Scholastic Mythbusters III

The Dead Sea Scrolls

We have been discussing the prevalence of myth in modern scholarship. While it is not always the case, there have been notable examples of prejudice and cant in the Academy—often lasting generations—where prevailing views alone are heard on a particular topic and all contrary hypotheses are rejected out of hand, if not ridiculed.

So strong can be the hold of the dominant view that anyone who has the temerity to express a different view, or to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy, risks being cast into outer academic darkness. Yet, in time, many of these "orthodox" views are shown to be false and, to employ the euphemism, prejudicial to the truth.

We have argued that the implicit arrogance of rationalism lends itself to such errors and to a kind of naïve credulity. The belief in the autonomy and ultimate veracity of the human mind predisposes the academic elite to an underlying arrogance, which all to often becomes overwhelming.

It is ironic that modern Athens betrays on every hand this worst form of blindness. Ironic, because modern Athens boasts of its enlightened character. Its much vaunted “scientific method”, its scholarship, its institutions of research, its mass media promulgating knowledge far and wide, its halls of learning, its publicly funded education system, its technological prowess—all play a part in reassuring us that modern man is truly advanced, enlightened, and wise. The modern Athenian citizen has banished all superstition and ignorance from the playground. Or, so the mantra runs.

The honest broker or the properly wise commences with a frank disclosure of his fundamental and guiding assumptions. He puts them out there for all to see. He discloses his prejudices and his pre-commitments from the outset. He is rigorously self-conscious of them. Of course, this procedure—the only one which avoids the trap of invincible moral culpable ignorance—would force a great deal of humility into academic and learned debates. That's partly why it is avoided like the plague. Declaring one's pre-commitments from the beginning forces everyone to face up to the fundamental circularity of all knowledge—which, to the modern rationalist, is a deep, if not fatal, embarrassment.

The dishonest broker will not acknowledge his pre-commitments. Rather, he appeals to the neutrality and objectivity of the facts, of the data, and of his “seeing things as they really are”. His claim to authority is based upon the “evidence”. He presents himself as dispassionate, detached, objective. For him, knowledge is not circular because he, the investigator, has not intruded himself onto the facts. He is not part of the factual landscae. His pre-commitments have not informed him throughout. His net has not determined from the outset what fish he will catch. The dishonest broker, by denying the circularity of all knowledge, including his own, ends up being little more than a propagandist.

We have given some examples of how scholarship over many years has perpetrated myths as undoubted fact. The first example was the prevailing myth about the sour bitterness of the Puritans and their rejection of music, gaiety, and the arts. So deep, extensive, and pervasive has been this myth that the adjectives “puritan” and “puritanical” have entered the lexicon, meaning an attitude of bigotry and intolerance. Yet, this slander has now been exploded as a myth. In this case, Voltaire has been proven right: the discipline of history is a cheap trick played upon the dead.

A second example is the overwhelming and near universal rejection of the historicity of the Old Testament and in its place the Academy has insisted that Manetho's chronology of ancient Egypt is the true and accurate historical record. This has controlled (and distorted) the study of the ancient near east for hundreds of years. Opposing views were simply not heard, let alone tolerated.

Now, however, some within the Academy have started to question the prevailing scholastic myth—and the edifice is starting to crumble. When one considers all the errors and distortions built into Manetho's scheme, it is a marvel that it was taken so seriously by such experts for so long.

A further example of scholastic mythmaking comes from a more narrow area of study. It has to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were first discovered (in the modern era) in 1947. The initial discovery was augmented by additional finds over a number of subsequent years. For over 50 years it was asserted that these scrolls were produced by a Jewish sectarian community, the Essenes, living at Qumran on the Dead Sea during the time of the incarnation of Christ our Lord.

This has now finally been demonstrated to have been an egregious error. Not only did the Essenes not produce the scrolls, they had nothing to do with them, and, to add insult to injury, there is no evidence of an Essene community ever having been at Qumran. But for 50 years the error held sway amongst scholars, governments, universities, journals and media. But it held sway in a particular manner: this was not a consensus forged through irenic and open-minded research. Rather it was perpetrated through power politics within the Academy. People that dared to question or expose the prejudice were vilified and their careers jeopardized.

The Scrolls themselves were an amazing archaeological find. They have the potential to shed much light on Judaism during the intertestamental period (300BC to 70AD)--a period when much of Judaica was destroyed and subsequently lost to history. But they have been pushed into a backwater for over fifty years through scholastic prejudice.

Fifty years of error in a supposedly enlightened world! Reputations and careers were made by promulgating the error. Careers were ruined by those with the temerity to question the then current orthodoxy. There is no doubt that the reigning mode of Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship for over half a century was flat out dishonest and culpably ignorant.

How did this happen in such an enlightened, modern age? In a truly remarkable book, Norman Golb, of the University of Chicago, documents a lifetime of fighting the Academy's orthodoxy and the personal and professional cost of doing so. (Norman Golb, Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? The Search for the Secret of Qumran. [London: BCA, 1995]) He shows how the myth was initially promulgated, took hold, then suppressed contrary views. It occurred very simply. Here are the steps:

1. Initial scroll research asserted the Essence theory without a full disclosure of the fundamental assumptions lying behind the theory which undergirded it. (In this particular case, the assumptions were speculative, baseless, and until recently, never been examined, verified or tested.)
2. Academics began promulgating the theory as established fact—based on the “evidence”. Evidence was "manufactured" to fit the theory. Contrary theories or interpretations were never allowed to intrude.
3. Those who questioned the theory were personally attacked and ridiculed as fantasizing ignoramuses. They were excluded from access to the Scrolls for research purposes.
4. A wilful sociology of ignorance took over. The more the error was stated, the more widely it was promulgated, the more believable it became. Credulity runs in packs. Repetition means truth. Mantras have huge influence in a culture dominated by culpable ignorance.
5. As data or evidence was subsequently found that did not fit with the Essene theory, it was explained away (“the evidence was alleged to have been forged”, etc).

The theory has recently collapsed and has been shown up for the folly that it was from the beginning. So, we had a grand conspiracy—but one where the culpable perpetrators allowed themselves to be duped and then defended their duplicity. Remember these were the best and brightest in their respective fields.
They turned out to be nothing more than propagandists. This arose because they suppressed their starting assumptions.

Now, of course, if they had been honest from the beginning and disclosed them, their initial findings on the origin and provenance of the Scrolls would have been far more tentative, less sensational, more humble, and much more quickly revised and corrected. The circularity would have been evident from the beginning, and therefore much more quickly scrutinized (and in this case, rejected).

A church caretaker once noticed the preacher had left his sermon notes on the pulpit. Scrawled in the margin at one place in the manuscript was the notation: “Weak point—speak more loudly.” The prevailing modern blindness which refuses to accept the circularity of all knowledge and hides fundamental pre-commitments and assumptions has fallen into the same deceit: the modern world thinks that by repeating something loudly and often, it establishes its veracity. Truth becomes a matter of shouting down the opposition. Truth becomes politicized. Truth becomes propaganda.

So, for over fifty years the scrolls were said to have been written by the sect of the Essenes. This is now shown up to patently false. Now scholars have to work out who actually did write them and where they came from. Hopefully, with the blinkers off we will come to understand a whole lot more of the intellectual, cultural and religious world in which our Lord ministered than ever before.

The final nail in the coffin came when archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority (that is, “official” scholars) committed to doing comprehensive archaeological work at the site. The dig took place over ten years. Recently they have reported and concluded that there never was an Essene community at Qumran. In a summary of their findings, the New York Times reported in 2006:

New archaeological evidence is raising more questions about the conventional interpretation linking the desolate ruins of an ancient settlement known as Qumran with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were found in nearby caves in one of the sensational discoveries of the last century.
After early excavations at the site, on a promontory above the western shore of the Dead Sea, scholars concluded that members of a strict Jewish sect, the Essenes, had lived there in a monastery and presumably wrote the scrolls in the first centuries B.C. and A.D.

Many of the texts describe religious practices and doctrine in ancient Israel. But two Israeli archaeologists who have excavated the site on and off for more than 10 years now assert that Qumran had nothing to do with the Essenes or a monastery or the scrolls. It had been a pottery factory.

The archaeologists, Yizhak Magen and Yuval Peleg of the Israel Antiquities Authority, reported in a book and a related magazine article that their extensive excavations turned up pottery kilns, whole vessels, production rejects and thousands of clay fragments. Derelict water reservoirs held thick deposits of fine potters’ clay. . . .

Norman Golb, a professor of Near Eastern languages and civilization at the University of Chicago who is a longtime critic of the Essene link, said he was impressed by the new findings and the pottery-factory interpretation. “Magen’s a very seasoned archaeologist and scholar, and many of his views are cogent,” Dr. Golb said in a telephone interview. “A pottery factory? That could well be the case.”

Dr. Golb said that, of course, Qumran could have been both a monastery and a pottery factory. Yet, he added: “There is not an iota of evidence that it was a monastery. We have come to see it as a secular site, not one of pronounced religious orientation.” For years, Dr. Golb has argued that the multiplicity of Jewish religious ideas and practices recorded in the scrolls made it unlikely that they were the work of a single sect like the Essenes. He noted that few of the texts dealt with specific Essene traditions. Not one, he said, espoused celibacy, which the sect practiced.
The scrolls in the caves were probably written by many different groups, Dr. Golb surmised, and were removed from Jerusalem libraries by refugees in the Roman war. Fleeing to the east, the refugees may well have deposited the scrolls for safekeeping in the many caves near Qumran.

The new research appears to support this view. As Dr. Magen noted, Qumran in those days was at a major crossroads of traffic to and from Jerusalem and along the Dead Sea. Similar scrolls have been found at Masada, the site south of Qumran of the suicidal hold-out against the Romans.
Dr. Magen also cited documents showing that refugees in another revolt against the Romans in the next century had fled to the same caves. He said they were “the last spot they could hide the scrolls before descending to the shore” of the Dead Sea.

The full preliminary report of the archaeologists can be downloaded here.

The upshot is that now almost every book on New Testament and intertestamental history is out of date and requires significant revision. This is irritating in its own right. But at least another scholastic myth has been exploded. However, if Golb is correct and the scrolls represent part of the (Sadduccean controlled) Temple Library, spirited out of Jerusalem and hidden in the caves to protect them from the Roman siege, they will contribute a great deal to our understanding of those times.

While the particular field of Qumranology may be somewhat esoteric and specialised the case serves to illustrate how the Academy can get things very wrong for a long, long time. We believe this dysfunctional situation is becoming more and more prevalent as rationalism takes hold. The more autonomous rationalism holds sway in the Academy the greater the likelihood of myth and superstition becoming regnant in the liberal-academic complex.