UNRAVELING THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

Don't get it twisted.

There are 100,000 fragments (many as small as your fingernail), so few are complete. It took them fifty years to reassemble and publish (and that did not come without pressure on the scholars assigned the pieces) so conspiracy theories abound. Unwrap it all and you come up with 236 scrolls of the Bible (every Old Testament book except Esther) and 565 other scrolls, all scattered among eleven caves. The scribes lived in a community near the Dead Sea, and in all likelihood were killed or captured and the community burned when the Roman army was on its way to Masada about AD 70.

As far as archaeology can tell us, they were a group of Zadokite priests. Back up and get the backstory. Rome occupied Palestine and sat an Edomite usurper on the throne (Herod). The office of high priest passed from the hands of the levitical priesthood and into the hands of the highest bidder via Roman authority (falling now to families like Caiphas, it became totally corrupt). Ezekiel describes a class of priest that will minister in the Millennial Temple. They won't serve the house or the people. They get to stand directly before the Lord because they "kept my charge" and "went not astray" (Ezek 44:15; 48:11). Watchman Nee has a great sermon on being a son of Zadok.

Since the High priesthood was sold and the true priests locked out, they set up camps, at least one of them at Qumran, where they could carry on the process of preserving the scripture, calling out a remnant of men to separate themselves and be holy, and ready themselves for when the Messiah would overthrow Rome, and the temple would again be theirs to administrate. So among the types of writings at Qumran (besides OT books) are scrolls that describe the code they will live by, the apocalyptic end of the age, and commentaries that try to recognize how the words of the Bible might be coming to pass in their contemporary events. They were waiting because they believed they were the ones.

Fast forward to 2007. The display at Union Station was disappointing. Exhibits at the Nelson are more extensive. Put all the display scrolls end to end and maybe it's eight feet worth (hardly impressive). Many were facsimiles and only a half dozen or so the real thing (and they seemed so incredibly small—must have had young kids doing the copying).

So why the buzz? Well, as far as the Bible is concerned, if you have read any modern translations of the Old Testament lately you know that it's not just a translation of the Hebrew Bible any more. In fact, in many instances they forgo the Hebrew entirely for a combination of LXX (that's the Greek translation of the OT called the Septuagint), the Targums (an ancient Aramaic translation of the same), and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Now that's amazing me, because you know what I discovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit? A text in transition. Get this. There are several copies of Joshua, but one of them was surely an apprentice's practice scroll. The lettering is inconsistent. The same word is spelled different ways (including the hero's name!), and the sequence of some events is different from the Masoretic (standard, received-as-authoritative) Hebrew text. In another scroll it says David wrote 4,050 psalms, "composed through prophecy," and contains some apocryphal ones (psalms not preserved in the Hebrew Bible).

What do we have here? A scripture in flux. You would have to liken the 200 years from 130 BC to AD 70 to the time from 1380-1580 in England. You could read the Bible in several versions (Geneva, Bishop's, Matthew's, Tyndale) and the English text was in a state of flux until a standard text was translated and accepted by the priesthood of believers.

Let me open a window on that last word. Watch a football game. In the NFL they allow a coach to challenge a call and subject it to instant replay (excuse me, "Referee Replay Review"). So the play happens. Referees on the field make a call. But you know what? It happened in the heat of the moment. Maybe it was not quite correct. So the referee goes to a camera where he can watch multiple views from different angles and then hands down the definitive call.

Now look. Why would you take readings from texts that were obviously in such a state of flux, and use them to overthrow the certain and sure Masoretic Hebrew text? Remember? After the temple was finally and fully destroyed, the Jews recognized that they needed to sit down with all their stuff, get it in a bag, determine which texts they knew were inspired, put the rest on the shelf, and then devise a scribal system (Masoretic) that would lock every letter in place for all time. Yeah, that text. You know, the one that came down to us after the play was reviewed.

Why in the world would you prefer flawed scrolls just because they are old? But every modern translation does it. Yada, yada.

And oh, by the way, there should be academic buzz about Qumran in NT circles as well, even though there are no NT texts there. Why? Because it proves how wrong N.T. Wright is (and E.P. Sanders and James D.G. Dunn, et al). They are all proponents of the "New Perspectives on Paul" (NPP). The new perspective is that second temple (first-century) Palestinian Judaism really believed in salvation by grace after all(!) You had to keep the law in order to stay saved, not get saved.

But Qumran proves they got it twisted. Our reading of Paul was right and Wright is NT wrong, because those Jews were just as legalistic as Martin Luther thought they were. Paul was talking about justification by faith. Righteousness is imputed for salvation. Baptism is not the "badge of being in the community," making you saved.

Don't get it twisted.