3. Apocryphal Text - The Qumram Manuscripts

The discovery of the archaeological site of Qumram and the manuscripts that were kept there has been one of the greatest recent archaeological discoveries and has contributed to make known a very important world for the Bible study, also for the knowledge of the New Testament, which was previously known only through some hints of ancient authors, but which was practically ignored.

The manuscripts found in Qumram are not apocryphal texts, at least not from the New Testament, because they are older, they do not imitate the Christian canonical writings, they do not speak of Jesus or his community. However, they are Jewish texts born in the same environment where Jesus lived and that marked the mentality from the first century before and after Christ, so they are a very interesting and very useful heritage for Bible study.

We talk about it now because very often you read or hear something that wants to scandalize or question the presence of Qumram elements in the Christian world, especially when the curiosity card is played, announcing something secret, hidden, some plot that some people wanted to keep hidden an otherwise compromising reality. The texts are known and kept by the Israeli authority; the Vatican has nothing to do with this, the Vatican has no power or property over these texts which are found in Israel and are kept in the great museum of Jerusalem.

They are known and published in the original text and in translations in all languages; they are accessible and can be easily consulted by anyone. They are difficult, strange texts. We are interested, especially the connection with Jesus; there is no explicit contact, however a title like this is very captivating: "Jesus and the community of Qumram," you can study the possible contacts, possible similarities, but in reality, the study refers to these documents with which Jesus probably never had anything to do with it. Or you can call a text: "The Secret Manuscripts of Qumram," it makes you want to read it, imagining discovering who knows what secrets, but then you find against the publication of fragments with the Hebrew transcription and translation, and are secret simply because they are fragmentary texts, not published in the first editions, but present in the latest major editions published by García Martínez, the main editor of these texts.

Let's try to tell the story to frame the situation well. It all began in the spring of 1947, in the wilderness of Judah when a shepherd boy from a tribe living in the Bethlehem area went in search of a goat that had been lost. The boy's name was Mohamed Dib, he has the name of Muhammad and the nickname ‘thief.’ Evidently he was a thieving, enterprising boy who threw stones to find the hiding place of this goat and at some point, with good and attentive ear, he recognized a strange noise, the stone has broken a ceramic vase, hears the noise of the fragments, approaches the area where he has thrown the stone and really glimpses the top of an amphora that has been hit by his stone and is shattered. He takes off the lid and looks inside finding some rolls of paper.

He extracts one and takes it to his father who immediately tries to sell this object found in the desert; he is certainly not interested in it, it's old paper, it reads badly, but he tries make money out of it. It seems to him that it is a Syrian text, he cannot read, it is an ancient manuscript, faded, ruined, and then he doesn't recognize it, doesn't understand it and being a good trader, if it is Syrian, may be of interest to Syrian monks. He goes to Jerusalem, to the monastery of St. Mark, of the Syrians, and presents this object that he found in the desert to Mar Athanasius, the Jacobite superior of the monastery who buys it.

Of course, the shepherd doesn't let the opportunity pass him by, he interrogates his son, and returns with friends to the place of discovery and extracts other texts. In some cases, they destroy them, and try to sell them. They take them to the market in Bethlehem, they take them to Jerusalem, the news of a discovery begins to spread of old and strange texts. The news reaches important experts who recognize in these fragments an ancient and beautiful Hebrew original. An important investigation is immediately carried out. The ones who take the management of this discovery is the archaeological superintendent of Jordan and French Dominican Roland De Vaux, of the French Dominican school of archaeology and biblical sciences, a famous character, and great scholar, expert archaeologist and biblical scholar who resides in Jerusalem.

Around these two authority figures, a team of experts was set up and began researching the texts. Mar Athanasius delivered the manuscript he had bought and also bought others in the following months and began to collect what had been extracted and worked on extracting the rest. That day the boy had found the first cave of Qumram. Qumram is the modern Arabic name for a ford, this is how the gorge is called where water is channeled during the rainy season 'Ford of Qumram.' It is not an old name; a cave was found where there were terracotta amphorae with lids. In these amphorae there were manuscripts.

The excavation began and in the first cave there were several amphorae with many important manuscripts. The experts began to read them, and being that they were written in classical Hebrew, it was easy for those experts to read the text. They immediately realized that these were not known texts. They were not biblical texts, nor documents already known, but were texts whose existence was completely unknown and therefore, it became very interesting their transcription and translation, the official edition and the research was born.

What had happened? Whose texts are these? Who wrote them? Why are they in the middle of the desert? The amphorae were well made, they were not there by chance. Those texts had been put into amphorae filled with fine dry sand, closed with a lid, buried in the sand and well hidden. Only time, water and wind had made that the amphora returned to the surface, and by chance that boy had hit it with a stone, because the area was very inaccessible and difficult to access.

The studies began, and this wonderful Qumram library, a complete set of manuscripts that give us information about a world that we didn't know before. Along with the excavation of the cave, archaeological research began in the surroundings and many archaeological remains came to light: a large complex of buildings with cisterns, canals, halls, deposits, ceramic remains, a large complex inhabited by many people came to light.

Who were the inhabitants of this complex, who most likely had produced these writings? Reading and translating the first writings found, it was understood that it was a community. The sign of the first cave is called 'serec' - 'the rule'. These texts are indicated by an acronym, a number and the capital letter Q. Q means Qumram, the number preceding it is the cave number. So far 11 have been excavated, so we have the indication if the text is in the first one, or in the second one, or in the tenth, or in the eleventh. 1Q means the first cave of Qumram. Then follows an acronym, For example, the 's' means 'serec', a Hebrew term that translates as 'rule': 1Qs is the Book of the Rule. A document that specifies the nature, origin, structure, rules of life, of this world. The book of the rule was found in the first cave of Qumram.

Other important scrolls were found: the parchment of war, a text of prayers, of psalms, but not the biblical psalms but psalms compossed in that community. In other caves, not whole scrolls were found, but fragments; for example, very famous a few years ago was a small fragment called 7Q5, meaning that it is the fifth fragment of the catalog among those found in the seventh cave of Qumram. This fragment in Greek has become famous because a learned Jesuit professor, Bible teacher, O'Callaghan, identified it with a piece of the Gospel of Mark. It's only twelve letters, not words, letters. Twelve letters in a very small fragment make it difficult to recognize the book from which it was taken, and yet it was hypothesized that there was also a fragment of Christian writing in that cave and thus created a kind of mystery with a provocation to scholars to reconstruct what happened, who those men were, why they were there, why they wrote those texts and how they ended up there.

The first solution of this enigma, proposed in the Dominican environment of Jerusalem and directed by Roland De Vaux, was somehow influenced by the Christian religious idea and in fact there was talk of a community of Essenes and that archaeological complex discovered was considered a monastery. Even today, when visiting the excavations of Qumram, there are signs of the various places that say: kitchen, refectory, desk, library; these are typical names of a Christian monastery. The pre-understanding of the archaeologists who excavated led them to recognize in those environments something corresponding to a Christian monastery, and the hypothetical form of these Essene monks was created. Studying the texts has given body to this particular world.

The central character, author of some texts, we could say the founder of this community, is not presented by his own name, but with a pseudonym. He presents himself as 'Master of Justice.' He is one who belongs to the priestly world of Jerusalem. The historical reconstruction places him in the second century before Christ; we imagine an authorized priest from Jerusalem entering into conflict with the priestly structure of the temple.

Around 160 B.C. the situation of the temple in Jerusalem was decidedly chaotic, an unbridled struggle for power with a corrupt priestly establishment, interested in wealth and power and colluding with the Hellenistic empire. A power struggle had begun; exploded shortly after the Maccabees' revolt against Hellenistic oppression. In that chaotic moment of conflict, while the Maccabean priests took up arms to fight, an important priest, who calls himself as 'Master of Justice,' breaks with the temple, breaks with that religious structure and retires. He withdraws into the desert, naturally followed by many who consider him a teacher and consider themselves his disciples.

This community, following the Master of Justice, would have been established in the desert in that same environment, near the western shore of the Dead Sea, where the monastery was excavated, where they would have lived and would have been organized, identified according to the indications of the ancient historians with the Essenes and, therefore, these monks of Qumram identify themselves with the Essenes, priests, pious and devout, lovers of justice, with very important rules of purity, dissident with respect to the environment of the temple. When the Maccabees defeated the Greeks and then took power, nothing had changed for the Essene priests of Qumram, and they stayed out of history. They gave life to a religious and cultural movement.

It is probably true that there were many other settlements, some even in Damascus. Perhaps they left the Dead Sea region and moved to Damascus. They were persecuted by the kings of Jerusalem. Perhaps they had to flee and returned later. The history of that community lasted about 200 years, from 160 BC to 70 AD. At the time of the Zealots' revolt against Rome, the Essenes of Qumram also joined that war and went off to fight the Romans. Before leaving for this fight, they saved their main heritage, the library, and sealed their volumes in amphorae. They hid them in natural caves, which are abundant in the region where they lived. They had the entrance sealed and buried everything. Perhaps they made a plan to recover their treasure once the war was over.

Instead, the war was catastrophic for them. They all died; they were exterminated by the Romans and no one ever recovered that treasure again; and they did not even spread the news that they had been hidden because they were all dead. Or, perhaps, someone had returned to retrieve it because, for example, in the seventh cave there are only pieces of papyrus, there are no amphorae with whole scrolls as in the first cave, it means that someone had removed the texts, and perhaps, it has also been said, that during the Jewish war the Christians hid there their libraries, so that hypothetical fragment of Mark's gospel could belong to a Christian group who had hidden their library in that area, but the Christians survived and came back and took their texts. By extracting them, some pieces broke off from the main roll and remained in the cave, and were discovered only recently.

Today, all these texts are published in the original and in translations. There is nothing secret about them, they are difficult texts, very difficult for us because they speak a strange language, because they are rules that do not correspond at all to our way of thinking. And, especially today, there is a lively rethinking. There are many books of popularization, they are useful and present this debate on research beyond the controversy. Someone to sell it has titled: "The Untold Story," trying to reconstruct what is really behind it. A young Italian scholar, Simon Paganini presented, "The Ruins of the Moon," the Arabic name for those archaeological remains and in the subtitle it says: "The Monastery and the Essenes, a Certainty or a Hypothesis?”

The state of the research situation tells us that it is only a hypothesis that we have disclosed based on the opinion of Roland De Vaux. The texts are these; can be read, contain nothing about Jesus and the apostles; they can, however, provide some insights, some literary similarities. They are very useful for studying the Jewish environment; there is no secret plot.

It is a wonderful archaeological event that has offered us a splendid literary heritage. Knowing it can always be useful.