Judaism, Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls 

Thanks a lot!!! 😉

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It's one of those high-tech Bigfoot cameras

@@flatmoonsociety9933 What are those? Are you being serious? Or is this a joke? 🧩 😉

It was likely nr.1 then nr.3 two men taking credit and telling a tale of nr.2 because that's what people do. Make stuff up to embelish and have fun with it. What is key is the science. The dating of the material and analysis.

Multiple scrolls where found in different caves

@@saultg5496 Exactly. There isn't just one single cave.

Where are the treasures now. Can't answer that one?

@@GH-kt5fe Who cares? They're wasted is all we need to know, further than that, we wait, or find then in ourselves....

I once read from a certain source that the Essenes didn't hold any allegiance to Jerusalem and were linked with other Mystery schools from Egypt. In essence they were Gnostics and did not represent the mainline views of the Rabbinic Judaism of that time period.

Email Prof. Shiffman your quibbles. I'm eager to hear his response!

And he says all scrolls have been published. Simply a lie. Certain scrolls like the complete 1 Enoch scroll were hidden or "sold" and there are zero public records or publishing of the missing passages from the versions we have

+Robert Feather I said, and I quote: "He said your theory is "nutty". Not you. If you claim you have found some of the treasures written about in the Copper Scroll, then where did you put them?" That is not misquoting you. It is not even quoting you. And I correctly quoted Prof. Schiffman, didn't I. Let's try again: If you claim you have found some of the treasures written about in the Copper Scroll, then where are they?

Robert Feather so tell us where it is

Robert Feather He said your theory is "nutty". Not you. If you claim you have found some of the treasures written about in the Copper Scroll, then where did you put them?

+Robert Feather Freud is my go to source for ancient archaeology as well.

+Robert Feather ego much. I thought he meant that other nutty one, Eisenman./

+Robert Feather If you claim you have found some of the treasures written about in the Copper Scroll, then where did you put them? Why cant the rest of us see them?

Is that the sound of crickets.

+Jay Carlsen I think his back is bothering him, he keeps trying to stretch it. That Beard is heavy.

I Love and respect Dr. Schiffman. He is one of the most brilliant Jewish Minds of modern day. I would give anything to take his classes.

OK but how do you decide who is being "Objective" The problem is most people think that only a Secularist is objective.

@@joebob5528 most religious people (particularly Abrahmic based) arent.

hello- who or what are these quotes from ?

motorhead not true I know of 1 quote

Here's the tl;dr for those who don't care to watch all the way through: The story of the Dead Sea Scrolls did not begin with the discovery of a cave by a Bedouin boy - rather, it began in the 19th century with the discovery of the Cairo Geniza, essentially a garbage dump for Jewish documents containing the name of God. Among the Geniza were found two manuscripts now called “The Damascus Document” (published 1911), which were also found later among Dead Sea Scroll. It was debated at first whether these documents belonged to the Pharisees, Sadducees, or the Essenes (which most scholars still believe wrote the DSS), and this debate carried on until the discovery of the DSS at Qumran. In the late 1940s, Jordanian Bedouin began a search to find where the DSS might have come from, because the cave in which they were first found was clearly not a library, but instead a drop-off site where the scrolls were hidden from the invading Romans during the late 60s CE. The Jordanian government became worried because Bedouins were digging up national treasures and selling them off to various antiquities departments, and so a team was put together of predominantly Christian scholars to work on the scrolls (since Jews were not allowed in Jordan at the time). They laid out all the material into glass plates and determined that among the 12,000 plates of fragments, there were about 900 documents in total. Excavators were then sent to work at Qumran where they found water cisterns, a variety of ritual baths, a defensive tower, an assembly hall, a scriptorium, and a cemetery. What the excavators determined is that this site had been used as a defensive outpost in the Iron Age. The defense towers caused a lot of speculation and ‘one man theories’ - some believed it was indicative of a Roman military structure - but this would raise questions as to why Romans had Jewish ritual baths, buried their corpses with their feet facing Jerusalem, and had collections of Jewish manuscripts hidden in nearby caves. The case was simply that the people who lived at Qumran required a guardhouse. Since the evidence was overwhelming, it was determined that those who inhabited the site were unambiguously Jewish. The chronology for the main part of the site ran from after 150 BCE, on through a destruction layer (probably caused by an earthquake) in 31 BCE, then on to a destruction layer in 68 CE caused by the Romans. Many stone vessels were found at the site, and the widespread use of these objects matched up with the notion among Jews that stone vessels are not subject to ritual impurity. There was also found a room into which a room on the second floor had collapsed, and that second floor room is thought to have been a scriptorium. Schiffman believes the documents found at Qumran were not necessarily written by the people living there, but were certainly copied there. Some text may have been written there, because we have coins in the wreckage which can date this part of the site. The cemeteries at the site of Qumran sparked a major debate as to whether the sect there had been celibate or not. There was a tremendous effort on behalf of Christians which tried to claim the people who wrote the DSS were really Christians, and therefore there was an attempt to interpret the scrolls in light of the New Testament. Since the leaders of the Church were celibate, it was assumed that the sect at Qumran was celibate. The texts of the DSS contain no traces of the New Testament, however, and the document which people tried to pass off as Christian contained five letters, three of which were the Greek word και (‘and’). If this sect was made up of Essenes, then we have a reference in Josephus which claims that there are two types of Essenes: marrying and non-marrying. The ‘Manual of Discipline’/rule of the community did not mention women, but then again, neither does the U.S. constitution. In light of the texts’ instructions to get married and have children, however, Schiffman does not believe the sect was celibate - if anything, they were ‘post-maritally celibate.’ Virtually all of the Hebrew Bible was recovered from the DSS, and on top of this were apocryphal works. These texts were not authored by those at Qumran, and were not even necessarily copied there. Texts just like them were also found at Masada. The Biblical works (e.g. Isaiah Scroll) were re-written in a dialect used by the people of Qumran, but the differences were not so remarkable - the Ten Commandments are still the Ten Commandments. The scrolls of most interest to scholars were those pertaining to the group living at Qumran. These scrolls included religious teachings such as predestination, imagery of a battle between light and darkness, messianic views, and prayers and rituals particular to this specific group of Jews. The next document Schiffman looks at (which was also in the Cairo Geniza) sets forth the idea that after the First Temple was destroyed, most Jews went astray and only the sectarians group led by descendants of Zadok (the first priest of the First Temple) went down the right path. The document gives us a code of Jewish laws concerning the Sabbath, Oaths, testimony, purity and impurity, etc. The texts found at Qumran proved that the documents found in the Cairo Geniza were truly from the same collection. Next, Schiffman looks at the Manual of Discipline which reveals theological details about the sect, such as belief in predestination, and the degrees of initiation into the sect. It was this document which led people to believe the Qumran community were the Essenes described by Josephus and Pliny the Elder, but Schiffman does not think this belief arose from sound reasoning. In 1984, there was a conference of Biblical archaeology with a paper focused on a letter called the MMT/4QMMT which shocked the world and eventually led to the restructuring of the publication team and the publication of all the DSS. The letter was probably written around 152 BCE when Jonathan Maccabee was high priest, and it is a criticism against his interpretation of the law. What had probably happened is that the Maccabees kicked out the Zadokite priests who had been too involved with Hellenistic activity for their liking - there were, however, some pious members of the Zadokite/Sadducee group who left Jerusalem and formed the Dead Sea sect then wrote this letter explaining that the establishment was misled on matters of Jewish law. This view raised serious criticisms against the Essene hypothesis. According to the sectarians, the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ was the only one with the proper interpretation of Jewish scripture, which was that all the works of the prophets actually pertained to the time of the Qumran sect, not the time of the prophets themselves. Schiffman goes on to descript a number of apocryphal works (such as works pertaining to Enoch, angelology, messianism, etc.). Among these works, one scroll described a spiritual war between the ‘sons of light’ and the ‘sons of darkness’ which some interpreted in a Christian light because of a mention of ‘Yeshua’ - this however, is a reference to the Joshua of the Old Testament, not Jesus Christ. Another text has a reference to a ‘Son of God,’ nevertheless, what it proves is that there were messianic expectations among the Jews, not that Jesus Christ’s coming was being foretold. The ‘Pierced Messiah Text,’ closely associated with the ‘war scroll,’ is part of a set which describes how the leader of the sect will pursue and defeat the leader of the Romans, but that the Romans will also kill the leader of the sect. Some scholars therefore assumed these texts were making reference to Jesus, but according to Schiffman, these scholars didn’t know Hebrew grammar, and they had made a mistake with their translation of personal pronouns. Ultimately, the small number of parallels with the New Testament found in the DSS almost always disregard the context in which such parallels were found. In conclusion, what we have in the DSS is a library of Jewish literature from the Second Temple period, not a collection of prophetic works anticipating the coming of Christ, as so many scholars initially wished it to be.

+The Modern Hermeticist your mention of the scrolls found in the Cairo geniza archive being very similar to the DSS , indeed lots of Jewish and early christian material is very well preserved in Egyptian tombs and deserts environment , the original 7 scrolls turned up on the open market years after they were originally located , and it is only word of those selling them that places them at Qumran , in the antiquities trade its a well known fact it is and was very very profitable to take anything found in Egypt and offer it for sale as a Jewish artifact found in Palestine if at all possible , and get ten times as much money for it , there is no reliable evidence at all that locates the first 7 scrolls at Qumran , indeed it seems to me that most of the material today called the DSS , are simply artifacts originally found in Egypt , and planted in the caves at Qumran to try and support the Jews claim to the land they planned to steal from Palestinians , if scrolls could survive at Qumran there should be lots more scrolls found in the last 60 years , WHY have almost no others found in the area of Palestine except those found in the 1950s , with scrolls by the millions found in extremely dry region of Egypt , if the Palestinian / Israel environment could preserve scrolls , there should be lots more scrolls survive , it sure looks like the DSS were found actually in Egypt and '' planted '' at Qumran by Zionists or archaeologists seeking funding to pay for their research , sadly the Jews keep on fabricating evidence to try and create evidence to support their delusional ideas and now have absolutely nil credibility in the field of archaeology or ancient or modern history

Vern Manson The cults that wrote and believed those documents died out a long time ago. No one follows their calendar, no one follows their laws of purity, no one believes in their apocalyptic wars .... except Christians.

+Eliezer Pennywhistler Christians do not! Christians don't keep dietary laws or even taharat ha'mishpacha.

+West Is Best Like Vern Manson, I am talking about the sect that lived in Qumran. Christians DO believe in an upcoming apocalyptic war. Read their scriptures.

Eliezer Pennywhistler Sorry, I mistook your comment to mean Christians today follow those humrot. I've never read the Christian Bible, only Tanakh, But I am somewhat familiar with Christian dogma, as I have a Greek Orthodox friend.

+West Is Best I think that some of the Greek Orthodox do not go along with some futuristic doctrines.

Thanks for Mentioning this ! I am a whistle Blower too !

Why?

@@toddmaek5436 because Eisenman has a better understanding of the Qumran community as it relates to what is now considered 'early Christianity.'

As a Christian, I can't but tragically LOL!!! Sad but truth be told, your common Christian is not very bright when it comes to history, philology, and cultural context… even when it is in regards to our own faith!

The "Christian" thing did not come from Paul. Greek was the lingafranca

But Christianity evolved from Judaism, with a dash of Hellenistic Mystery thrown in. Would it make you laugh if I told you that Clement Ader's Avion II proves that aircraft existed before the Wright Brothers? The Wright Brothers built on the knowledge of previous "not-quite-capable-enough" flying machines, to produce their Wright Flyer models. Likewise, the earliest Christians built on the "Christ knowledge" of Judaist heretics such as the remote desert Qumran community, who rejected the defeatist attitude of the Temple priests to the Kittim occupiers. That creed was then continued forward, via Paul, to morph into a creed that the likes of Constantine found very useful in holding Rome together. Nature abhors a vacuum; imploding Rome grasped at whatever would save them - and Christianity was it. In fact it was so much "it", that it has survived as a useful mechanism to this day - although Science, since the days of Copernicus and Galileo, has made the Church increasingly cough and splutter in its absolutist "certainties".

John Carter is this akin to saying the predictive accounts of Judaism rang true ?

Teth Yes, but only to the ears of the faithful, and to this extent they gave the faithful hope, which is the basis of faith. Once each prophecy was made known to the people, it could not be revoked - after all, it came from God, through the prophet. So each prophecy built on the previous prophecies. It became like a deadly earnest game of Whispers, with each new prophecy adjusting the old to the new conditions. When the Temple priesthood finally surrendered to the unstoppable Roman occupation, "true" Judaism went underground, in the form of an alternative temple in the Wilderness, where new prophecies, on top of old, went on unabated, in the form of Wilderness life-style disciplines, preparations of war against the Romans, and an expectation of imminent salvation from God. One could interpret the events of Jesus' life and mission as a self-fulfilling prophecy - useful more for the fledgling Paul-led Christian community, than for anything that would benefit Israel.

The talmud??

On May 13, 1981.

RG you’ll be sorely missed

What do you mean

+Norsang Kelsang Then read his ridiculous book and leave us alone. BTW - His publisher apologized for issuing it and Allegro was forced to resign from his university position.

STOP LYING FOOL

What do you mean? Affirms the messiah before Jesus was born?