Wednesday, April 1, 1998 | 8:57 a.m.
A year and a half ago, Hershel Shanks, probably the world's most influential amateur biblical archaeologist, published an illuminating guide to the old stones of Jerusalem, describing exactly what the years of excavations have told us about the city's history - and what they haven't.
Shanks, the editor of Biblical Archaeology Review and a man who maintains a high standard of religious and political neutrality on the sometimes explosive topic of old stones, has now done a similar service in "The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls," his study of what is probably the most famous archaeological discovery of all time.
Readers of Edmund Wilson's classic 1955 study "The Scrolls From the Dead Sea" will know that the hundreds of crumbling documents and fragments of documents found five decades ago in the Judean desert have opened up as many questions as they answered - even the year they were found is not certain.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a kind of manuscript in a bottle, discovered fully two millennia after they were written. But the manuscript was made fragmentary by the ravages of time, and it came with no clear label identifying the authors, where they lived or even exactly what they meant.
Shanks' purpose, he writes, is to "attempt an assessment" of the scrolls, especially now that the documents themselves, kept for half a century in the hands of a small, exclusive group of scholars, have been made available to everybody.
Along the way, Shanks gives the fascinating background to the scrolls' discovery in caves not far from the ruins of the Bible-era city of Qumran, modestly sketching in his own crucial role in breaking the earlier scholarly monopoly.
His discussion of certain issues is absolutely fascinating, such as the identity of the Essenes, the breakaway sect of Jews whom earlier scholars identified as the authors of the scrolls. (Shanks challenges this.) His chapter on the famous copper scrolls that give tantalizing hints about the location of buried biblical treasure - and probably real treasure in Shanks' view - is alone worth the price of this volume.
And yet, despite the immense service he has performed in laying out the current state of scholarship and interpretation of the scrolls, Shanks' discussion is sometimes puzzling, frustratingly lacking in fullness, especially as he deals with the differences between his own assessment of the meaning of the scrolls and the earlier meanings found in them.
Recent scholarship, Shanks contends, has reached less spectacular conclusions than were first drawn about the scrolls, most notably by Wilson himself. The earlier view was that the most important of the scrolls foreshadowed Christian doctrine. The Qumran sect, Wilson wrote - the assumption then being that the authors of the scrolls were Essenes who lived in Qumran - is "more than Bethlehem or Nazareth, the cradle of Christianity."
Shanks says he disagrees with that view. "Jesus is not in the scrolls," he writes. The scrolls are Jewish documents, not Christian ones, whose value lies in what they tell us that "we had not previously known about the situation of Judaism at the dawn of Christianity."
The documents, written between roughly 250 B.C. and A.D. 68, present a portrait of the religious and social ferment of the time, out of which Christianity arose, but they do nothing, according to Shanks, that "contradicts anything that Christians hold dear."
Shanks is no doubt correct to re-establish the Jewishness of the scrolls, but in other respects, it is not so clear how his conclusions differ from those of Wilson. The scrolls, after all, show rather clearly that Christianity and the coming of the Messiah were indeed foreshadowed in documents that precede Jesus by a century or so, and that would indeed seem to undermine the uniqueness of Christianity.
As Shanks puts it, the scrolls call into question "the naive notion that Jesus' Jewishness was accidental or incidental and the belief that his message was wholly new, unique and unrelated to anything that had gone before, astonishing everyone who heard it."
The idea here is that Christian doctrine was deeply embedded in Jewish mystical trends that emerged in the decades before the birth of Jesus. Among the elements of Christianity that can be found in the scrolls are the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, the concept of the Messiah and of the "Son of God" and what Shanks calls "the apocalyptic, eschatological outlook" - the notion of a final battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil.
"In almost every respect the message of early Christianity was presaged in its Jewish roots," he writes. The position of Wilson, following the French archaeologist Andre Dupont-Sommer, was that the Qumran sect and Christianity were successive phases of a single movement. Again, these two views as briefly described by Shanks do not appear fundamentally different.
Indeed, the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls seems to have had the same general effect on the concept of religious revelation as critical biblical studies have generally.
Modern scholarship removes religious belief from the realm of immutable, divinely inspired truth and puts it into the terrain of man-made history. In this sense, as Shanks makes clear, the scrolls present some sharp challenges to the traditional view of Judaism as well as of Christianity, especially to the idea of Judaism as an immutable set of beliefs.
As Shanks puts it, the Dead Sea Scrolls show that there were several Judaisms when Christianity was born. One of them was a far more apocalyptic doctrine than many Jewish scholars, associating apocalyptic ideas with Christianity, have wanted to believe.
After the Roman annihilation of Judea in A.D. 70, only two of them survived. One was Christianity, the other Rabbinic Judaism, which shed its apocalyptic strain and fathered the major Jewish doctrines that exist to this day.
That idea is certainly arresting, even shocking to some. We can be thankful to Shanks for illuminating the documents that produced it, even as we wish he had given us fuller explanations of the scholarly and theological debates that the discovery of the scrolls has always entailed.
PUBLICATION NOTES:
'THE MYSTERY AND MEANING OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS'
By Hershel Shanks
Illustrated. 246 pages. Random House. $25.
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