Dead Sea scroll

Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea scrolls, were discovered between 1946 and 1956 in the. They are scene as ancient Jewish manuscripts from the Second Temple period written by Essenes from Qumran.

4QMMT

4QMMT was composed of small pieces of parchment script that were numbered from 4Q394 to 4Q399 with 4Q398 on Papyrus.

These fragments were painstakingly pieced together and translated and then interpreted by scholars with a wide variety of results.

Proffessor Emeritus John Strugnell of the Harvard Divinity School and Elisha Qimron  a professor in the Department of Hebrew Language at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Israel worked on the puzzle of these fragments which were kept almost secret fore decades.

Hershel Shanks, of the Biblical Archaeology Society, decided to publish what he thought should be made available to hundreds of scholars since the piecing of fragments would create scientific debate and was to valuable tu public academia to exclude since most of the work could be done from detailed photos.

Elisha Qimron would eventually sued the publishers of the 4QMMT because 40% of the published text was his intellectual property since it was fabricated by his attempt to fill in the gaps present in the fragmented manuscripts.

To be saved

John Strugnell and Elisha Qimron saw the text as a part of the Pauline theology. This has spaund a heated religious debate as to the power and potential questions yet to be answered.

To be saved by the works of the law or not to be saved.

By keeping the discovery hidden from the academic careers of hundreds of scholars the would stir a more heated and controversially ďebated topics and conclusions.

Robert Eisenman would eventually make use of the Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, published by the Biblical Archaeology Society but would come to a drastically different interpritation.

Eisenman sees the 4QMMT (Halakhic Letter)  from Cave 4 of the Quamran as a parallel to the teachings of James of what some call the Ebionite Jesus movement.

He identifies the Teacher of righteousness as James the Just and Paul as the false teacher or "wicked priest" orspouter of lies who says we are to love our enemy.

Those who remained in the Dead Sea scroll community saw this false teacher as an enemy.

Other place the scrolls over a hundred years earlier. Others enterpret the Teacher of righteousness as John the Baptist and Jesus as the false teacher.

Eisenman depends on the recognitions of Clementine for his analysis. He sees Clement as the second or third Pope after Peter who supposedly did not give a good account of Paul who is only identified as the hostile enemy compared to James the Just.

Proffessor Charlesworth sees Paul as removing the 600+ laws of the Torah from the Ebionite Jesus movement.

It should be clear that Jesus and Paul as well as Peter and James only removed the false teachings of the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Zealots about the nature of the statutes of Moses.

Did the statutes require circumcision of the flesh or the heart, no leaven of yeast or of oppression? Did Jesus come to free the land that men walk on or free the men who walk upon the land? Didn't Jesus say that all laws hinge on two? Were the 613 statutes merely written judgements jumpstarting a list of precedents for the people's courts set up by Moses.

The rush to hide the scrolls

The insurrection brought Roman troops to the Dead Sea area.

While under the emperor's patronage, Josephus wrote that after the Roman Legio X Fretensis, accompanied by Vespasian, destroyed Jericho on 21 June 68, Vespasian took a group of Jews who could not swim (possibly Essenes from Qumran), fettered them, and threw them into the Dead Sea to test the sea's legendary buoyancy. Indeed, the victims bobbed up to the surface after being thrown in the water from the boats.