The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (11 page)

I know that the inclination of every spirit is in your hand [and all] its [activity] you established before you created it. . . . You alone created the righteous, and from the womb you prepared him for the time of favor, to be protected in your covenant and to walk in all [your ways]. . . . But the wicked you created for the [time of] your wrath; and from the womb you dedicated them for the day of slaughter. (1QH 7:16-20)

And these are the ones whom [you] pre[pared from ages] of old to judge through them all your creatures before you created them—together with the host of your spirits and the congregation of [the heavenly beings wi]th your holy firmament and [al]l its hosts, together with the earth and all that springs from it in the sea and in the depths—[according to]all that was planned for them for all the everlasting epochs and the eternal visitation.

For you yourself prepared them from ages of old and the work of [. . .] among them so that they might make known your glory in all your dominion. . . .

And in the mysteries of your knowledge you apportioned all these things, in order to make known your glory. (1QH 5:13-19)

In your wisdom [you] es[tablished the generations of] eternity, and before you created them, you knew their deeds for everlasting ages. For without you nothing] is done, and nothing is known without your will . . .

. . . and in the wisdom of your knowledge you established their destiny before they existed. According to your will everything [comes] into being: and without you nothing is done. . . . These things I know because of the insight that comes from you, for you have opened my ears to wondrous mysteries. (1QH 9:19-21)

For my light has sprung from the source of his knowledge; my eyes have beheld his marvelous deeds, and the light of my heart, the mystery that is coming to pass [
raz nihyeh
]. He that is everlasting is the support of my right hand; the way of my steps is over stout rock which nothing shall shake; for the rock of my steps is the truth of God, and his might is the support of my right hand. From the source of his righteousness is my justification, and from his marvelous mysteries is the light in my heart. My eyes have gazed on what is eternal, and wisdom concealed [
nist
ā
r
âh
] from men, on knowledge and wise design (hidden) from the sons of man; on a fountain of righteousness and a storehouse of strength, on a spring of glory (hidden) from the assembly of flesh.  (1QS 11:3-7)

1. Geza Vermes,
   The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English
   (London: Penguin, 1997), 7. In a later book,
   The Story of the Scrolls: The Miraculous Discovery and True Significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls
   (London: Penguin, 2010), after remarking that  “the miserable handling by de Vaux [a Dominican priest who was the first person to be given general charge of the publication of the scrolls] and his successors of the archaeological finds has stretched the scandal well into the third millennium” (p. 172), he goes on to defend the Essene hypothesis outlined below against various alternative theories.
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2. Vermes, 
   Complete Dead Sea Scrolls
   , 1.
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3. Since the secondary sources, Pliny, Philo, and Josephus, are all clearly wrong about some things, how can we be sure when they are right? Pliny, for instance, says that the Essenes do not use money: the plentiful supply of coins discovered at Qumran proves him to be mistaken. And he is equally wrong to maintain that they survived for thousands of centuries (though he does remark at the same time how difficult this is to believe, since no children are ever born to them!) (
   Natural History
   5.15.73). Josephus, who distinguishes between two orders of Essenes, the first celibate, the second not, is more interested in the first group, which he numbers at rather more than four thousand (
   Ant
   . 18.20-21). The
   Community Rule
   at Qumran makes no provision for women, and the great majority of skeletons found in the cemetery were male; so if the community also included members of the second (married) order of Essenes, they will have been much in the minority. Philo’s account is distorted by his philosophical preoccupations, and whereas Josephus says that Essenes were to be found in every city of Judea, Philo says that they avoided cities, which they regarded as dens of vice. Yet although, given these discrepancies, it is scarcely surprising that historians come to different conclusions, especially with regard to place and numbers, much of what Philo and Josephus say about the nature of Essene communities has in fact been confirmed by archaeological and, more especially, by the extensive manuscript discoveries at Qumran and elsewhere. (The classical sources—Philo, Pliny, Josephus—are conveniently gathered together, with translations, in
   The Essenes
   according to the Classical Sources
   , ed. Geza Vermes and Martin Goodman, Oxford Centre Textbooks 1 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989).
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4. Introducing a collection of essays published in 2013 based on my suggestion (in
   Understanding the Fourth Gospel
   ) that the Gospel of John was “an apocalypse in reverse,” I argued that John (as an Essene) had carefully read the Book of Daniel and that he had also studied the parts of
   1 Enoch
   available at Qumran (“Intimations of Apocalyptic: Looking Back and Looking Forward,” in
   John’s Gospel and Intimations of Apocalyptic
   , ed. Christopher Rowland and Catrin H. Williams [London: T & T Clark, 2013]: 1–33). Since 2010, when this essay was written, I have radically revised my opinion: I now think that it is only a mere rather than a near possibility that the evangelist was an Essene before he came to follow Jesus. 
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5. Brian J. Capper, “John. Qumran, and Virtuoso Religion,” in
   John,
   Qumran, and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Sixty Years of Discovery and Debate
   , ed. Mary L. Coloe and Tom Thatcher, Society of Biblical Literature Early Judaism and Its Literature 32 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), 107–8.
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6. See John J. Collins,
   The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature,
   Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 6.
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7. See Vermes,
   Complete Dead Sea Scrolls
   , 21.
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8. Carol A. Newsom,
   The Self as Symbolic Space:
   Constructing Identity and Community at Qumran,
   Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 52 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 4.
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9. Joseph Blenkinsopp, “Interpretation and the Tendency to Sectarianism: An Aspect of Second Temple History,” in
   Jewish and Christian Self-Definition: Aspects of Judaism in the Greco-Roman Period
   , ed. E. P. Sanders et al., 3 vols. (London: SCM, 1981), 1:1–26.
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10. Perhaps the most impressive attempt, drawing upon the work of Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, Hartmut Stegemann, and others, is that of Philip R. Davies,
    The Damascus Covenant: An Interpretation of the Damascus Document,
    Journal for the Study of the Old Testament: Supplement Series 25 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1982). Davies criticizes both Murphy-O’Connor and Stegemann for their excessive reliance on the scriptural interpretations found at Qumran known as
    pesharim
    (on which I have more to say later). But it may be that he makes the opposite mistake of failing to give them sufficient attention.
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11. Two examples from the Scrolls: (1) The phrase “the city of blood” in Nah. 3:1 is interpreted as “the city of Ephraim,
    those who seek smooth things
    during the last days, who walk in lies and falsehood” (4QpNah 3-4 ii 2); (2) In two of the hymns called the
    Hodayot
    , the leader of the community sees himself an object of attack by “the interpreters of error” and “those who seek
    smooth things
    ” (1QH 10:14-15) and again by “lying interpreters and deceitful seers,” who “have concocted base schemes against me, to exchange your law, which you impressed upon my heart for
    smooth things
    for your people” (1QH 12:10-11).
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12. An elaborate pun makes it impossible to translate this passage effectively. The verb
    ḥāqaq
    means “to cut or inscribe (on a tablet)” and hence “to decree,” and the participial form of the verb,
    ḥōqēq
    , can mean either a commander’s staff (which explains the translation “scepter” in the RSV) or else something decreed—a statute. The document exploits this ambiguity: במחוקקות אשד חקק חמחוקק—
    bimmĕḥôqĕqôt ’ăšer ḥāqaq hammĕḥôqēq,
    “with the statutes (staves) that were decreed by the ruler (staff)” (CD 6:9)
    .
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13. Most scholars think that the 390 years should be calculated from the destruction of the First Temple in 586
    bce
    By adding twenty (the number given for the years of searching), we arrive at the date of 176
    bce
    . for the beginning of the sect and the appearance of the Teacher of Righteousness. Three hundred and ninety years looks like a precise figure, but it may well have been borrowed from a prophecy of the prophet Ezekiel relating to Israel’s punitively long exile. In the relevant passage, after commanding the prophet to lie on his left side, God declares: “I will lay the punishment of the house of Israel upon you; for the number of days that you lie upon it, you shall bear their punishment. For I assign to you a number of days, three hundred and ninety days, equal to the number of years of their punishment” (Ezek. 4:4-5). In a note on this number, one editor of the document (Daniel Schwartz) comments that although it is canonical (insofar as is taken from Ezekiel), “it may, nevertheless, be approximately correct.” Clearly he might just as well have said, “being canonical, this number is unreliable.” But the author evidently believed that the sect to which he belonged was no more than a few decades old.
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14. “Teacher of Righteousness” is the literal translation of a Hebrew expression,
    mōrēh haṣṣedeq
    , which could be rendered in more idiomatic English as “Righteous Teacher.” But I will continue to employ the more literal rendering, the one generally used by commentators.
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15. Somewhat further on the document speaks of “the penitents of Israel and those who depart from the land of Judah and dwell in Damascus” (CD 6:5) and of “those who entered the new covenant in the land of Damascus” (6:19). Hence its name: the
    Damascus Document
    . The C in the abbreviation CD is for Cairo—where it was found—and the D for Damascus. The location of Damascus is disputed.
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16. The word generally used to refer to these commentaries is
    pēšer
    , a Hebrew word (borrowed from the Aramaic
    pišrah
    ) designating a continuous commentary on a biblical text: the corresponding verb
    pāšar
    was used of the act of interpretation. Several pesharim, as they are now called, have been found at Qumran—and nowhere else! The word is found only once in the Hebrew Bible (Qoh. 8:1), in the sense of explanation, but the cognate noun
    pōtēr
    and the corresponding verb
    pātar
    occur in Genesis in the context of Joseph’s interpretation of the dreams of “the butler and the baker of the king of Egypt,” and of Pharaoh himself (Genesis 40–41). This being so, it seems likely that the author of Daniel, who uses the Aramaic word
    pišrah
    repeatedly of Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams (Daniel 2), was borrowing the word, and with it the idea of dream interpretation, from the story of Joseph. It is equally likely, I believe, that the author of the Qumran pesharim was similarly borrowing from the story of Daniel, for just as Daniel could not interpret dreams without divine assistance, the
    pesharim
    show that the words of Scripture, like Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams, are mysteries (
    rāzîm
    ), and consequently cannot be properly understood except by an interpreter inspired by God. (The word
    rāz
    , “mystery,” rare in the Hebrew Bible, is quite common in the scrolls in the sense of a deep secret that human beings are unable to penetrate without God’s special aid.) So here, though in a very different context, we come across once more the now familiar theme of the essential element in the interpretation of Scripture.
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17. With a single exception, a pesher on one of the Psalms, all the pesharim are interpretations of prophetic texts—Isaiah and some of the minor prophets. No doubt the community thought of David, to whom they ascribed the authorship of the Psalms, as yet another prophet.
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18. Vermes, 
    Complete Dead Sea Scrolls
    , 97.
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19. In what follows and for the translation I am indebted to a long chapter of Carol Newsom entitled “What Do Hodayot Do?” in eadem,
    Self as Symbolic Space
    , 204–86.
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20. Newsom,
    Self as Symbolic Space
    , 86.
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21. At first this term was translated as a future—“the future mystery.” I have argued, however, that a present tense is more appropriate—“the mystery that is coming to pass.” See John Ashton, “‘Mystery’ in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Fourth Gospel,” in Coloe and Thatcher,
    John, Qumran, and the Dead Sea Scrolls,
    53-58. See also
    Qumran Cave 4.XV: Sapiential Texts, Part 1,
    ed. T. Elgvin et al., in consultation with J. A. Fitzmyer, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 20 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 105, where the editors say of the term רז  נהיה: “This refers to the secret of that which is coming into being,” and they point to Sir. 43:19 and 48:25, “where נהיות is parallel to נסתרות, secrets.”
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22.  See
    Qumran Cave 4.XXIV: 4QInstruction (Musar leMevin): 4Q415 ff.,
    ed. J. Strugnell, D. J. Harrington, and T. Elgvin, in consultation with J. A. Fitzmyer, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 34 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999).
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23.   In chapter 8 I will give further reasons for stressing the similarity between the Logos and the
    raz nihyeh
    .
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