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Dead Sea Scrolls: Scholars
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The revelations of the Dead Sea Scrolls could hardly have come at a worse time for the Church. At a time when church attendances - especially in Europe - are at historically low levels, the doctrinal foundations of Christianity have ... come under a cloud, making things doubly difficult. According to some scholars, even the historicity of Jesus - something that most people including non-believers had accepted as fact - is now in doubt. More fundamentally, some of the highest officials in the Church hierarchy feel that they and their institutions are under siege. This in many ways is a purely secular crisis that bears close examination.
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In studying the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars are presented with the rare opportunity of exploring the world of an important Jewish group from the first centuries BC and AD, the Essenes. Three types of witnesses exist to help in reconstructing the life and thought-world of the Essenes:
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The current furor over the Dead Sea Scrolls has mostly been examined by the media as a simple scholarly feud. It is scandal enough that scroll researchers have restricted access by "outsiders" to the scrolls for over forty years. (The history and politics of the scrolls' acquisition is long, complex, and well known, and I will not go into it here.) But if it were merely yet another academic "turf" war or simple scholarly egoism, the controversy would not merit as much attention. The problem is that the scrolls deal with very pertinent matters surrounding the development of modern Christianity and Judaism. The position that the scroll researchers have tried to bulwark for forty years is that the Essenes of Qumran were external to "normative" Judaism or Christianity, a fringe sect with little connection to events of the time. (Recently, the theory has been raised that the Qumranites may have been Sadducees instead, as the word "Essene" does not appear anywhere in the documents.
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The Dead Sea Scrolls contain two or three Targum fragments (4QtgLev, 4QtgJob and 11QtgJob - some scholars disagree with the identification of 4QTgLev as a Targum). More general information on the Targums can be found here. For information on the Logos edition of the Targums from the files of the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project, including 4QtgJob and 11QtgJob, click here.
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Today scholarly opinion regarding the time span and background of the Dead Sea Scrolls is anchored in historical, paleographic, and linguistic evidence, corroborated firmly by carbon 14-datings. Some manuscripts were written and copied in the third century B.C.E., but the bulk of the material, particularly the texts that reflect on a sectarian community, are originals or copies from the first century B.C.E.; a number of texts date from as late as the years preceding the destruction of the site in 68 C.E. at the hands of the Roman legions.
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The Kansas City Public Library owns a copy of the Dead Sea Scrolls on microfiche. They are available at the Central Library Reference desk on the third floor and must be used in the library. This material is for the scholar with prior knowledge about the Dead Sea Scrolls and their languages. They are the scrolls in fragments written in the language of the time.
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