Bible Truth from Qumran
The Significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls
- edited by DAG
The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947 by shepherds in a Judaean desert cave near Qumran, have been the source of fascination for Bible scholars ever since. Increasingly their conclusions tend to confirm the accuracy of the transmission of Scriptures from early, historically dim centuries, and this in turn has served to reinforce traditional Christian interpretations. Before these scrolls were discovered, the earliest written Old Testament went back only as far as 1000 A.D.
In September, Trinity Western University near Vancouver opened a "Dead Sea Scrolls Institute", first of its kind in North America. Modern computer techniques have provided accurate replicas of the scrolls for a new master's program in Biblical studies. The Institute, under the direction of professor Craig Evans, will publish its research and host academic visits, conferences, and regular public seminars.
According to a recent issue of Trinity's alumni magazine Roots (in a report by Joe Woodard, reprinted from BC Report magazine), the "fashionable disbelief that anything in the Bible could really be true" is finally being shaken. This has been the trend for the past hundred years in so-called "Higher Criticism", which tended to jettison "all belief in anything mysterious or miraculous.
By the 1950's, says Prof. Evans, the 'mythological preoccupation' of academic Bible study had lost any grasp on the historical Jesus. ...'Fifty years ago, almost no-one in academics took seriously the notion of Bible as history. Now the prejudice against miracles has subsided, almost all the presumption about myth-making has vanished, and there's a new hunger for accurate historical truth.'"
Another recent Scroll fragment identification is offering persuasive suggestion that the Gospel of Mark was written between 40 and 50 A.D., soon after Jesus' time on earth. September's issue ofInside the Vatican suggests this early dating weakens the "rationalist" approach to Bible criticism, popular for the past 150 years among "liberal Protestants and modernist Catholics". According to that school of speculation, we could know almost nothing about Jesus because so much time supposedly elapsed before the Gospels were recorded, during which period the disciples embellished the story to suit the needs of the early church. But this recent, almost indisputable Qumran research offers "documentation of a complete continuity between the Lord and a tradition which cannot be manipulated", according to the Patricarch of Venice, Cardinal Marco Ce.
The current Rector of the Pontifical Bible Institute is more cautious, encouraging continued scientific investigation. Fr. Klemens Stock points out that "our faith is based on our relationship with the living Lord, who truly walked this earth", while acknowledging that the close link between the Gospels and the historical Jesus is now an indisputable fact.
One of the new faculty members recruited by Trinity's new Institute is Peter Flint from Southwestern College in Arizona. The Roots article says he agrees that "the Qumran Old Testament documents have not revolutionized, so much as reaffirmed, the traditional understanding of the Bible as a whole. 'What they've indicated to us is that the scribes down through history have been 99% accurate', says Prof. Flint. And the effect upon New Testament studies may be equally conservative. For more than a century, skeptical academics had generally assumed that the 'cosmopolitan' and 'spiritual' elements in Christianity were Greek elements, imported into a Jewish story by the early church fathers. But increasingly, confidence in both Old and New Testaments texts makes that position less tenable."
The real legacy from this important, inter-Testamental period, according to Prof. Flint, is that these documents "force us to confront the reality of the historical Jesus, at that particular time and place, fulfilling a particular promise."
