Sex, Lies and Dead Sea Scrolls - those early years surrounding Christianity

The13th: I think it about time to clarify those early years around those mediterranean area, its social historical characteristics, some of the real people involved, to help us understand the context of Christianity.

As Pet Detective once said, lets break the news, ssssssllllloooooowwwwwlllllyyyyyy. That's when he was serving as a monk somewhere in Tibet, after one of the pet monkey fell off the cliffhanger. Poor monkey.

So a monkey die you become a monk. If a donkey die do you become a don?

Zanjan: What's to know? When Jesus was born, Palestine was the most oppressive and corrupt place in the Eastern hemisphere. No one was doing anything good and people had forgotten how to love, if they ever knew. They couldn't help themselves if they wanted to.

edmund_carey: Don't worry 13th, the subject has been pursued more than how to make a million on the stock market. If you would like to read something about it try "The Historical Figure of Jesus" by E P Sanders. He describes the historical setting with a completeness worthy of War and Peace.

ghostgeek: Study the life and teaching of James the Just if you want to know about the early years of Christianity.

edmund_carey: How do we do that? I don't know of any gospel recounting them.

ghostgeek: Er, isn't there supposed to be a letter written by James in the New Testament canon?

ghostgeek: And Hegesippus and Josephus have something to say about James' life and death, while Paul can give you a dour view of the way he conducted himself.

ghostgeek: Also, though this is somewhat controversial, it has been suggested that the Dead Sea Scrolls were written by the community that James led.

Zanjan: The scrolls were written between 150 B.C. and 70 AD. If James was leading one community, how could he be leading another community at the same time? I think he made up his mind to follow the Christian path, knowing he'd have to die for it.

Zanjan: I don't think we're in any place to say James led the Christian community; if he was the biological brother of Jesus, and a Christian, he'd be esteemed as a member of the Holy Family - that doesn't imply community leadership. He was known for virtue.

They weren't organized at that time and Jesus didn't name a successor. He only referenced something about Peter, those who wanted to teach, and who would look after His mother.....strangely, not one of her biological sons (as would be their normal duty). It was John (thought to be Jesus's favourite disciple)

The New Testament describes how they interacted - all were Apostles, just a band of brothers consulting together and agreeing on what to do next.

edmund_carey: I believe the usual view is that the Dead Sea Scrolls all date from the first century BC. For no particularly good reason they have been attributed to the Essenes, but, historians don't actually know that much about the Essenes. They are mostly books from the Old Testament, plus a few weird apocalyptic fantasies.

Neither St. Paul nor Josephus seems to have had any doubts that James was Jesus' brother, which is interesting. Given his apparent eminence in the early Jesus movement, it may be taken that his teachings were entirely consonant with that belief system.

(I actually forgot about his epistle. Lemme re-read that.)

Zanjan: Scholars have said some of the scrolls date to as late as 70 AD. The scrolls mention the expected "Righteous Teacher" and the story of how He was unjustly killed. Sounds like Jesus.

During messianic times, the established religion sees a breakaway of several sects, waiting for the Promised One; they're highly devoted, dedicated to making themselves pure enough to be acceptable to Him when He arrives. The Essenes were monks, probably among the first to warn before John the Baptist appeared.

The scribes at Qumran weren't named but they didn't have to be; it's clear what they had been expecting and why. They weren't writing about fantasies but of a well-known dynamic which presents itself at the end days.

Every religion of God has its own apocalypse; when religion goes south, the world follows except, unlike religion, the world crumbles. The Promised One creates another dynamic, known as the Great Reversal.

ghostgeek: The Righteous Teacher, the Spouter of Lies and the Wicked Priest are mentioned in the scrolls. Robert Eisenman equates James with the Righteous Teacher, Paul with the Spouter of Lies and Ananus with the Wicked Priest. Seems to tie up.

He also thinks that the Jesus Movement and the Essenes were just different names for the same group.

Zanjan: *I* think he's a bag of hot air.

Zanjan: The Spouter of Lies isn't a single person. According to the Bible, there were more than a few wicked priests.

ghostgeek: It's the connection between the three of them that's the important thing. Ananus topped James, who never really got on with Paul, who in turn eviscerated Judaism and so created Christianity.

ghostgeek: In respect to Paul we have come to understand that he was a Herodian and was not an apostle of Jesus. Paul was always in conflict with the teachings of Jesus (Yeshua) and his Essenian sect. It is quite evident that the Community of Qumran (called Essene by scholars) was either the followers of James the Just or the group from which the Nasaarenes emerged. The Dead Sea Scrolls, writings which have been identified by leading unbiased scholars as having been written in the 1st century by the group at Qumran, identify the Qumran Essenes as, “the poor” from the Hebrew word ebion (and therefore Ebionites), the followers of the Way, and men of the New Covenant. These designations in which the Qumran community identified themselves are also names in which the followers of Jesus, led by his brother James, also identified themselves within the New Testament. The organization of the two groups are also exactly alike. Both had a 12 man council with an inner 3 man group of overseers – referred to by Paul as the Pillars in Galatians – Yaakov, Cepha and Yochanon (James, Peter and John).

[ https://antimissionary.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/paul-a-fraud-and-enemy-of-the-jewish-people/ ]

ghostgeek: Drawing on the Dead Sea Scrolls and on long overlooked early Church texts, Eisenman reveals in this groundbreaking major exploration the Christianity of Paul as a distortion of what James and Jesus preached. Whereas James and his followers, "zealous for the Law" of Moses, were nationalistic and apocalyptic, Paul's Hellenized movement promoted itself as pacifist, cosmopolitan, and faith-based. In an argument with enormous implications, Eisenman identifies Paul as deeply compromised by Roman contacts, and James as not simply the leader of Christianity of his day, but the popular Jewish leader of his time, whose death triggered the Uprising against Rome. Creative rewriting of early Church documents has obscured this fact. Eisenman shows that characters like "Judas Iscariot" and "the Apostle James" did not exist as such and details an actual physical assault by Paul on James in the Temple. By rescuing James from the oblivion into which he was deliberately cast, James the Brother of Jesus reveals one of the most successful historical rewrite enterprises ever accomplished

[ https://antimissionary.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/paul-a-fraud-and-enemy-of-the-jewish-people/ ]

edmund_carey: Eisenman is a bit of a maverick. The scholarly consensus is against him, from what I hear of it.

Zanjan: I should think the layperson on the street would be as well.

ghostgeek: His overuse of footnotes is hard to stomach, and he likes to lay into his opponents, but that doesn't make his core argument wrong.

ghostgeek: When Paul was listing who Jesus visited after his death, he made a distinction between the Twelve and the Apostles. Perhaps the Dead Sea Scrolls give us the reason why he did that.

edmund_carey: But don't most scholars date the Dead Sea Scrolls to before Jesus was even born? Not to mention before Christianity saw the light of day. That there are any New Testament personalities or references in them is thought to be unlikely to the point of impossible, as I understand it.

ghostgeek: I guess it depends on who you read:

While scholars have fiercely debated the dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls — whether they are B.C or really A.D — they all agree that the Dead Sea Scrolls are Jewish and written by Jewish scribes.

[ https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-middle-east/2019/04/scholars-say-new-findings-in-dead-sea-scrolls-add-dimension-to-holy-days/ ]

Zanjan: According to scholars, the Isaiah scroll was fully intact; also, it was the only scroll that was copied exactly according to the most ancient Jewish texts - no additions, no changes. So, I don't buy that they discovered anything new - it's just a variant in translation.

Jesus stood up in the synagogue and read from this scroll - Isaiah 61, then commented "This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears."

I think it was also cryptic of modern times - why these scrolls came to light in the 20th century. According to the NT, in the promised age, all truths will be exposed and whatever was hidden will be revealed.

Zanjan: At first, some thought that the scrolls were secured as back up in case they lost their books through some disaster; however, the "communal library" didn't have any "flow" and the books were random fragments. Scholars were able to identify that some scrolls came from different communities.

Considering the terrible condition of many of the scrolls that were preserved under identical conditions, scholars had thought that this was the place they disposed of old worn-out scrolls. Normally one can't garbage or burn old religious books - they have to be buried.

That might have something to do with the dating problem. Makes sense to me that material which wasn't canon would be the most recently penned.