Word: scholares
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Only lately have scholars accumulated enough facts to be able to settle down to a sober appraisal of the scrolls' significance. The majority verdict: the scrolls do not shake the foundations of Christianity, but they greatly contribute to the understanding of those foundations. As U.S. Old Testament Scholar Frank Cross of McCormick Theological Seminary puts it: the writers of the scrolls and of the New Testament "draw on common resources of language, theological themes, and concepts . . . The strange world of the New Testament becomes less baffling, less exotic." Says Hebrew Scholar Theodor Caster of Dropsie College: "They recover...
Shadow Land. Dean of the scholars is Pere Roland de Vaux, a French Dominican priest who has spent the last 24 of his 53 years in Palestine. Archaeologist de Vaux supervises the publication of the fragments, leads the periodic expeditions to the Qumran ruins. (Features of a typically rugged day there: Mass at 5:30 a.m., digging in the merciless heat until 3 p.m., paper work amid clouds of mosquitoes until midnight.) De Vaux's fellow priest, Polish-born Father Joseph Milik, 35, who left Warsaw when the Communists took over, is known as the Scrollery's fastest...
...Hebrew and Aramaic letters are classifiable by date-this science of paleography is, in fact, the most exact way of dating the scrolls. Each scribe, too, had his own characteristic handwriting ("ductus"), and a shred of personality makes a time-defying leap across the centuries when a scroll scholar recognizes the mannerisms of an Essene scribe who worked at a long table not unlike his own, 20 miles away and 2,000 years ago. In addition to matching up the script, it is also sometimes possible to match fragments according to the material on which they are written: the leather...
Love of Law. Twice a day they celebrated a solemn communion meal, with blessing of bread and wine. This, says Scholar Cross, was "a liturgical anticipation of the Messianic banquet" in the coming kingdom-a concept that was a common theme in the Judaism of the time. Another regular practice of the Essenes was baptism. On entering the community, individuals received a baptism on repentance of sins (unlike the later Christian practice, however, the Essene baptism was renewed each year and supplemented by continued daily ritual washings or lustrations...
...scholar who thinks the Romans are the Kittim renders the "smooth ground" as "liquid plain," i.e., water. A scroll statement that the Kittim horsemen "fly like a vulture" is connected by the pro-Roman faction with the Roman eagle. The question of offering sacrifice to the standards is not as clear an argument for the Roman identification as it seems at first; it is doubtful whether the legions actually offered sacrifices to their standards before the time of the empire...