome. They met with little success, some six hundred of them being rounded up and handed over to the authorities. Men, women and children were tortured in an attempt to make them acknowledge the emperor as a god. According to Josephus, ‘not a man gave in or came near to saying it’. And he adds:

Here again is that strain of fanatical dedication — a dedication that cannot be political in nature, that can only be religious.

More than sixty years after the war that left Jerusalem and the Temple in ruins, the Holy Land erupted again in a new revolt, led by the charismatic Messianic figure known as Simeon bar Kochba, the ‘Son of the Star’. According to Eisenman, the terminology suggests that Simeon was in reality descended by blood from the ‘Zealot’ leaders of the previous century.²⁶ In any case, the image of the ‘Star’ had certainly figured prominently among them during the period culminating with the first revolt.²⁷ And, as we have noted, the same image figures repeatedly in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It derives ultimately from a prophecy in the Book of Numbers (24:17): ‘a star from Jacob takes the leadership, a sceptre arises from Israel’. The ‘War Rule’ invokes this prophecy, and declares that the ‘Star’, or the ‘Messiah’, will, together with the ‘Poor’ or the ‘Righteous’, repel invading armies. Eisenman has found this ‘Star’ prophecy in two other crucial places in the Qumran literature.²⁸ One, the ‘Damascus Document’, is particularly graphic: ‘The star is the Interpreter of the Law who shall come to Damascus; as it is written… the sceptre is the Prince…’²⁹

Josephus, as well as Roman historians such as Suetonius and Tacitus, reports how a prophecy was current in the Holy Land during the early 1st century ad, to the effect that ‘from Judaea would go forth men destined to rule the world’.³⁰ According to Josephus, the promulgation of this prophecy was a major factor in the revolt of ad 66. And, needless to say, the ‘Star’ prophecy finds its way into Christian tradition as the ‘Star of Bethlehem’, which heralds Jesus’ birth.³¹ As ‘Son of the Star’, then, Simeon bar Kochba enjoyed an illustrious symbolic pedigree.

Unlike the revolt of ad 66, Simeon’s insurrection, commencing in AD 132, was no ill-organised conflagration resulting, so to speak, from spontaneous combustion. On the contrary, much prolonged and careful planning went into the enterprise. Jewish smiths and craftsmen pressed into Roman service would, for example, deliberately forge slightly sub-standard weapons. When these were rejected by the Romans, they would be collected and stored for use by the rebels. From the war of the previous century, Simeon had also learned that there was no point in capturing and holding fortresses such as Masada. To defeat the Romans, a campaign based on mobility, on hit-and-run tactics, would be necessary. This led to the construction of vast underground networks of rooms, corridors and tunnels. In the period prior to the revolt, Simeon used these networks for training. Subsequently, once hostilities had begun, they served as bases and staging areas, enabling the rebels to launch a sudden lightning assault, then disappear — the kind of ambush with which American soldiers, to their cost, became familiar during the war in Vietnam.³² But Simeon did not confine himself solely to guerrilla operations. His army included many volunteers from abroad, many mercenaries and professional soldiers with considerable military experience. Indeed, surviving records discovered by archaeologists have revealed that a number of Simeon’s officers and staff spoke only Greek.³³ With such well-trained forces at his disposal, he could, on occasion, meet the Romans in pitched battle.

Within the first year of the revolt, Simeon had destroyed at least one complete Roman legion, and probably a second.³⁴ Palestine had been effectively cleared of Roman troops. Jerusalem had been recaptured and a Judaic administration installed there. The campaign came within a hair’s-breadth of total success. It failed primarily because Simeon was let down by his expected allies. According to his overall grand design, his troops were to be supported by forces from Persia, where a great many Jews still resided and enjoyed the sympathetic favour of the reigning dynasty. Just when Simeon most needed these reinforcements, however, Persia itself was invaded from the north by marauding hill tribes, who effectively pinned down Persian resources, leaving Simeon bereft of his promised support.³⁵

In Syria, safely outside Palestine, the Romans regrouped under the personal leadership of the Emperor Hadrian, with Julius Severus, formerly governor of Britain, as his second-in-command. Another full-scale invasion ensued, involving as many as twelve legions, some eighty thousand troops. In a two-pronged advance, they fought their way from post to post down the entire length of the Holy Land. Eventually Simeon was cornered, making his last stand at Battir, his headquarters, a few miles west of Jerusalem, in ad 135.

During the entire course of the revolt, Simeon’s troops were in constant occupation of Qumran. Coins found in the ruins attest to their presence in what would, after all, have been a site of considerable strategic importance. It is thus possible, despite the claims of Father de Vaux, that some, at least, of the Dead Sea Scrolls were deposited in Qumran as late as Simeon’s time.

15. Zealot Suicide

Once the broad messianic movement of 1st-century Palestine is seen in perspective, and once the apparently diverse sects are seen as integral parts of it, a number of hitherto inexplicable elements and anomalies slip into place. Thus, for example, the apocalyptic and eschatological ferocity of John the Baptist begins to make sense, as does his role in the events recounted by the Gospels. Thus, too, can one account for a number of theologically awkward passages and incidents pertaining to Jesus’ own career. There is, as we have noted, at least one ‘Zealot’ in his following, and possibly more. There is the violence of his action in overturning the tables of the money-changers at the Temple. There is his execution not by Judaic but by Roman authorities, in a fashion specifically reserved for political offenders. There are numerous other instances, which the authors of this book have examined at length elsewhere. Finally, there are Jesus’ own words:

And, more tellingly still, in unmistakably Qumranic phraseology:

In this passage, it is almost as if Jesus had anticipated Paul’s advent. Certainly he could not have warned against it any more specifically. By the standards he lays down, Paul’s status in the Kingdom of Heaven cannot be much higher than that of official pariah-in-residence.

Another anomaly that emerges in a fresh light is the fortress of Masada, and the character and mentality of its tenacious defenders. When the Holy Land rose in revolt in ad 66, Masada was one of the first strongholds to be seized — by Menahem, the son or grandson of Judas of Galilee, founder of the ‘Zealots’. Perched high on a sheer-sided mountain overlooking the south-western shore of the Dead Sea, some thirty-three miles below Qumran, the place became the rebels’ most important bastion, the supreme symbol and embodiment of resistance. Long after that resistance had collapsed elsewhere, Masada continued to hold out. Jerusalem, for example, was occupied and razed within two years of the insurrection’s outbreak — in ad 68. Masada remained impregnable, however, until ad 74. From within its walls, some 960 defenders withstood repeated assaults and a full-scale siege by a Roman army estimated to have numbered fifteen thousand.

Despite the tenacity of this resistance, Masada’s position, by the middle of April ad 74, had become hopeless. Cut off from reinforcement, entirely encircled by Roman troops, the garrison no longer had any prospect of withstanding a general assault. The besieging Romans, after bombarding the fortress with heavy siege machinery, had constructed an immense ramp running up the mountainside and, on the night of 15 April, prepared for their final onslaught. The garrison, under the command of Eleazar ben Jair, came to their own decision. The men killed their wives and children. Ten men were then chosen to kill their comrades. Having done so, they proceeded to draw lots, choosing one to dispatch the remaining nine. After he had performed this task, he set fire to what remained of the buildings in the fortress and killed himself. Altogether, 960 men, women and children perished. When the Romans burst through the gate the following morning, they found only corpses amid the ruins.

Two women and five children escaped the carnage, supposedly having hidden in the water conduits under the fortress while the rest of the garrison killed themselves. Josephus recounts the testimony of one of the women — drawing, he says, on her interrogation by Roman officers.² According to Josephus, she furnished a detailed account of what transpired on the last night of the siege. If this account is to be believed (and there is no reason why it shouldn’t), Eleazar, the commander of the fortress, exhorted his followers to their mass suicide by his charismatic and persuasive eloquence:

According to Josephus, Eleazar concludes: ‘Let us die unenslaved by our enemies, and leave this world as free men in company with our wives and children. That is what the Law ordains.’⁴

On occasion, Josephus is unreliable. When he is so, however, it shows. In this instance, there is certainly no reason to doubt his word; and the excavations of Masada conducted in the 1960s tend to support his version of events. It is, of course, probable that he embellished Eleazar’s speeches somewhat, making them perhaps more eloquent (and long-winded) than they might actually have been, availing himself of some poetic licence. But the general tenor of the narrative rings true, and has always been accepted by historians. What is more, Josephus had a unique and first-hand understanding of the mentality that dictated the mass suicide at Masada. At the beginning of the revolt, he himself had been a rebel commander in Galilee. In AD 67, his forces were besieged by the Romans under Vespasian at Jotapata — now Yodefat, near Sepphoris. When the town fell, many of its defenders committed suicide rather than submit to capture. Many others, including Josephus himself, fled and hid in caves. According to his own account, he found himself in one cave with forty other fugitives. Here, as at Masada, lots were drawn as to who would kill his comrades. Whether ‘by chance’, as Josephus suggests, or by ‘the providence of God’, or perhaps by a fiddle which aided and abetted one or the other, he and another man ended up as the sole survivors. Persuading his companion to surrender, he then himself defected to the victorious Romans.⁵ He does not emerge from the adventure in any very creditable light, of course. But even if he himself could not live up to them, he was no stranger to ‘Zealot’ attitudes, including their preparedness for self-immolation in the name of the Law.

In reality, there was a fairly sophisticated logic governing such self-immolation, which would not have been readily apparent to Josephus’ readers, either at the time or subsequently. The mass suicides at Masada, at Gamala and at other sites are explained by Eisenman as resting ultimately on the uniquely ‘Zealot’ concept of resurrection. This concept derived primarily from two Old Testament prophets, Daniel and Ezekiel, both of whose texts were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran. Daniel (Daniel 12:2) was the first to give expression to the concept in any developed form: ‘Of those who lie sleeping in the dust of the earth many will awake, some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting disgrace.’ He speaks, too, of an imminent ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, and of ‘End Times’, of the ‘coming of an anointed Prince’, of a ‘Son of Man’ on whom ‘was conferred sovereignty’ (Daniel 7:13-14).

In Ezekiel, the relevant passage is the famous vision of a valley filled with dry bones, all of which, God announces, will live again:

So important was this passage deemed to be that a copy of it was found buried under the floor of the synagogue at Masada.⁶

The concept of resurrection derived from Daniel and Ezekiel was picked up and adopted by the original ‘zealots for the Law’, the Maccabees. Thus, in the second book of Maccabees, it is used to encourage martyrdom for the sake of the Law. In 2 Maccabees 14:42, an Elder of Jerusalem kills himself rather than be captured and suffer outrages. In 2 Maccabees 6:18ff., a priest and teacher of the Law kills himself as an ‘example of how to make a good death… for the venerable and holy laws’. This incident, according to Eisenman, is the prototype for the establishment of later Zealot mentality. The principle finds its fullest expression in 2 Maccabees 7, where seven brothers submit to death by torture rather than transgress the Law:

Here then, in the pre-Christian book of Maccabees, is the principle of bodily resurrection that will figure so prominently in later Christian theology. It is available, however, as the third of the above speeches makes clear, only to the righteous, to those ‘zealous for the Law’.

But there is another point of relevance in the passage devoted to the death of the seven brothers. Just before the last of them is to be executed, his mother is brought in to see him. She has been urged to plead with him to submit and thereby save himself. Instead, she says to him that ‘in the day of mercy I may receive you back in your brothers’ company’ (2 Mace. 7:29). At the end of time, those who die together will be resurrected together. Thus Eleazar, in his exhortation to the garrison of Masada, urges them to die ‘in company with our wives and children. That is what the Law ordains.’ Not the Law of the ‘Sadducee’ establishment or of later Judaism — only the Law of the so-called ‘Zealots’. Had the women and children in the fortress been left alive, they would not have been exterminated by the victorious Romans. But they would have been separated from their menfolk and from each other. And many of them would have been enslaved, raped, consigned to Roman army brothels and thereby defiled, bereft of their ritual purity according to the Law. At Masada, separation and defilement were feared more than death, since death, for the ‘Righteous’, would have been only temporary. Here then, among the ferocious defenders of Masada, is a principle of bodily resurrection virtually identical to that of later Christianity.

The garrison who defended Masada can hardly be reconciled with traditional images of placid, peace-loving Essenes — who, according to adherents of the consensus, made up the community at Qumran. And indeed, as we have noted, adherents of the consensus continue to insist that no connection can possibly have existed between the Qumran community and the garrison at Masada, despite the discovery at Masada of texts identical to some of those found at Qumran — found at Qumran and, in at least two instances, found nowhere else — and despite the use by the defenders of Masada of precisely the same calendar as that used by the Qumran material: a unique solar calendar, in contrast to the lunar calendar of the official ‘Sadducee’ establishment and of later rabbinical Judaism.

Once again, there can be discerned the configuration of what Eisenman has described: a broad messianic nationalistic movement in which a number of supposed factions, if there was ever any distinction between them, effectively merged. Eisenman’s explanation accommodates and accounts for what has previously seemed a welter of contradictions and anomalies. It makes sense, too, of the mission on which Paul is dispatched by James and the hierarchy of the so-called ‘early Church’ — the ‘Nazorean’ enclave — in Jerusalem. In biblical times, it must be remembered, ‘Israel’ was not just a territory, not just a particular tract of land. Even more important, ‘Israel’ denoted a people, a tribe, a ‘host’. When Paul and other ‘evangelists’ are sent forth by the hierarchy in Jerusalem, their purpose is to make converts to the Law — that is, to ‘Israel’. What would this have meant in practical terms, if not the recruitment of an army? Since Old Testament times, and especially since the ‘Babylonian Captivity’, the ‘tribe of Israel’ had been scattered across the Mediterranean world and beyond, on into Persia — where, at the time of Simeon bar Kochba’s rising in ad 132, there was still enough sympathy to elicit at least a promise of support. Were not the emissaries of the Jerusalem hierarchy sent to tap this potentially immense source of manpower — to ‘call to the colours’ the dispersed people of ‘Israel’ to drive the Roman invaders from their native soil and liberate their homeland? And Paul, in preaching a wholly new religion rather than mustering recruits, was, in effect, depoliticising, demilitarising and emasculating the movement.⁷ This would, of course, have been a far more serious matter than merely lapsing from dogma or certain ritual observances. It would have been, in fact, a form of treason. For the Law, as it figures in the Dead Sea Scrolls, is not wholly confined to dogma and ritual observances. Running throughout the Qumran texts, as a sacred duty, there is clearly a thrust to build a legitimate messianic persona, whether royal, or priestly, or both. By implication, this would involve the re-establishment of the ancient monarchy and priesthood, to drive out the invader, to reclaim and purify the Holy Land for the people chosen by God to inhabit it. In the words of the ‘War Scroll’: ‘The dominion of the [invaders] shall come to an end… the sons of righteousness shall shine over all the ends of the earth.’⁸

16. Paul — Roman Agent or Informer?

With this grand design in mind, it is worth looking again at the confused and sketchy description of the events that occur towards the end of the Acts of the Apostles. Paul, it will be remembered, after a prolonged evangelistic mission abroad, has again been summoned to Jerusalem by James arid the irate hierarchy. Sensing trouble, his immediate supporters exhort him repeatedly, at each stage of his itinerary, not to go; but Paul, never a man to shrink from a confrontation, remains deaf to their appeals. Meeting with James and other members of the community’s leadership, he is again castigated for laxity in his observation of the Law. Acts does not record Paul’s response to these charges, but it would appear, from what follows, that he perjures himself, denying the accusations against him, which his own letters reveal to have been justified.^lIn other words, he recognises the magnitude of his offence; and however fierce his integrity, however fanatic his loyalty to ‘his’ version of Jesus, he acknowledges that some sort of compromise is, this time, necessary. Thus, when asked to purify himself for seven days and thereby demonstrate the unjustness of the allegations against him, he readily consents to do so. Eisenman suggests that James may have been aware of the true situation and that Paul may well have been ‘set up’. Had he refused the ritual of purification, he would have declared himself openly in defiance of the Law. By acceding to the ritual, he became, even more than before, the ‘Liar’ of the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’. Whatever the course of action he chose, he would have damned himself- which may have been precisely what James intended.²

In any case, and despite his exculpatory self-purification, Paul continues to inspire enmity in those ‘zealous for the Law’ — who, a few days later, attack him in the Temple. ‘This’, they proclaim, ‘is the man who preaches to everyone everywhere… against the Law’ (Acts 21:28). The ensuing riot is no minor disturbance:

The cohort is called out — no fewer than six hundred men — and Paul, in the nick of time, is rescued, presumably to prevent civil upheaval on an even greater scale. Why else would the cohort bother to save the life of one heterodox Jew who’d incurred the wrath of his fellows? The sheer scale of the tumult attests to the kind of currency, influence and power the so-called ‘early Church’ must have exercised in Jerusalem at the time — among Jewsl Clearly, we are dealing with a movement within Judaism itself, which commands loyalty from much of the city’s populace.

Having rescued him from the incensed mob, the Romans arrest Paul — who, before he is marched off to prison, asks permission to make a self-exonerating speech. Inexplicably, the Romans acquiesce to his request, even though the speech serves only to further inflame the mob. Paul is then carried off for torture and interrogation. As was asked previously, interrogation about what? Why torture and interrogate a man who has offended his co-religionists on fine points of orthodoxy and ritual observance? There is only one explanation for the Romans taking such an interest — that Paul is suspected of being privy to information of a political and/or military nature.

The only serious political and/or military adversaries confronting the Romans were the adherents of the nationalistic movement — the ‘Zealots’ of popular tradition. And Paul, the evangelist of the ‘early Church’, was under threat from those ‘zealous for the Law’ – forty or more of them in number — who were plotting to kill him, vowing not to eat or drink until they had done so. Saved from this fate by his hitherto unmentioned nephew, he is bundled, under escort, out of Jerusalem to Caesarea, where he invokes his right as a Roman citizen to make a personal appeal to the emperor. While in Caesarea, he hobnobs in congenial and intimate fashion with the Roman procurator, Antonius Felix. Eisenman has emphasised that he is also intimate with the procurator’s brother-in-law, Herod Agrippa II, and with the king’s sister — later the mistress of Titus, the Roman commander who will destroy Jerusalem and eventually become emperor.³

These are not the only suspicious elements looming in the background of Paul’s biography. From the very beginning, his apparent wealth, his Roman citizenship and his easy familiarity with the presiding establishment have differentiated him from his fellows and from other members of the ‘early Church’. Obviously, he has influential connections with the ruling elite. How else could so young a man have become the high priest’s hatchet man? In his letter to the Romans (16:11), moreover, he speaks of a companion strikingly named ‘Herodion’ — a name obviously associated with the reigning dynasty, and most unlikely for a fellow evangelist. And Acts 13:1 refers to one of Paul’s companions in Antioch as ‘Manaen, who had been brought up with Herod the Tetrarch’. Here, again, there is evidence of high-level aristocratic affiliation.⁴

Startling though the suggestion may be, it does seem at least possible that Paul was some species of Roman ‘agent’. Eisenman was led to this conclusion by the scrolls themselves, then found the references in the New Testament to support it. And indeed, if one combines and superimposes the materials found at Qumran with those in Acts, together with obscure references in Paul’s letters, such a conclusion becomes a distinct possibility. But there is another possibility as well, possibly no less startling. Those last muddled and enigmatic events in Jerusalem, the nick-of-time intervention of the Romans, Paul’s heavily escorted departure from the city, his sojourn in luxury at Caesarea, his mysterious and utter disappearance from the stage of history — these things find a curious echo in our own era. One is reminded of beneficiaries of the ‘Witness Protection Program’ in the States. One is also reminded of the so-called ‘supergrass phenomenon’ in Northern Ireland. In both cases, a member of an illicit organisation — dedicated to organised crime or to paramilitary terrorism — is ‘turned’ by the authorities. He consents to give evidence and testify, in exchange for immunity, protection, relocation and money. Like Paul, he would incur the vengeful wrath of his colleagues. Like Paul, he would be placed under seemingly disproportionate military and/or police protection. Like Paul, he would be smuggled out under escort. Having co-operated with the authorities, he would then be given a ‘new identity’ and, together with his family, resettled somewhere theoretically out of reach of his vindictive comrades. So far as the world at large was concerned, he would, like Paul, disappear.

Does Paul, then, belong in the company of history’s ‘secret agents’? Of history’s informers and ‘supergrasses’? These are some of the questions generated by Robert Eisenman’s research. But in any case, Paul’s arrival on the scene set a train of events in motion that was to prove irreversible. What began as a localised movement within the framework of existing Judaism, its influence extending no further than the Holy Land, was transformed into something of a scale and magnitude that no one at the time can have foreseen. The movement entrusted to the ‘early Church’ and the Qumran community was effectively hijacked and converted into something that could no longer accommodate its progenitors. There emerged a skein of thought which, heretical at its inception, was to evolve in the course of the next two centuries into an entirely new religion. What had been heresy within the framework of Judaism was now to become the orthodoxy of Christianity. Few accidents of history can have had more far-reaching consequences.