DCHindley

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the thoughtful response!

What made me comment in the first place was your statements "The horror expressed by April DeConnick and PaleoBabble was not at the thought that an earlier belief in a suffering messiah would undermine Christianity in any way, because it doesn't and wouldn't, but at the thought of sensationalistic journalists telling people that it undermined Christianity. There is a big difference" and "I think a bigger problem is that the sensationalism seems designed to create a prejudice against Christianity among nonchristians"

While I think you read a little too much into DeConnick and Paleobabble's reaction to the Gabriel Stone controversy, your statements reminded me of that Irish critic's rants against journalists (Wilson), and scholars who would dare suggest any sort of Essenic or sectarian doctrinal influence on Jesus or developing Christianity (Andre Dupont-Sommer and especially John Allegro). K. Smyth practically called Allegro the Antichrist!

To me this is alarmist and unnecessary. What these critics were doing at the time was calling into question whether Christianity was as unique as was usually assumed. Most Christians considered their redeemer Christ theology to be an ethical quantum leap above Judaism, just as Jewish monotheism was thought to be an ethical quantum leap over pagan polytheism. They might have allowed for Judaism to have "reformed" previous pagan practices, they generally preferred to think the theology of Jesus and early Christianity was completely unique or entirely divinely inspired, a fulfillment of things that preceeded it. When people get alarmed, they are letting their emotions rule them rather than their reason. When I myself get reactions like that (and I do), I usually have to take a step back and ask myself, "what am I afraid of?", then study the issue closer until I feel I have got my head around it.

FWIW, Like most folks, I only know what I have read in books, having sort of following the matter of what the scrolls contain since the late 1970s, hanging around college libraries, reading DJD volumes, buying several translations over the years, etc. Believe me, I am no expert, but it was clear that prejudices were affecting their publication. The most vocal critics in the 50's were, by chance, Catholic priests based in Jordan, who also happened to have a noticeable dislike for the establishment of the nation of Israel. Yigael Yadin of Israel and the atheist John Allegro published the scrolls available to them pronto. I think Yadin was hoping to illuminate the history of Masada, which was then a symbol for Israel's resolve to stand against its opponents. Allegro, on the other hand, wanted to emphasize what he felt was the influence of Essene Symbolism on Christianity, an idea which appealed to some segments of the population. I think you can get a feel for the interconnection these issues had on the study of the DSS.

The Nag Hammadi discoveries were published relatively quickly, but that was Gnostic, and dated well after and formative period for Christianity. A few titles were similar to works the 2nd to 4th century heresiologists complained about, but the belief systems they described did not fit the same titles in the NHL codices very closely, except in a general way. This suggested extensive development. Their beliefs were so far out of the Christian mainstream, it was clear that, at best, Christianity influenced them more than they influenced Christianity.

DCH

Petergdi

Is that really what the fuss was about? I would find the idea that Jesus was influenced by the various Jewish sects entirely unobjectionable. The Jesus of Christian orthodoxy is fully human and got his ideas the same way the rest of us do. That Jesus was to some extent a product of his time and place was obvious long before the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. The impression I had was of hints or claims that there was something really troubling that was going to come out.

It's the old "modest enquirer" excuse. If you start questioning the obvious then people will start thinking that it really is questionable. And since the concept of uniqueness is really pretty flexible, we are all unique and also all basically the same, you can plausibly assert or deny uniqueness to anything depending on how you set the threshold.

It was obvious to everyone who interacted with early Christians that Christianity was not the same old thing they had met before under different names. That is very likely true of several other religions also - I'm not claiming a unique level of uniqueness and fail to see why one should. But "same old .. same old" is one of the favourite ways of dismissing something in the modern world.

A good many fashionable theologians do seem to have thought that way, and a good many non-Christian intellectuals also. But I'm certainly not sure this actually reflects "most Christians" of the time. I would like to think that lay believers had more in common with Barth than Harnack. What Jesus taught was how to travel the road of obedience to God, and the early Christians taught that Christ's obedience and God's raising him from death made it possible for us to become God's adopted children so that we too could become obedient.

While I'm not aware of anyone who previously explicitly taught that the neighbour who you should love as you love yourself includes those who hate you and those despised in your society, or that one should not resist evil directed at you, it would not make any difference to Christianity if someone had taught those things before. It would only mean that someone else had been correct earlier.

Jesus thought his teaching was implicit in the Torah and Prophets, but it is hardly the same take as any other sect I know of. And while calling Jesus the "Christ" obviously builds on existing messianic expectations, I'm not aware of any expectations that would really count as a close match to Jesus of the gospels.

Call me unreasonable if you like, but I think that the motivation behind "nothing new here" and "here's a hint about what they don't want you to know" is obvious. Of course, the cure is to encourage people to think for themselves, but one doesn't have to hang out here for very long to find out how powerful an influence "nothing new here" and "here's what they don't want you to know" can be.

Peter.