One of the world's foremost scholars on the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Judaism concluded the lecture series held in conjunction with the special traveling exhibit on the ancient texts at the Laie Temple Visitors Center with presentations on March 17 and 20, 2006.
Dr. Lawrence H. Schiffman — an Orthodox Jew from New York City who is the Edelman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University — demonstrated through his scholarship that the texts are historical, and emphasized that "there was no New Testament found in the Dead Sea Scrolls."
"When the scrolls were found, it was assumed that they would provide a lot of historical information for understanding the history of Christianity," Schiffman said. "At that time the approach to the scrolls was to see them as a type of proto-Christianity."
"If you say that the scrolls are Christian, you've now written off one of your big sources to understand what Judaism was like before Christianity." Instead, he continued, "they are pre-Christian Jewish texts which help us understand later Judaism and Christianity."
Schiffman, who recently co-authored the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, described them as a treasure trove. "When we look at the Dead Sea Scrolls, we keep telling everybody we have this phenomenal new resource" of about 900 scrolls that were composed in the first and second century BCE.
"To have historical writings, you need to have some form of cause and effect, as well as human causality," he continued. "The cause and effect part is pretty obvious, but just listing things in order for a modern person is not history. We want to know why World War II took place [for example]. We don't just want to know that it happened. And human causality, in religious terms, is always going to have some divine causality in it, too."
"Is there history writing in the Dead Sea Scrolls as we know it today? The answer would be very simple, no," Schiffman said. "However, the better question is, do we have texts that supply us with historical information…about the history of the Jews who gathered this material, or more importantly, texts that give us data about the period leading up to the destruction of the site [of Qumran, near where the scrolls were discovered] in 68 AD...in the middle of the Jewish revolt from 66-73."
Schiffman explained that pesharim, or biblical text commentaries are "among the most important documents...[that] give us some kind of historical sense" of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
From such various scroll texts he drew examples demonstrating historical clues, such as references to Demetrius, king of Greece; King Nebuchadnezzar of Assyria; and Alexander Jannaeus, a member of the Hasmonean dynasty started by the Maccabees.
"Even if these are not historical texts, they tell us the history of a very particular period in an indirect way; and they leave us with as many questions as answers," Schiffman said. "It's possible to search the documents and find out historical information, but the historical information is often veiled and very limited."
"This, I think, is one of the reasons why any attempt to interpret these documents as not being the background of Christianity, but being really Christianity, is off base."
"Most of them are religious texts about religious Jews," he concluded.
In his Monday, March 20 presentation, Schiffman focused on the "Bible and its interpretation in the Dead Sea Scrolls."
"The first major question we have is what's the Bible. We're talking about the Hebrew scriptures [or the Old Testament portion of the King James Bible]...parts of every single book except Esther," he said, noting these comprise about one third of the scrolls.
He explained the second third includes numerous apocryphal writings, and the last third was "authored by sectarian Jews, identified by most scholars as Essenes. When people say who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, that's generally who they're talking about."
"Biblical interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls happens in a lot of ways," he continued, listing as examples pesharim commentaries, harmonization with other scriptural texts such as the Samaritan Bible, and small differences "that almost always happen in ways where the interpretation is not labeled as interpretation."
"For us, very often, the problem is how do we interpret the Bible," he said, noting the Dead Sea Scrolls "show us how these ancient people [at Qumran] interpreted it" and suggesting that might help us.
Asked how modern observant Jews feel about the Dead Sea Scrolls, Schiffman replied, "Here's the problem — the same problem that exists in Christianity: The Dead Sea Scrolls do not have any independent authority in anybody's religion because they came out of the ground in the way that they did. Therefore, there's no way to know as to how these scrolls were treated in antiquity."
"There's a lot of interest in this material historically," he continued, adding some people think they're Christian or that "the Vatican is keeping them secret" — these latter points leading to what he describes as the problem of "Christianization, where people understood the scrolls as if they were part of Christianity."
"I think the effect is really a historic one," Schiffman said. "In the scrolls we have so much more information about religious ideas and the pertinence of the period."