Sects and the Dead Sea Scrolls

The period of the Dead Sea Scrolls, roughly from the second century BCE until the end of the first century CE, has been described by the eminent Harvard scholar Frank Moore Cross as a rich cauldron bubbling over with religious ideas and groups expounding them.

Risa Levitt Kohn, the curator for the upcoming Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit, to be held at the Royal Ontario Museum in the summer and fall of 2009, has said in her book, A Portable Religion, that even the term Judaism is not quite appropriate for these various nascent views. She prefers the Greek word, Judaismos, as a more apt name for the beliefs found in the land, which the Romans called Judaea after Pompey added it to their expanding dominions in 63 BCE.

There were a number of religious groups in the Land of Israel at that time. They have been variously called sects, groups, movements or parties. The best known of these groups are the Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots and Essenes – and for want of a better term, the Jewish Christians or Christian Jews. Only two of these sects would survive the traumatic events associated with the destruction of the Second Temple. One was the Pharisees, the other the so-called Christians.

The destruction of the Second Temple would be just as important in the development of Christianity as it was for the development of Judaism. Until the cataclysmic events of 70 CE, the Jesus movement was controlled by those who wanted the group to adhere to its Jewish roots. Chief among them was Peter, and the apparent leader of the group, James, the brother of Jesus, whose supposed ossuary aroused much controversy when it was on display at the ROM a few years ago.

With the destruction of the Temple, it was the Pharisees who would come to dominate Judaism, while the Jesus movement fell increasingly under the control of those members who gravitated to the teaching of Paul, who believed that Christianity should place its emphasis on converting the Gentiles. To achieve this end, Paul moved the group beyond its original confines in Judaea and into the world of the eastern Mediterranean.

Although the eastern Mediterranean was part of the Roman empire, its common language was Greek, thanks to the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE. The popularity of Greek is demonstrated by the fact that the first translation of the Bible, the Septuagint, was into Greek, in the city of Alexandria. It was there that a sizable group of Jewish expatriates nearly succumbed to the seductive charms of assimilating into the Hellenistic Greek culture of the time. It was to these affluent Jewish communities of the eastern Mediterranean, and their neighbours, that Paul took his message.

Based on his work on the Scrolls, the eminent Oxford scholar Geza Vermes believes that it was in this Greek-speaking environment that the concept of divinity was attached to Christ. Vermes believes that the appellation “son of God” was not uncommon in Judaea at this time and could have any number of meanings attached to it that did not imply a divine nature. These meanings include the first born of Israel, or the saintly figures of the nation, or even all members of Am Yisrael. But in the Greek culture of the eastern Mediterranean, a son of God could be a semi-divine being such as Hercules or Achilles, who were the product of a union between a mortal and a deity.

However, Cross disagrees with Vermes and cites a document found at Qumran that he believes has divine connotations for the term “son of God.” Such is the fascinating nature of the ongoing debate about the Dead Sea Scrolls as the evidence of the Past pushes Forward into the future.