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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bentway who wrote (505682)	12/8/2003 9:44:08 AM
From: Johannes Pilch	Respond to of 769670

Right. Well, judging from this response I can certainly understand why those in control of the scrolls are taking their sweet time with them. You refer to Edmund Wilson’s work, which was based upon work by Andre Dupont-Sommer. The problem is, Dupont Sommer’s translations are doubtful, to put it euphemistically. “The French scholar Andre Dupont-Sommer, who was not a member of the scroll publication team, sought to draw a direct line between the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran and Christianity, arguing that Jesus was prefigured by a character in the scrolls known as the Teacher of Righteousness…. Dupont-Sommer greatly influenced the prominent American literary critic Edmund Wilson, who wrote a best-selling book on the scrolls, reprinted from a series of articles that appeared in The New Yorker from 1951 to 1954. Wilson, following Dupont-Sommer, claimed that the Qumran sect and early Christianity were "successive phases of a [single] movement"…. In 1991, after considerable struggle, as we shall see, the hitherto secret texts finally became available to all scholars. Since then scroll scholarsllip has burgeoned. It is now possible to attempt an assessment, which provides the occasion for this book: What do the scrolls tell us about the period from which both Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism emerged? It is clear that the scrolls have not fulfilled the extravagant expectations that their discovery first aroused. Dupont-Sommer was wrong. Jesus is not in the scrolls. Nor is the uniqueness of Christianity in doubt….” pbs.org Scholar Ed Cook states emphatically that the “parallels” you have mentioned simply do not exist in the texts. This is from his Solving the Mysterious of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1994, p. 133. “It is unlikely the sect considered the Teacher the Messiah. Other texts from the scrolls plainly teach that the group still expected a Messiah who would save Israel (some passages even suggest that they expected two messiahs, a priestly Messiah and a royal Messiah). It is unlikely that the Teacher was executed, although he certainly was persecuted. There is no suggestion anywhere in the Dead Sea Scrolls that the Teacher, or any other human being, would be the supreme judge at the end of the end of time. That role was assigned to God. Although the Teacher found a group based on his teachings, there is no indication that his followers expected "his glorious return." Indeed, the comparison with Jesus Christ can only succeed if the Teacher formed the center of the sect's worship and devotions. He did not. Some of the scrolls, like the War Scroll, the Manual of Discipline, the Temple Scroll, and 4QMMT do not even mention the Teacher. He is not mentioned in any of the new Cave 4 material (with one possible exception). (Edward M. Cook, Solving the Mysterious of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1994, p. 133) I myself have seen some of Sommer’s work. He was just plainly wrong. The parallels he made are in many cases so general they can be made of any religious leader of the time. In other cases Sommer’s translations are simply rejected by current scholarship. Once again, I suspect this is why the people who control the Scrolls have been so reticent to simply release them. There are too many crackpots in the world who, like you, wish to use ignorance to create dishonor concerning them.