Posted on 11/16/2001 1:24:02 PM PST by Asmodeus
Associated Press
November 16, 2001
Last of Dead Sea Scrolls About Ready to Publish
NEW YORK -- Half a century after the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls was found in desert caves, archeologists celebrated the near completion of the publication of the ancient texts.
"It's a very happy moment that we can say today that all this is completed," Emmanuel Tov, the project's editor in chief, said Thursday at the New York Public Library.
"After 54 years of excitement, expectation, tribulation, much criticism and a little praise, with the help of much inspiration and even more perspiration, the publication has been finalized." The scrolls, which date from 250 BC to AD 70, were discovered between 1947 and 1956 in 11 caves overlooking the western shores of the Dead Sea.
For decades, access to the complete scrolls was tightly guarded by a small group of international scholars. After the release of bootlegged copies of some of the texts and an archive of scroll photographs, a new group of nearly 100 scholars took charge of the scrolls in 1991. Tov, a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was named to head the project, pledging to expedite its publication.
The 900 scrolls and commentaries in 37 volumes were primarily written in Hebrew and Aramaic on more than 15,000 leather and papyrus documents. They were found near the ruins of the ancient settlement Hirbet Qumran, nine miles south of Jericho in the West Bank.
They are believed to have been written by the Essenes, an austere, insular Hebrew sect.
Scholars consider the scrolls a treasure of Jewish history and religion. They provide insights into what the Hebrew Bible looked like more than 2,000 years ago. They also contain prayer texts, biblical interpretations, fragments of poetry, compositions on wisdom and various sectarian documents.
Tov and his colleagues said that nothing in the scrolls is likely to shed a negative light on Judaism or early Christianity as once was thought possible. Tov said Jesus was not mentioned in the scrolls, noting that most of them were written before Jesus was born.
The work "leads us to believe that the Bible went through many stages of changes," Tov said.
Tov's team, overseen by the Israel Antiquities Authority, has issued 28 volumes; two more are in their final stages. They are published by Oxford University Press under the general title "Discoveries in the Judean Desert."
One scroll contains a Hebrew song of thanksgiving that Tov and his colleagues dedicated to New York City in honor of its steadfastness following the Sept. 11 terror attacks: "Bless the one who wonderfully does majestic deeds, and makes known his strong hand."
When I saw the title, I knew the above would be the punchline......Revelation 22:18-19.
Breaking: Sun rose from the east this morning. Many predict it will set in the west this evening.
The oldest Biblical manuscripts in existence, the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in caves near Jerusalem in 1947, only to be kept a tightly held secret for nearly fifty more years, until the Huntington Library unleashed a storm of controversy in 1991 by releasing copies of the Scrolls. In this gripping investigation authors Baigent and Leigh set out to discover how a small coterie of orthodox biblical scholars gained control over the Scrolls, allowing access to no outsiders and issuing a strict "consensus" interpretation. The authors' questions begin in Israel, then lead them to the corridors of the Vatican and into the offices of the Inquisition. With the help of independent scholars, historical research, and careful analysis of available texts, the authors reveal what was at stake for these orthodox guardians: The Scrolls present startling insights into early Christianity -- insights that challenge the Church's version of the "facts." More than just a dramatic exposé of the intrigues surrounding these priceless documents, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception presents nothing less than a new, highly significant perspective on Christianity.
I think the close parallel to the Sumerian Enuma Elish is very interesting.
Zecharriah Sitchin has written exhaustively on the subject.
I read it several years ago. As I recall, it reads like much of the Kennedy assassination stuff. Plausible in small snatches, but pretty silly in toto. But I won't swear to that evaluation, as I've read a couple of different things, and it was several years ago...(maybe I'll pull it back off the shelf tonight...)
The same thing happened to the Gnostic Gospels--e.g., the Gospel of Thomas--discovered in Egypt at Qumran in 1947, and for the same reason. Fundamentalist Christians don't want any changes in the canon. Elaine Pagels has a very interesting book on this, called The Gnostic Gospels.
I am always suprised at the knee jerk reaction so many sceptics have toward unbelief and accepting uncritically those theories and propositions which weaken rather than strenthen the possibility that God communicated with His creatures through a process of revelation that is recorded for us in the Bible.
Other than that, no big deal.
Unfortunately for your point, the Gospel of Thomas was specifically excluded from the canon back when it was being defined in the 300s -- as were a number of other "gospels".
It's a happy accident that a copy was rediscovered -- but the reason it was lost in the first place, was that it carried no Scriptural weight: nobody wanted or needed a copy.
Mostly, it wasn't needed because it doesn't say anything particularly different from the canonical Gospels. The only difference that stands out in my mind is one little passage where Jesus takes Thomas aside and tells him a secret that he's not supposed to reveal. This is probably a later addition of the Gnostic sects.
All that to say: there are reasons that the Gospel of Thomas isn't in the canon, which do not require the introduction of dark, modern-day Fundamentalist conspiracies.
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