A lavish mainstream article, just out in the latest issue of Smithsonian (January, 2010) is sure to further confuse the public on the status of the question–”Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?” Author Andrew Lawler has done his homework, but his article gives the impression that the dissenting theories of Yuval Peleg, Norman Golb, and even the Donceels, are somehow something new and earthshaking, challenging the so-called “Essene” hypothesis.

In fact there is widespread and general agreement among 98% of Dead Sea Scrolls scholars that the sectarian group that composed bulk of the Dead Sea Scrolls, call them “Essenes,” or any number of their self-designations (“New Covenanters” “Son of Light” “The Community”), did in fact inhabit the settlement at Qumran, hiding their scrolls in caves in and around the site around the time of the 1st Jewish-Roman revolt (66-73 CE). This is confirmed by the archeology of Qumran as well as its landscape and setting.

Curious readers and non-specialists should obtain as a most basic and comprehensive source, besides a copy of the Dead Sea Scrolls in English (I recommend the Geza Vermes edition), the readable, comprehensive, and reliable volume by James Vanderkam and Peter Flint, The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  This book, more than any single source, truly offers a useful analysis of every aspect of the Dead Sea Scrolls, including a fully documented discussion of the “Essene” hypothesis and alternative theories of composition.

So far as the Smithsonian article goes, fortunately Stephan Goranson and other readers have already begun to post various corrections, qualifications, and caveats under “Comments” on the Smithsonian website, for example:

The Hebrew origin of the name which came through Greek spellings into English as “Essenes” is indeed in some of the Qumran scrolls as a self-designation–in scrolls recognized on other grounds as Essene. This Hebrew root has been recognized as the source of “Essenes” by some scholars as early as 1532, and in every century since, in effect, predicting what appeared in some Qumran scrolls, as various scholars today (e.g. James VanderKam of Notre Dame) recognize.
For more details on this source, ‘osey hatorah, observers of torah (which their opponents would not call them), see:

http://www.duke.edu/~goranson/Essenes_&_Others.pdf

Goranson, Stephen. “Others and Intra-Jewish Polemic as Reflected in Qumran Texts.” In The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment, ed. Peter W. Flint and James C. VanderKam, 2:534-551. Leiden: Brill, 1999.

My own modest contribution to the subject, published with Joe Zias and Stephanie Harter-Laiheugue, is a journal article ” Toilets at Qumran, the Essenes, and the Scrolls, New Anthropological Data and Old Theory” in Revue de Qumran 22:4 (2006): 631-640, in which we pair the references to latrines in the Scrolls with passages in Josephus on the Essenes, showing how the physical site of Qumran (both cemetery and toilets) reflect the practices of the sect.

A story is just breaking tonight around the world regarding the text found by Prof. Garfinkel at Elah over a year ago. It has apparently now been deciphered and dated and can be reliably put in the 10th century BCE, the time of the “Monarchy.” This is a major breakthrough in terms of the debate between the “minimalists” who argue the Biblical narratives are post-Exilic and those who maintain that we have texts at least 500 years earlier.

See the Eureka press release with photos here.

I was away in Israel on two separate trips in December, 2009 and want to catch up on quite a few news items, books, and notices that I have not had time to post. Some of this might be old news by now but I wanted to go ahead with a series of posts, for the record, and in case some of you too have been very busy with the holidays and end-of-the-year activities.

The discovery of the 1st century CE ruins of a house in Nazareth on the grounds of the convent near the Church of the Anunciation by the Israel Antiquities Authority excavation directed by Alexandra Yardenna has been up on the IAA Web site for some time but had not yet received much attention. On December 21st a more popular press release was put out with video interviews and photos, and was picked up worldwide–just in time for Christmas. The story in HaAretz is representative of the coverage and has some good pictures and there is a nice MSNBC video report here, plus a Fox News interview with Yardenna here (you have to endure the ads at the beginning). Despite the orchestrated timing, the story is quite important for understanding Jesus and his village background, growing up just outside of Sepphoris, the major urban center of Galilee and capital of Herod Antipas. The discovery also addresses the issue, raised by a few scholars (e.g. Rene Salm and Frank Zindler), as to whether the village of Nazareth even existed in 1st century Roman Galilee. Until now no remains of living areas, preserved to this extent, had been dated solidly dated to the time of Jesus and Josephus does not mention the village in his inventory of Galilean towns.

I was filming in Nazareth in December and was able to see the area firsthand. Both the size and style of the house points to the kind of modest Jewish village typical of the time and fits well with what many of us had postulated regarding Nazareth itself, see Crossan and Reed, Excavating Jesus (chapter 2) and my own discussion in The Jesus Dynasty (chapter 5). Nazareth was a very small hamlet, perhaps sheltering a few dozen families, and its significance and name might well derive from its inhabitants laying claim to Davidic lineage–the Hebrew word netzer, meaning “branch,” from which the name is taken, is used in Isaiah 11 to refer to the royal house of David. The presence of stone vessels, found in the excavation, also indicate its inhabitants were observant of ritual purity laws of the Torah.

As it turns out, the drawing that the artist Balage Balogh, who was commissioned by Crossan and Reed in Excavating Jesus, and by me for illustrations in The Jesus Dynasty, seems to have captured pretty accurately how such the village might have looked in the time of Jesus. This latest discovery, along with the tombs and agricultural remains, seems to reflect a coherent picture of a rather typical 1st Jewish century village located near a natural spring in the valley surrounded on hills, with Sepphoris just to the northwest. This location also fits our early Christian tradition of Miriam, mother of Jesus, growing up in the outskirts of Sepphoris where her parents Joachim and Anna lived.

One might hope that further archaeological investigation of such a significant site might be undertaken in the future but unfortunately this excavation was a “rescue” operation in a very densely populated area surrounding the Church of the Annunciation. It appears unlikely that much more than this area will be exposed, at least in the near future.

I have taught Christian Origins and Ancient Judaism the past 20 years in the Department of Religious Studies at UNC Charlotte, a North Carolina state university. Prior to that I taught in the Dept. of Religion at the College of William and Mary,  a Virginia state school. Even earlier, my first job was teaching in a Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Although some of the methods and approaches to the study of early Christianity are the same, what goes on in the distinctive field we call “Religious Studies” is quite different from that of Theology. I studied and wrote my dissertation under Jonathan Z. Smith of the University of Chicago, who perhaps as much as anyone one single person of our generation has contributed to the developing enterprise we call “Religious Studies” in our various state and private schools throughout America.

Our UNC Charlotte Department of Religious Studies was recently profiled in a very nicely done cover story in UNC Charlotte Magazine, which is a nice slick color publication for alumni and friends of the University, but fortunately also appears on-line. I highly recommend this insightful article and I am honored to serve as Chair, for the past six years, of this wonderful and thriving department with such a great history. I think what is said about us can be rightly said for many such departments around the country, and indeed for the study of Religion in the academic study of the Humanities in general.

You can read the story here or download as a PDF file:

http://www.publicrelations.uncc.edu/resources/pdfs/magazine/uncc_magazine_q42009_updated.pdf

Tis the Season” love it or not but for an alternative take on Jesus’ birth, December 25th, and a different kind of “Silent Night” see my essay, just up on the Web at Bible&Interpretation, a site well worth a bit of browsing:

http://www.bibleinterp.com/opeds/xmas357921.shtml

I love this wonderful Armenian portrayal of the meeting of Miriam with her kinswoman Elisheva in the region of Ein Kerem in the “hill country of Judea,” west of Jerusalem. Note that the unborn babies are shown in situ as if by ancient ultrasound. According to Luke’s gospel the women were separated in their pregnancies by six months and Mary stayed with Elizabeth for three months, implying that she was attending at the birth of John/Yehochanan.