Vol. 287. no. 5450, pp. 33 - 34
Palestine: Palestinians Inherit Riches, But Struggle to Make a Mark
Michael Balter
Denied for 3 decades the right to dig in their own land, Palestinian archaeologists are now only held back by a lack of cash and training
WEST BANK AND GAZA STRIP, PALESTINE--Khirbet Siya, a craggy mound nestled among austere orange hills near the West Bank town of Birzeit, might not seem the most auspicious site for an archaeological dig. What remains of a Byzantine village has been badly scarred by looters, who over the years have eaten away at the mound looking for ancient treasures. But for Hamed Salem of the Palestinian Institute of Archaeology in Birzeit, it is an opportunity he had been waiting for since the early 1980s. Last July, with the aid of students from Birzeit University, the United States, and Europe, Salem began excavating at Khirbet Siya--the first dig he has directed since becoming an archaeologist nearly 20 years ago. Among the discoveries are a giant olive press and traces of one of the oldest Byzantine churches ever found in Palestine.
Until 5 years ago, when Israel began ceding parts of the territories occupied during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War to the Palestinians, local archaeologists were rarely allowed to excavate in the West Bank and Gaza, which were under military jurisdiction. But after the creation of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) in 1994, Palestinians soon found themselves in possession of thousands of archaeological sites. Many are of major importance, such as Tel es-Sultan in Jericho and Deir el-Balah south of Gaza City, which during past excavations have revealed important insights into the Neolithic and Bronze Age peoples that once inhabited this land. For Palestinian archaeologists, this sudden embarrassment of ancient riches is both a blessing and a curse: Although they are thrilled at the chance to dig at last in their own land, lack of funding and trained excavators means they can often do little more than protect and preserve the sites from falling into ruin or the clutches of looters.
"We are starting completely from scratch," says archaeologist Adel Yahya, director of the Palestinian Association for Cultural Exchange. And as Palestinian archaeologists enjoy their newfound freedom, they are struggling to define their own research priorities and to avoid allowing archaeology to serve political and religious ideologies--a trap many of them believe Israeli archaeologists often fell into (see p. 29).
Their first priority is money. The Palestinian Department of Antiquities based in Ramallah--which was also created in 1994--currently receives only $500,000 annually from the PNA, according to department chief Hamdan Taha. And although contributions from outside donor countries, such as the Netherlands and Italy, have swollen the total department budget to several million dollars each year, nearly all of this money goes into restoring and protecting archaeological sites rather than research. "The major task of the department is rescue archaeology," says Taha. "Many sites were left as they were in 1967, and others have been excavated and then abandoned. Thousands of sites have been plundered and looted."
The lack of funds for research digs is very unfortunate, archaeologists say, because the thousands of sites now under Palestinian control represent a treasure trove of potential new information. "This is one of the richest archaeological areas in the world," says Joanne Clarke, director of the Jerusalem office of the Council for British Research in the Levant. This is especially true of the Gaza Strip, a major crossroads of the ancient Near East. And yet, Clarke says, the Gaza area "is almost completely untouched" by archaeologists. Clarke and the council are now teaming up with Palestinian antiquities authorities to excavate a number of Bronze Age settlements in Gaza, which were home to the Egyptians, Philistines, and Canaanites who vied for control of this region in ancient times.
Like the Gaza project, nearly all research digs currently under way here--such as new excavations by an Italian-Palestinian team at Jericho and Dutch-Palestinian explorations of an extensive Canaanite water system at Khirbet Belameh, near the West Bank city of Jenin--rely heavily on foreign funds and expertise. But this dependence on outside help worries many Palestinian archaeologists. Khaled Nashef, director of the Palestinian Institute of Archaeology, for example, complains that over the decades foreign archaeologists have dug in Palestine and then gone away, publishing their findings in their own languages without translating them into Arabic. "We need to work with foreign archaeologists as equal partners, but it is not easy."
One fundamental obstacle to getting Palestinian archaeology off the ground is a severe lack of opportunities for students wanting to enter the field. Nearly all of the archaeologists in Palestine--who number, according to various estimates given to Science, between 15 and 25 with graduate degrees--were trained in other countries. The only institution that currently offers graduate-level training in archaeology is the Institute for Islamic Archaeology near Ramallah, which awards masters' degrees. The Palestinian Institute of Archaeology, which is part of Birzeit University and once also offered masters' degrees, suffered a major setback when its American director was murdered under mysterious circumstances in 1992. Today, it only offers an undergraduate minor in archaeology, although Nashef--who took over the rudderless institute in 1994--says he hopes to convince university administrators to restore at least a major in the subject soon.
As they wrestle with these legacies of the recent past, many Palestinian archaeologists express a strong desire to keep ideological and religious issues out of their nascent archaeological endeavors. This may prove difficult, because there is considerable evidence that the Palestinian general public--which is well aware that Israeli archaeology has often been linked with the search for Jewish roots in Palestine--appears hungry for archaeological discoveries that would prove that the Palestinians were here first. Over the past few years, a number of articles have appeared in Palestinian newspapers and magazines--and even on the PNA's Web site--claiming that Palestinians were descended from the Canaanites or other pre-Israelite residents of Palestine. In discussions with Science, most Palestinian archaeologists were quick to distance themselves from these ideas.
"We don't want to repeat the mistakes the Israelis made," says Moain Sadek, head of the Department of Antiquities' operations in the Gaza Strip. Taha agrees: "All these controversies about historical rights, who came first and who came second, this is all rooted in ideology. It has nothing to do with archaeology." But not all archaeologists here believe that issues of Palestinian national identity can be totally shunted aside. "This question cannot be avoided," says Nashef. "Until now we Palestinians have not worked to create our own history, and this is our own fault. Archaeology here has concentrated on historical events or figures important to European or Western tradition. This may be important, but it doesn't provide a complete picture of how local people lived here in ancient times."
Until Palestinian archaeologists can develop the basic infrastructure needed to conduct excavations, these thorny ideological issues will probably remain largely academic. In the meantime, they will be concentrating on constructing their budding discipline from the ground up. "We have the core human resources," says Mahmoud Hawari, an archaeologist who teaches at the Institute for Islamic Archaeology. "Now we just need to get ourselves together. It might be a gradual evolution, but it is no shame to start small."
Chronicle of Higher Education
Section: Research & Publishing
Volume 52, Issue 35
The End of Gnosticism?
Richard Byrne
From the moment that Karen L. King entered Brown University's graduate program in religion, in the 1970s, she wanted to study Gnosticism. She was one of several religious-studies students of that era whose interest in the Gnostics was sparked by increased access to a treasure trove of ancient writings that had been discovered in 1945 near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi.
The brittle papyri found in Egypt were filled with lost sayings attributed to Jesus and provocative notions about his death and resurrection and the creation of the cosmos. Such writings had been labeled "heretical" by influential second- and third-century Christian bishops, and most of them were destroyed. People who adhered to such beliefs were eventually hounded out of mainstream Christianity and became a footnote in its history.
Now a professor of ecclesiastical history at Harvard University's Divinity School, Ms. King is one of the foremost experts in a field that has received immense popular attention since the publication of Dan Brown's best-selling 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code (Doubleday) and the April news blitz surrounding the Gospel of Judas — a newly unveiled lost text of early Christianity.
Yet the buzz around Gnosticism has drowned out an energetic and fundamental debate among scholars of early Christianity: Does Gnosticism even exist?
Ms. King has not lost her relish for the study of the texts that fall under that rubric. But she and other scholars — most notably Michael Allen Williams, a professor of comparative religion at the University of Washington — are asking hard questions about a definition of Gnosticism accepted for nearly 1,500 years.
Is the term imprecise — or even useless? Has its continued use by scholars stymied new breakthroughs in research on the Nag Hammadi texts?
Ms. King says that her work on texts such as the Apocryphon of John and the Gospel of Mary led her to the conclusion that "Gnosticism" is a bankrupt term for the Nag Hammadi writings and those whose beliefs they reflected. "With both texts," she says, "I kept trying to get them to fit into the mold, and they kept slipping out."
Both Ms. King and Mr. Williams have written trenchant book-length critiques of the term in the last decade. But many other scholars in the field, while agreeing that the term must be used with precision, argue that "Gnosticism" is still useful and necessary.
Bart D. Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sees the campaign to scrap the term altogether as a bit over the top. "I think it's a knee-jerk reaction," he says.
Sitting in the living room of her home in suburban Boston, Ms. King passionately insists that "Gnosticism" needs to go if scholars want to paint a more diverse and authentic picture of early Christianity. Yet she acknowledges the strength of the current against which she and others are swimming.
"It's extremely difficult to change a master narrative," she says. "And we've had this master narrative of Christianity since at least the fourth century. ... It's become entrenched."
History's Mysteries
That "master narrative" of Christianity traditionally sets those it calls Gnostics — a word derived from the Greek word gnosis, or "knowledge" — against the Christian orthodoxy from which they deviated.
In this narrative, the dividing lines are sharp. Where Christians embraced the God of the Old Testament as part of a new Trinity, Gnostics rejected that God as the Supreme Being. (Some of them believed the Old Testament God who created earth was a lower spirit, or "demiurge," and argued that his lesser status explained the manifold imperfections of his creation.) Christians believed that Jesus was crucified, died, and physically rose from the dead, while Gnostics held a variety of opinions about Jesus' death and resurrection, including the possibility that it was symbolic. Christians relied on a shared knowledge of scripture as interpreted by bishops, but Gnostics held that "secret" teachings of Christ and his apostles also existed.
This definition of Gnosticism was formulated mostly by its enemies. Until the 1940s, almost everything scholars knew about Gnostics came from the writings of early Christian bishops such as Irenaeus of Lyon, who in the second century attacked the theology and the ethics of Gnostics and declared them to be heretics. In refuting the Gnostics, however, the bishops did preserve some accounts of their beliefs — and even their writings.
Until the discoveries at Nag Hammadi, those ancient polemics were the primary sources for most scholarly explorations about the Gnostics. In her 2003 book, What Is Gnosticism? (Belknap/Harvard University Press), Ms. King devotes three chapters to tracing how scholars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries approached Gnosticism before that scholarly windfall. She argues that the lack of new evidence about Gnosticism forced researchers to work creatively within the definition written by the enemies of Gnostics more than 15 centuries before.
Elaine H. Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton University and author of a number of important books on early Christianity, points to the German scholar Hans Jonas's influential 1934 work, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist (Gnosticism and the Spirit of Late Antiquity), as a good example of how that dynamic played out. Sifting the ancient evidence with psychology and existential philosophy, she observes, Jonas described the Gnostics as essentially alienated from the world. From that sense of separation, they fashioned a theology that emphasized a duality between body and spirit — and extended that duality to create new myths about the cosmos.
"His book was so compelling," says Ms. Pagels, "that it became the framework in which people saw the discoveries made 10 years later. His scheme was so persuasive that it was taken by many people to be the underlying structure."
Doubting Dualism
The discovery of 45 lost texts at Nag Hammadi in 1945 gave scholars a new perspective on Gnosticism. They now could read "gospels" and "revelations" by believers the early Church fathers had labeled heretics. The papyri even contained attacks against orthodox Christians that accused them of heresy. (A Nag Hammadi text called the Apocalypse of Peter, for instance, assails "those outside our number who name themselves bishop and also deacons. ... They are dry canals.")
The discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts "shows that the Gnostics sincerely and reverently held these beliefs," says Mr. Ehrman. "Their attacks on the proto-orthodox as heretical were one of the most illuminating things for me."
The impact of the discovery in scholarly circles was by no means immediate, however. Dissemination of the texts was slowed by academic turf wars. Few scholars were proficient in Coptic, the language in which the newly discovered papyri were inscribed.
By the 1970s, however, scholars were working on the texts in earnest. The publication in 1978 of The Nag Hammadi Library (HarperCollins), edited by James M. Robinson, a professor emeritus of religion at Claremont Graduate University, provided English translations of all the texts found in 1945 and two additional texts found in 1896.
In 1979, Ms. Pagels's The Gnostic Gospels (Random House) was a popular success that brought the Nag Hammadi texts — and the theological, social, and political issues they raised — to a wider audience.
But as the notoriety of Gnostic writings grew, some scholars — including Ms. Pagels and Ms. King — grew dissatisfied with what they saw as the outdated interpretive framework that had attached itself to the texts like a barnacle.
In What Is Gnosticism?, Ms. King argued that the promise of "a new chapter in the history of Christianity" offered by the Nag Hammadi discoveries had not materialized. "The new riches did not provide quick or easy solutions," she wrote. "Indeed, the surprise is that for decades little has changed."
But Ms. King was not the first scholar to fashion a book-length critique of Gnosticism as it had been defined. In 1996 Mr. Williams, of the University of Washington, wrote a book bluntly titled Rethinking "Gnosticism": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton University Press). In that book, he crafted a comprehensive analysis of the ways that the Gnostic texts themselves rejected many of the assumptions generally held about them. Mr. Williams concluded that the texts varied so greatly in outlook and substance that the overall term made little sense.
For instance, he asked, did the myths created by Gnostics about the creation of the world by lower powers ("demiurges") really mean that Gnostics rejected the world? "In fact," writes Mr. Williams, "demiurgical myth seems in many instances to have been associated with greater involvement with the larger society, not less."
Reflecting on his book a decade later, Mr. Williams says that "at least as problematic as the term 'Gnosticism' were the categories used to describe it. ... People seemed to have open avenues to go to any certain text with a category in mind, and a set of expectations, and, of course, you find what you're looking for."
Scary Similarities
In What Is Gnosticism?, Ms. King undermined the term by tracing the history of its use to the present day. In essence, she says, she intended the book to "clean the slate" for a radical rethinking of how to interpret the writings and the beliefs of those who wrote and read them.
One provocative notion she sets forth is that to view Gnosticism solely in terms of its opposition to normative Christianity — heresy versus orthodoxy, public confession versus private teaching — impedes an understanding that it was the similarities between the Gnostics and their orthodox opponents, and not the differences, that fueled intense conflict in the early church.
Early in What is Gnosticism?, Ms. King observes that anti-Gnostic polemicists "took their rivals so seriously and denounced them so emphatically precisely because their views were in many respects so similar to the polemicists' own."
In an interview, Ms. King expands on her theory. "When you map out the similarities rather than the differences between the two sides — or what Irenaeus says are the differences — the territory of similarity is huge," she says. "Both work with this notion of humanity created in the image and likeness of God — and the need for a restoration of that. They both see Christ as the revealer figure, with the body as the place where the struggle takes place. They both have views at the end where humanity is divided into three groups depending on how you do."
Ms. Pagels agrees that "if we drop the invented terms, what we have is many different types of early Christianity. When I used the title The Gnostic Gospels, I assumed that they were all Gnostic. Now I would say that these are other Christianities. ... It's difficult for all of us who were raised the way we were to get rid of the assumptions. The act of shedding assumptions is only done one by one, and with great difficulty."
In What is Gnosticism?, Ms. King also took issue with Mr. Williams's decision to propose "biblical demiurgical myth" as a replacement term for Gnosticism. She argued that the new term retained assumptions that should be discarded in its favoring of "one mythic element over all others as the determinant characteristic" to define the texts.
"The result of Mr. Williams's study," she quipped, "has been merely to lead scholars to put Gnosticism in quotation marks and use it in more or less as always."
In conversation, Ms. King says that Mr. Williams's book was "a necessary step. Because what he's doing is working inside the box to critique it. He takes those typological definitions of Gnosticism and says 'Asceticism or libertinism? This or that?' And he shows us that this-or-that model of Gnosticism moves us in a different direction, and that there are other ways of seeing it, and also that the old stereotypes don't work.
"But then," she continues, "once you see that the old stereotypes don't work, and there's more going on there, what he comes up with at the end is a new term: 'biblical demiurgical myth.' It does not slip off the lips very easily. And one has to say, 'What does that mean?'"
Defenders of the Faith
Mr. Williams acknowledges the awkwardness of his term, but says many of his critics have been misguided.
"People thought I was just swapping names," he says. "Maybe there could have been something more eloquent, but I was suggesting that it might be good — as we looked at this diversity of texts — to also look at the things that group them together."
Indeed, the difficulty in talking about the Nag Hammadi texts and other writings as a group prods some scholars to defend the terms Gnostic and Gnosticism as necessary.
"I truly see the point that Karen makes about this," says Marvin W. Meyer, a professor of Bible and Christian studies at Chapman University. "That these terms are polemical terms, rhetorical terms. They define the Other. But what always makes me pause before abandoning 'Gnostic' is the fact that Irenaeus says that there are certain people who refer to themselves as 'Gnostikoi.' If they think of themselves as Gnostikois, it gives me a certain confidence."
Mr. Meyer adds that he does "try to avoid the term Gnosticism. I think it's a neologism that has come into existence over the past century to cover a lot of different things."
Mr. Ehrman, of North Carolina, also believes the term is useful. "We talk about 'Christianity,' 'Judaism,' and 'apocalypticism,'" he points out, "even though there are many varieties of each."
While he does not agree with Mr. Williams's critique of the term, Mr. Ehrman does share his colleague's desire to plot out what links these texts together. "One of the things historians do in trying to understand the past is to try to find and understand commonalities," says Mr. Ehrman. "Religious historians group things together based on shared beliefs and practices. When we say 'Jew,' we mean something by it. ... A lot of these terms are slippery, but when there are enough similarities, they are shared enough that you can label them."
Doing away with "Gnosticism" entirely, he concludes, "would be to fragment our knowledge to such an extent that we can't know what we're talking about."
In some ways, Mr. Ehrman says, the skirmishes over definition are "old battles." He also worries that efforts to disentangle the Gnostics from their defeat in early Christianity's battles over heresy may simply be swapping the losing side's black hat for a white hat.
"There's a feeling that the Gnostics have to be the good guys," he says.
Mr. Williams says that Ms. King's work in particular is a step toward "breaking away from the way in which these old categories end up privileging the mainstream model of Christianity.
"But," he continues, "my approach is different. ... I think it is important to approach them from a historical perspective, and not always to judge them theologically against normative Christianity." The various strands of belief that are labeled as Gnostic, says Mr. Williams, "were attempts at religious innovation that did not enjoy majority success. What came to be orthodox Christianity did. I treat them sociologically to understand why they were minority movements."
Back to the Future
A question that What Is Gnosticism? left open is just what the book's author proposes to replace "Gnosticism." After taking a wrecking ball to the concept, Ms. King offered only the haziest of ways forward at the conclusion of her study.
So what should replace it? "What if we write the history of Christian identity creation," she says, "and instead of having our already-established categories of orthodoxy and heresy, with all of their diversity, we start asking, Where do Christians draw lines? Who did it? What was at stake? Using what tools?"
Ms. King says that her latest works — The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle (Polebridge Press, 2003) and The Secret Revelation of John (Harvard University Press, 2006) — are attempts to write new chapters in that history of early Christian identity, one historical text at a time. Both of Ms. King's studies closely examine one text often defined as Gnostic, and include a translation of the work.
Many of the scholars in the field see such close readings as a strong trend in current scholarship.
"What's going on now is close work on individual texts or groups of texts, asking specific sets of questions," says Mr. Williams.
But how does Ms. King's theoretical approach make her studies different? For one thing, her rejection of "Gnosticism" leads her to place both the Gospel of Mary and the Apocryphon of John at a distance from the classic Gnostic definition.
In The Gospel of Mary of Magdala, for instance, she concludes that the text contains few elements that scholars define as Gnostic. Rather, she observes, it was that gospel's arguments "that the resurrection is spiritual, not physical" and its affirmation "that women can serve as teachers and preachers" that led it to be branded later as a heretical text.
Ms. King's latest book, The Secret Revelation of John (Harvard University Press), transforms a text often used to define Gnosticism, the Apocryphon of John, into a wrestling match among Plato, the Pentateuch, the New Testament Gospel of John, and other ancient spiritualities. She argues that while some parts of this particular writing possess classic Gnostic characteristics (the God of the Old Testament, for example, is cast as a renegade and ignorant child of the embodiment of Wisdom), other parts of the text argue against the classic definition.
In an interview, Ms. King points to a lengthy litany of demons that the Apocryphon of John associates with various parts of the body. Previous scholars have taken this passage to represent a Gnostic rejection of the body as evil, she says. But Ms. King reads it as exactly the opposite: a blueprint for healing. "It is said that Gnostics had no valuation of the body," she says, "but then you have this text — more than half of which is a description of the body."
The Nag Hammadi texts reveal many new things about early Christianity, scholars say. But they do so in dribs and drabs. The texts are fragmentary. They are complex. They offer no smooth avenues or easy interpretations.
"Any time you have new texts of this complexity," says Ms. King, "it requires living with them for awhile, and working with them and working with them, until you gain that kind of understanding. It's partly a matter of research and partly a matter of rethinking. I think this is a big challenge not just for the broader public but for scholars: to be able to reimagine the history of Christianity and to make these texts a part of that history. Right now, they're still off to the edge."
Interview from PBS Thinktank
What Do We Know About the Bible?
Ben Wattenberg: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Recently an Israeli antiquities collector revealed the existence of a stone artifact inscribed with the words 'James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.' The discovery set off a storm of controversy among archeologists, historians, and biblical scholars. What is science-once the scourge of religion-now telling us about the people and culture of Biblical times? Can the bible serve as both a book of religious faith as well as historical facts?
Eric Meyers, professor of archeology at Duke University, editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Arcaheology in the Near East, and co-author of the Cambridge Companion to the Bible.
And Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, and author of The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The topic before the house: What do we know about the Bible?
Ben Wattenberg: Many archeologists have long regarded Biblical scripture as a collection of myths and legends. But beginning around 1960, archeologists began turning up artifacts bearing direct references to important figures in the Bible--King David, Herod, Pontius Pilate, and others. If authenticated, the inscription on the recently discovered ossuary would be the oldest direct evidence of the existence of Jesus.
Piecing together ancient history from stone tablets and pottery shards is no easy task. At many known sites, like Jericho, only a fraction of the ancient ruins have been explored. In Jerusalem, religious restrictions and political violence hamper archeological work. But new technologies are making it easier to pinpoint potential sites. Growing interest among scientists could lead to a golden age of biblical archeology.
Ben Wattenberg: Hershel Shanks, Eric Meyers, thank you for joining us on 'Think Tank.' Hershel, let’s begin with the story that made front pages, the ossuary? Is that how it’s pronounced?
Hershel Shanks: That’s how it’s pronounced. It’s a bone box. In the First Century, Jews in Jerusalem would bury their dead or put them in a niche in a cave. And after a year when the flesh had desiccated and fallen away, they would take the bones and put them in a bone box called an ossuary, a limestone box, long enough to accommodate the longest bone. And this one is inscribed in Aramaic 'James the Son of Joseph, the Brother of Jesus.'
Ben Wattenberg: Now is that the first reference to Jesus in a historical artifact?
Eric Meyers: If the artifact is legitimate then beyond doubt it would be the first extra-biblical reference to Jesus.
Ben Wattenberg: Do you think it’s authentic?
Eric Meyers: I think there’s a high probability that it is, but given the fact that we don’t know its context and that it comes from a looted environment and sold on the open market, I think we have to have a question mark ultimately.
Ben Wattenberg: You have a question mark, Hershel?
Hershel Shanks: Yes, certainty is rare in archaeology.
Ben Wattenberg: Your magazine published it, is that right?
Hershel Shanks: That’s right. Biblical Archeology Review, and the author of the story is one of the world’s leading experts in scripts, a man by the name of Andre Lamaire from the Sorbonne. And we’ve tested the authenticity from everywhere to Sunday. And I’m convinced that there’s almost no question as to its authenticity. The bigger question is whether the three people that are mentioned - James, Joseph, and Jesus - are the three people by those names in the New Testament.
Ben Wattenberg: Is your guess that as archeologists continue the work there would be further historical references, non-biblical references to Jesus?
Eric Meyers: The problem with that is Jesus is a very common name in the First Century. And it’s a shortened form of Joshua-- Jeshu or Jeshua. And so there are numerous mentions of Jesus in Jewish epigraphy and inscriptions from the First Century, but not with the configuration as Hershel has said with these three particular names. Each name is very common in and of itself. Tom, Dick, and Harry as it were. But this configuration is virtually unique.
Ben Wattenberg: What else have you all come up with recently that tends to confirm or deny things in the Bible?
Hershel Shanks: We have a few other artifacts that refer to people that are mentioned in the New Testament. Pontius Pilate is one, Herod the Great. And then going back further, we have a very recent, the last decade, the discovery excavated by professional archeologists of a reference to the House of David or the Dynasty of David within a hundred, a hundred and fifty years after David’s reign.
Ben Wattenberg: What would that be? About a 1000 BC or something?
Eric Meyers: Nine, Nine Twenty-five (BC), something like that. Tenth Century (BC).
Ben Wattenberg: Wow.
Hershel Shanks: That is the inscription. The reign was probably a Thousand to Nine Sixty (BC), something like that.
Ben Wattenberg: How do you go about trying to authenticate these inscriptions? I mean that they’re real? How does that work?
Eric Meyers: Well paleography is not a new science, that is, a study of the shape of the letters, for example in the ossuary. This is a discipline that’s sixty, seventy years old, and is quite advanced. And we have tables and charts that scholars have established as being guidelines to the dating of these letters. Now when you get such inscriptions in stone we have similar paleographical guidelines to understand the dating. And unfortunately the David inscription is also found in a dump at the Tel Dan excavation and it’s out of its context. But it is certainly...
Ben Wattenberg: Do you do carbon dating?
Eric Meyers: You can’t do it for inanimate objects.
Ben Wattenberg: What are the main schools of thought about how accurate the Bible is in-as reality of that time?
Eric Meyers: It’s a pretty heated debate. In general, European scholars have opted for a low chronology, that is saying that the biblical text was produced in late first temple times, at the time of Deuteronomy let’s say the Sixth or Seventh Century, but most of it was created in the postexilic era, the Persian period, Fifth Century BC, Fourth Century BC. Some even want to say it was written, fictionally, in the Hellenistic Period, Third or Second Century BCE. And many scholars, therefore, doubt the veracity, the truth of the reports of the pre-exilic period. That is the first temple period, the united monarchy, the origins of Israel, the exodus of...
Ben Wattenberg: King David, King Solomon, that kind of stuff.
Hershel Shanks: Yes, yes, yes.
Ben Wattenberg: But people are always saying, you know, you can use the Bible almost as a guidebook to the Middle East. All the cities that are mentioned...
Hershel Shanks: No. No. That has to be qualified. The search today is for the core truths of the Bible. There’s no question that the Bible went through stages of composition, was edited by people who used old sources. And to try to separate all this is very difficult. It’s very uncertain. If you want certainty, go into mathematics. Don’t go into ancient history. The effort has to be to look to see the core of the story, or whether there’s a core truth to it. And I think that, while there’s obviously going to be some uncertainty, uh, the basic structure of the story is sound. And it’s very hard for me to imagine that it was simply created fictionally. That someone sat down and said I want to make a story. What they did was to take a story that was there, that was developed over the centuries and gave it a little twist for their own purposes.
Ben Wattenberg: Right.
Hershel Shanks: But still the core is there. And there are exaggerations, too. So our task is to try to find that core. And some of the scholars that Eric was talking about, I think, sort of glory in their own cynicism, in their own knocking of the Bible.
Ben Wattenberg: Are these the so-called minimalists who are sort of fighting this?
Eric Meyers: It’s more widespread than the phenomenon of biblical minimalism. And when I said Europe, I intentionally meant to indict the European scholars in general. They have more or less dismissed the early period of Israelite beginnings and origins years ago. This was something they started doing in the Nineteenth Century. And so this is just coming around a hundred and fifty years later in a more extreme form.
Ben Wattenberg: This was sort of the burgeoning of rationality throughout the Western World. As they said everything’s got to be proved and these are all folk tales and what not.
Eric Meyers: Yes, I’ve taught in Europe two semesters, one in Frankfurt, one in Berlin, and lectured widely there. And people when they hear my sort of conservative, maximalist view, I mean, you know we wind up in the beer hall until early wee hours debating how so many Americans could buy into this.
Ben Wattenberg: But the not so hidden agenda of the minimalists is to attack religion and elevate rationality. I mean it came about in that general area.
Eric Meyers: It’s not attacking a religion. It’s attacking the veracity of the narrative, the truthfulness of what is reported in those books.
Ben Wattenberg: Well, if you take it one step further, you then say well you know it’s all a myth, it’s all a story.
Hershel Shanks : Yeah. They would...they would...
Ben Wattenberg: We are the great Nineteenth Century rationalists and we finally are starting to look at things scientifically. And now my understanding is that there’s a somewhat of a reversal going back. That many scholars now, as you all do, believe that much of the Bible has been authenticated? I mean there was that sort of swing.
Eric Meyers: In its larger framework, yes. Not in every detail, of course.
Ben Wattenberg: No, of course not.
Hershel Shanks: Yes, you have to really talk about specifics. So that when you’re talking about the patriarchs, that’s one thing. When you’re talking about the conquest, for example, there archeology can play a role.
Ben Wattenberg: The conquest...
Hershel Shanks: ...the conquest of Canaan.
Ben Wattenberg: Right.
Hershel Shanks: When the Israelites came out of Egypt, they passed through the desert forty years and then they conquered Canaan according to the book of Joshua.
Ben Wattenberg: And not according to the Marquis of Queensbury rules either. Pretty tough stuff.
Eric Meyers: Not according to the book of Judges either, which I think is what the point Hershel’s going to make, where it wasn’t a conquest. There was a peaceful settlement. There were some battles here and there but it was not the way previous generations understood it. And without archeology we would be in no position to understand it with the kind of refinement and nuance that we do today.
Ben Wattenberg: Now how much do we know about the period in which Jesus lived and immediately thereafter compared to this earlier period.
Hershel Shanks: Enormously more.
Eric Meyers: Well it’s quite different and it’s easier because we’re in a period where written textual material was transmitted in a much better way and more preserved text. We have ancient coinage, which has only invented it in Sixth Century, Seventh Centuries, before that and not in the earlier periods. So we have coins and you have to remember that the New Testament is about one fifth the size of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. And so all of the New Testament scholarship that is focused on the historical Jesus and the context of Jesus has produced enormous results over the last two generations.
Ben Wattenberg: And the Dead Sea Scrolls are part of that new scholarship?
Hershel Shanks: They’re part of that. They really provide the Jewish background. This historical Jesus research that’s been going on over the last couple of decades is really quite extraordinary. And the public I think is very unaware of it. For example, there was a big discussion about whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem. He probably wasn’t. He was supposed to have come down with Joseph and Mary because of a census. But the census was at a different time. It doesn’t fit. And it’s very unlikely that people would travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Also, there’s a good reason for him to be born in Bethlehem, to get him down in Bethlehem. And that is that he’s supposed to be a scion, a descendant of King David who was the original Messiah.
Ben Wattenberg: Right.
Hershel Shanks: And his genealogy is given as coming from David. And where was David born?
Eric Meyers: Bethlehem.
Hershel Shanks: In Bethlehem, of course.
Ben Wattenberg: So the Davidic line would be...
Hershel Shanks: That’s right. He’s always called in the New Testament Jesus of Nazareth. So I don’t mean to say that I’m on one side or the other of that debate. But that’s the kind of discussion that’s going on in historical Jesus research. And mainstream, this isn’t some extreme kookiness.
Ben Wattenberg: After both of you, your many decades of study of these texts, are these divine documents?
Eric Meyers: I would put it slightly differently. The Bible is certainly a document prepared and written down by human hands. But without the belief in a supreme being, which underlies it, you would not have the level of high literature that you have in those documents. So it is the record of a discussion between human beings and whom they believe to be God.
Ben Wattenberg: I mean it’s a very important question in American life today generally and people are talking that we’re at the edge of a third Great Awakening, where there will be another surge of religious belief in American life, so it’s not just an argument among scholars.
Eric Meyers: I think we’re seeing that religious awakening in America and certainly I see it on campus every day. But it takes a...
Ben Wattenberg: How do you see it? I mean, what do you see?
Eric Meyers: Well, I meant that evangelical life has never been richer and...
Ben Wattenberg: This is at Duke University?
Eric Meyers: At Duke University and other campuses. You have religious life flourishing, at least on our campus and other campuses that I visit. And I think this is a real genuine searching. But it’s taking two forms. As I said there’s the evangelical thrust and those who are looking for more literal understanding in God’s word as reflected in the Bible, Old and New Testament. And there’s people who follow teachers like me and the rest of our faculties in places like Duke, where we go for the nuance and higher criticism. We try to put it in a way that is compatible with the modern scientific rationalistic spirit.
Ben Wattenberg: Tell me about the Dead Sea Scrolls. How important are the Dead Sea Scrolls?
Eric Meyers: Well, to me, the Dead Sea Scrolls is certainly the most important archeological discovery of the modern era, even beyond the Twentieth Century, because it embraces archeology, the physical ruin of the site, plus eight hundred different manuscripts, canonical, non-canonicals and has shed light on the end of the second temple era, period in Judaism as never before.
Ben Wattenberg: What would the timeframe then be?
Eric Meyers: Well about Two Hundred BC to Seventy AD, roughly those three centuries.
Ben Wattenberg: And this was what? Apparently a library or something, that it would have that much material?
Eric Meyers: This is an ancient archive that was stored by the site, some of it produced by the sectarians who lived there, some of it brought with them when they left the mainstream at the beginning of their tenure in the Second Century (BC). And so you have canonical, that is, material that ultimately appears in the Bible as we know it, and materials that are unique to this sectarian group known as the Essenes.
Hershel Shanks: There’s a commonality between the Dead Sea Scrolls and this really fantastic ossuary that we’ve just brought to light. And that is, as Eric said, the ossuary was looted. We don’t know where it came from.
Ben Wattenberg: It was looted.
Hershel Shanks: It may have been found when they were digging a trench to lay a pipe or add a room to a building or whatever.
Ben Wattenberg: Not stolen but just...
Eric Meyers: Well modern tomb robbers of some kind.
Ben: Right.
Hershel Shanks: And the Dead Sea Scrolls were also looted. We bought most of them from the Bedouin who looted them. And that was certainly the wise thing to do in retrospect. They bought them. And that’s what happened here. So we would know much more if we knew the context. If they were professionally excavated, we always like that. But I guess my position is if we can’t have that, it’s better to have what we do have than to pretend that it didn’t exist. And it’s the same thing with the ossuary as with the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Ben Wattenberg: Are the Dead Sea Scrolls considered authentic? I mean, is there any argument about that?
Eric Meyers: I don’t think anyone would question their authenticity today. When they were first found in the Nineteen Forties, Late Forties and Early Fifties, there was some debate whether they were Early Medieval or Post Seventy (AD), but I think that has all but disappeared. They have been tested for carbon fourteen, and all the dates have been reestablished and resecured through scientific carbon fourteen testing.
Ben Wattenberg: What did your magazine do with the Dead Sea Scrolls? I mean, you played a real role in publishing them.
Hershel Shanks: Well, the Dead Sea Scrolls from Cave Four, comprising over five hundred different manuscripts were assigned to eight scholars to publish. And they kept...
Ben Wattenberg: Assigned by whom? Are they owned by the government of Israel? Or?
Hershel Shanks: No, no. At that time it was by Jordan. There were no Jews on this Judenrein committee. And they kept it to themselves for years and years. Initially they’d published a little then in 1960 they stopped. Decades passed and other scholars couldn’t get access to them. Some of them died and passed them on to their students, who then considered them theirs and they wouldn’t let other scholars see them. And we complained. We complained about them in writing in the magazine and ultimately we published transcripts and pictures of the unpublished scrolls. They weren’t the best copies, but that really forced those few scholars who had access to them to recognize the claims of the public and they opened them up and now they’re free to all scholars to study.
Ben Wattenberg: The photographs that you published of the Dead Sea Scrolls are of the Bible as it existed what a thousand years ago?
Hershel Shanks: No, it didn’t exist two thousand years ago as the Bible. It’s anachronistic to talk about the Bible then. The books of the Bible that were accepted into the canon were accepted later. And also the texts, the Biblical texts, were standardized later so that there is quite a tolerance of different editions of the various books that we know of as in the Bible today.
Eric Meyers: The documents that we have from the Dead Sea Scrolls date from roughly Two Hundred BC to Seventy AD. And among those documents are hundreds of fragments and full complete copies of what we call canonical Biblical texts, such as the Book of Isaiah, we have in multiple copies. The most common copies we have are the Book of Deuteronomy. And it is remarkable that so many of these editions, without vowels by the way, turn out to be the same text virtually, with some modification, as that text adopted, let’s say, Three Hundred AD by the Rabbis and ultimately regularized by the Masserites in Nine Hundred AD. So it shows us that the Bible was stabilized textually at a very early period. On the other hand, it shows us, for example, in the Book of Samuel, that you have variations that are very significant. It shows us a Book of Jeremiah in the Greek that has a underlying much shorter version, that’s attested at Qumran. So it’s full of significant information that sheds light on the textual transmission history of the Old Testament.
Hershel Shanks: I agree with Eric, in general, the text closely follows today what we have from two thousand years ago. And the Dead Sea Scrolls brought us back an additional thousand years. The oldest Hebrew Bible that we had was about a thousand (AD). Now we have those texts going back another thousand years. While that is all true, some of the most interesting things are the differences that we find. And in the Hebrew Bible, for example, in Deuteronomy Thirty-two it talks about the land being distributed according to the sons of Israel. That doesn’t make any sense because, at the time they’re talking about, Israel hasn’t been established. And in the Qumran text that we now have, it says that it was distributed again, according to the sons of God--in Hebrew. And there was a version of it that said according to the sons of God. And you have that in the Hebrew Bible, so the suspicion is that it had a polytheistic stain to it, so that it was changed to the sons of Israel in the Hebrew text.
Ben Wattenberg: As students of the Bible, if you look back at the cultures of that time, or of those times, were the people then people that we would recognize. I mean, I know they were physically, but I mean have all the vast cultural array of modernism just changed us as a species? Or would we know how the world works?
Eric Meyers: I think intellectually and spiritually we could identify with them. But given the nature of what you had to do to survive in a single day, I think we’d all have enormous problems: No electricity, no flush toilets, all of these things would put a hamper on all our life. Just the amount of energy invested into food production per day I think would stymie most families, whether it’s America or Europe. Not in Africa. I recently visited Africa and there you can see pre-industrial life pretty much...
Ben Wattenberg: Well, I mean a hundred years ago, a hundred and fifty years ago, in America you could also. I mean you didn’t have any of that stuff. So.
Eric Meyers: Right. But the people, basically, I think we’d have to say were the same in their intellect and in their spirits and in their hearts.
Ben Wattenberg: Which is what makes the Bible such a universal document.
Eric Meyers: And that’s why it carries well, through time, with an eternal message.
Ben Wattenberg: Okay. Hershel Shanks, Eric Meyers, thank you very much for joining us on 'Think Tank.' And thank you. Please remember to send your comments via e-mail. For 'Think Tank,' I’m Ben Wattenberg.
WEST BANK AND GAZA STRIP, PALESTINE--Khirbet Siya, a craggy mound nestled among austere orange hills near the West Bank town of Birzeit, might not seem the most auspicious site for an archaeological dig. What remains of a Byzantine village has been badly scarred by looters, who over the years have eaten away at the mound looking for ancient treasures. But for Hamed Salem of the Palestinian Institute of Archaeology in Birzeit, it is an opportunity he had been waiting for since the early 1980s. Last July, with the aid of students from Birzeit University, the United States, and Europe, Salem began excavating at Khirbet Siya--the first dig he has directed since becoming an archaeologist nearly 20 years ago. Among the discoveries are a giant olive press and traces of one of the oldest Byzantine churches ever found in Palestine.
Until 5 years ago, when Israel began ceding parts of the territories occupied during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War to the Palestinians, local archaeologists were rarely allowed to excavate in the West Bank and Gaza, which were under military jurisdiction. But after the creation of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) in 1994, Palestinians soon found themselves in possession of thousands of archaeological sites. Many are of major importance, such as Tel es-Sultan in Jericho and Deir el-Balah south of Gaza City, which during past excavations have revealed important insights into the Neolithic and Bronze Age peoples that once inhabited this land. For Palestinian archaeologists, this sudden embarrassment of ancient riches is both a blessing and a curse: Although they are thrilled at the chance to dig at last in their own land, lack of funding and trained excavators means they can often do little more than protect and preserve the sites from falling into ruin or the clutches of looters.
"We are starting completely from scratch," says archaeologist Adel Yahya, director of the Palestinian Association for Cultural Exchange. And as Palestinian archaeologists enjoy their newfound freedom, they are struggling to define their own research priorities and to avoid allowing archaeology to serve political and religious ideologies--a trap many of them believe Israeli archaeologists often fell into (see p. 29).
Their first priority is money. The Palestinian Department of Antiquities based in Ramallah--which was also created in 1994--currently receives only $500,000 annually from the PNA, according to department chief Hamdan Taha. And although contributions from outside donor countries, such as the Netherlands and Italy, have swollen the total department budget to several million dollars each year, nearly all of this money goes into restoring and protecting archaeological sites rather than research. "The major task of the department is rescue archaeology," says Taha. "Many sites were left as they were in 1967, and others have been excavated and then abandoned. Thousands of sites have been plundered and looted."
The lack of funds for research digs is very unfortunate, archaeologists say, because the thousands of sites now under Palestinian control represent a treasure trove of potential new information. "This is one of the richest archaeological areas in the world," says Joanne Clarke, director of the Jerusalem office of the Council for British Research in the Levant. This is especially true of the Gaza Strip, a major crossroads of the ancient Near East. And yet, Clarke says, the Gaza area "is almost completely untouched" by archaeologists. Clarke and the council are now teaming up with Palestinian antiquities authorities to excavate a number of Bronze Age settlements in Gaza, which were home to the Egyptians, Philistines, and Canaanites who vied for control of this region in ancient times.
Like the Gaza project, nearly all research digs currently under way here--such as new excavations by an Italian-Palestinian team at Jericho and Dutch-Palestinian explorations of an extensive Canaanite water system at Khirbet Belameh, near the West Bank city of Jenin--rely heavily on foreign funds and expertise. But this dependence on outside help worries many Palestinian archaeologists. Khaled Nashef, director of the Palestinian Institute of Archaeology, for example, complains that over the decades foreign archaeologists have dug in Palestine and then gone away, publishing their findings in their own languages without translating them into Arabic. "We need to work with foreign archaeologists as equal partners, but it is not easy."
One fundamental obstacle to getting Palestinian archaeology off the ground is a severe lack of opportunities for students wanting to enter the field. Nearly all of the archaeologists in Palestine--who number, according to various estimates given to Science, between 15 and 25 with graduate degrees--were trained in other countries. The only institution that currently offers graduate-level training in archaeology is the Institute for Islamic Archaeology near Ramallah, which awards masters' degrees. The Palestinian Institute of Archaeology, which is part of Birzeit University and once also offered masters' degrees, suffered a major setback when its American director was murdered under mysterious circumstances in 1992. Today, it only offers an undergraduate minor in archaeology, although Nashef--who took over the rudderless institute in 1994--says he hopes to convince university administrators to restore at least a major in the subject soon.
As they wrestle with these legacies of the recent past, many Palestinian archaeologists express a strong desire to keep ideological and religious issues out of their nascent archaeological endeavors. This may prove difficult, because there is considerable evidence that the Palestinian general public--which is well aware that Israeli archaeology has often been linked with the search for Jewish roots in Palestine--appears hungry for archaeological discoveries that would prove that the Palestinians were here first. Over the past few years, a number of articles have appeared in Palestinian newspapers and magazines--and even on the PNA's Web site--claiming that Palestinians were descended from the Canaanites or other pre-Israelite residents of Palestine. In discussions with Science, most Palestinian archaeologists were quick to distance themselves from these ideas.
"We don't want to repeat the mistakes the Israelis made," says Moain Sadek, head of the Department of Antiquities' operations in the Gaza Strip. Taha agrees: "All these controversies about historical rights, who came first and who came second, this is all rooted in ideology. It has nothing to do with archaeology." But not all archaeologists here believe that issues of Palestinian national identity can be totally shunted aside. "This question cannot be avoided," says Nashef. "Until now we Palestinians have not worked to create our own history, and this is our own fault. Archaeology here has concentrated on historical events or figures important to European or Western tradition. This may be important, but it doesn't provide a complete picture of how local people lived here in ancient times."
Until Palestinian archaeologists can develop the basic infrastructure needed to conduct excavations, these thorny ideological issues will probably remain largely academic. In the meantime, they will be concentrating on constructing their budding discipline from the ground up. "We have the core human resources," says Mahmoud Hawari, an archaeologist who teaches at the Institute for Islamic Archaeology. "Now we just need to get ourselves together. It might be a gradual evolution, but it is no shame to start small."
Chronicle of Higher Education
Section: Research & Publishing
Volume 52, Issue 35
The End of Gnosticism?
Richard Byrne
From the moment that Karen L. King entered Brown University's graduate program in religion, in the 1970s, she wanted to study Gnosticism. She was one of several religious-studies students of that era whose interest in the Gnostics was sparked by increased access to a treasure trove of ancient writings that had been discovered in 1945 near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi.
The brittle papyri found in Egypt were filled with lost sayings attributed to Jesus and provocative notions about his death and resurrection and the creation of the cosmos. Such writings had been labeled "heretical" by influential second- and third-century Christian bishops, and most of them were destroyed. People who adhered to such beliefs were eventually hounded out of mainstream Christianity and became a footnote in its history.
Now a professor of ecclesiastical history at Harvard University's Divinity School, Ms. King is one of the foremost experts in a field that has received immense popular attention since the publication of Dan Brown's best-selling 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code (Doubleday) and the April news blitz surrounding the Gospel of Judas — a newly unveiled lost text of early Christianity.
Yet the buzz around Gnosticism has drowned out an energetic and fundamental debate among scholars of early Christianity: Does Gnosticism even exist?
Ms. King has not lost her relish for the study of the texts that fall under that rubric. But she and other scholars — most notably Michael Allen Williams, a professor of comparative religion at the University of Washington — are asking hard questions about a definition of Gnosticism accepted for nearly 1,500 years.
Is the term imprecise — or even useless? Has its continued use by scholars stymied new breakthroughs in research on the Nag Hammadi texts?
Ms. King says that her work on texts such as the Apocryphon of John and the Gospel of Mary led her to the conclusion that "Gnosticism" is a bankrupt term for the Nag Hammadi writings and those whose beliefs they reflected. "With both texts," she says, "I kept trying to get them to fit into the mold, and they kept slipping out."
Both Ms. King and Mr. Williams have written trenchant book-length critiques of the term in the last decade. But many other scholars in the field, while agreeing that the term must be used with precision, argue that "Gnosticism" is still useful and necessary.
Bart D. Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sees the campaign to scrap the term altogether as a bit over the top. "I think it's a knee-jerk reaction," he says.
Sitting in the living room of her home in suburban Boston, Ms. King passionately insists that "Gnosticism" needs to go if scholars want to paint a more diverse and authentic picture of early Christianity. Yet she acknowledges the strength of the current against which she and others are swimming.
"It's extremely difficult to change a master narrative," she says. "And we've had this master narrative of Christianity since at least the fourth century. ... It's become entrenched."
History's Mysteries
That "master narrative" of Christianity traditionally sets those it calls Gnostics — a word derived from the Greek word gnosis, or "knowledge" — against the Christian orthodoxy from which they deviated.
In this narrative, the dividing lines are sharp. Where Christians embraced the God of the Old Testament as part of a new Trinity, Gnostics rejected that God as the Supreme Being. (Some of them believed the Old Testament God who created earth was a lower spirit, or "demiurge," and argued that his lesser status explained the manifold imperfections of his creation.) Christians believed that Jesus was crucified, died, and physically rose from the dead, while Gnostics held a variety of opinions about Jesus' death and resurrection, including the possibility that it was symbolic. Christians relied on a shared knowledge of scripture as interpreted by bishops, but Gnostics held that "secret" teachings of Christ and his apostles also existed.
This definition of Gnosticism was formulated mostly by its enemies. Until the 1940s, almost everything scholars knew about Gnostics came from the writings of early Christian bishops such as Irenaeus of Lyon, who in the second century attacked the theology and the ethics of Gnostics and declared them to be heretics. In refuting the Gnostics, however, the bishops did preserve some accounts of their beliefs — and even their writings.
Until the discoveries at Nag Hammadi, those ancient polemics were the primary sources for most scholarly explorations about the Gnostics. In her 2003 book, What Is Gnosticism? (Belknap/Harvard University Press), Ms. King devotes three chapters to tracing how scholars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries approached Gnosticism before that scholarly windfall. She argues that the lack of new evidence about Gnosticism forced researchers to work creatively within the definition written by the enemies of Gnostics more than 15 centuries before.
Elaine H. Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton University and author of a number of important books on early Christianity, points to the German scholar Hans Jonas's influential 1934 work, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist (Gnosticism and the Spirit of Late Antiquity), as a good example of how that dynamic played out. Sifting the ancient evidence with psychology and existential philosophy, she observes, Jonas described the Gnostics as essentially alienated from the world. From that sense of separation, they fashioned a theology that emphasized a duality between body and spirit — and extended that duality to create new myths about the cosmos.
"His book was so compelling," says Ms. Pagels, "that it became the framework in which people saw the discoveries made 10 years later. His scheme was so persuasive that it was taken by many people to be the underlying structure."
Doubting Dualism
The discovery of 45 lost texts at Nag Hammadi in 1945 gave scholars a new perspective on Gnosticism. They now could read "gospels" and "revelations" by believers the early Church fathers had labeled heretics. The papyri even contained attacks against orthodox Christians that accused them of heresy. (A Nag Hammadi text called the Apocalypse of Peter, for instance, assails "those outside our number who name themselves bishop and also deacons. ... They are dry canals.")
The discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts "shows that the Gnostics sincerely and reverently held these beliefs," says Mr. Ehrman. "Their attacks on the proto-orthodox as heretical were one of the most illuminating things for me."
The impact of the discovery in scholarly circles was by no means immediate, however. Dissemination of the texts was slowed by academic turf wars. Few scholars were proficient in Coptic, the language in which the newly discovered papyri were inscribed.
By the 1970s, however, scholars were working on the texts in earnest. The publication in 1978 of The Nag Hammadi Library (HarperCollins), edited by James M. Robinson, a professor emeritus of religion at Claremont Graduate University, provided English translations of all the texts found in 1945 and two additional texts found in 1896.
In 1979, Ms. Pagels's The Gnostic Gospels (Random House) was a popular success that brought the Nag Hammadi texts — and the theological, social, and political issues they raised — to a wider audience.
But as the notoriety of Gnostic writings grew, some scholars — including Ms. Pagels and Ms. King — grew dissatisfied with what they saw as the outdated interpretive framework that had attached itself to the texts like a barnacle.
In What Is Gnosticism?, Ms. King argued that the promise of "a new chapter in the history of Christianity" offered by the Nag Hammadi discoveries had not materialized. "The new riches did not provide quick or easy solutions," she wrote. "Indeed, the surprise is that for decades little has changed."
But Ms. King was not the first scholar to fashion a book-length critique of Gnosticism as it had been defined. In 1996 Mr. Williams, of the University of Washington, wrote a book bluntly titled Rethinking "Gnosticism": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton University Press). In that book, he crafted a comprehensive analysis of the ways that the Gnostic texts themselves rejected many of the assumptions generally held about them. Mr. Williams concluded that the texts varied so greatly in outlook and substance that the overall term made little sense.
For instance, he asked, did the myths created by Gnostics about the creation of the world by lower powers ("demiurges") really mean that Gnostics rejected the world? "In fact," writes Mr. Williams, "demiurgical myth seems in many instances to have been associated with greater involvement with the larger society, not less."
Reflecting on his book a decade later, Mr. Williams says that "at least as problematic as the term 'Gnosticism' were the categories used to describe it. ... People seemed to have open avenues to go to any certain text with a category in mind, and a set of expectations, and, of course, you find what you're looking for."
Scary Similarities
In What Is Gnosticism?, Ms. King undermined the term by tracing the history of its use to the present day. In essence, she says, she intended the book to "clean the slate" for a radical rethinking of how to interpret the writings and the beliefs of those who wrote and read them.
One provocative notion she sets forth is that to view Gnosticism solely in terms of its opposition to normative Christianity — heresy versus orthodoxy, public confession versus private teaching — impedes an understanding that it was the similarities between the Gnostics and their orthodox opponents, and not the differences, that fueled intense conflict in the early church.
Early in What is Gnosticism?, Ms. King observes that anti-Gnostic polemicists "took their rivals so seriously and denounced them so emphatically precisely because their views were in many respects so similar to the polemicists' own."
In an interview, Ms. King expands on her theory. "When you map out the similarities rather than the differences between the two sides — or what Irenaeus says are the differences — the territory of similarity is huge," she says. "Both work with this notion of humanity created in the image and likeness of God — and the need for a restoration of that. They both see Christ as the revealer figure, with the body as the place where the struggle takes place. They both have views at the end where humanity is divided into three groups depending on how you do."
Ms. Pagels agrees that "if we drop the invented terms, what we have is many different types of early Christianity. When I used the title The Gnostic Gospels, I assumed that they were all Gnostic. Now I would say that these are other Christianities. ... It's difficult for all of us who were raised the way we were to get rid of the assumptions. The act of shedding assumptions is only done one by one, and with great difficulty."
In What is Gnosticism?, Ms. King also took issue with Mr. Williams's decision to propose "biblical demiurgical myth" as a replacement term for Gnosticism. She argued that the new term retained assumptions that should be discarded in its favoring of "one mythic element over all others as the determinant characteristic" to define the texts.
"The result of Mr. Williams's study," she quipped, "has been merely to lead scholars to put Gnosticism in quotation marks and use it in more or less as always."
In conversation, Ms. King says that Mr. Williams's book was "a necessary step. Because what he's doing is working inside the box to critique it. He takes those typological definitions of Gnosticism and says 'Asceticism or libertinism? This or that?' And he shows us that this-or-that model of Gnosticism moves us in a different direction, and that there are other ways of seeing it, and also that the old stereotypes don't work.
"But then," she continues, "once you see that the old stereotypes don't work, and there's more going on there, what he comes up with at the end is a new term: 'biblical demiurgical myth.' It does not slip off the lips very easily. And one has to say, 'What does that mean?'"
Defenders of the Faith
Mr. Williams acknowledges the awkwardness of his term, but says many of his critics have been misguided.
"People thought I was just swapping names," he says. "Maybe there could have been something more eloquent, but I was suggesting that it might be good — as we looked at this diversity of texts — to also look at the things that group them together."
Indeed, the difficulty in talking about the Nag Hammadi texts and other writings as a group prods some scholars to defend the terms Gnostic and Gnosticism as necessary.
"I truly see the point that Karen makes about this," says Marvin W. Meyer, a professor of Bible and Christian studies at Chapman University. "That these terms are polemical terms, rhetorical terms. They define the Other. But what always makes me pause before abandoning 'Gnostic' is the fact that Irenaeus says that there are certain people who refer to themselves as 'Gnostikoi.' If they think of themselves as Gnostikois, it gives me a certain confidence."
Mr. Meyer adds that he does "try to avoid the term Gnosticism. I think it's a neologism that has come into existence over the past century to cover a lot of different things."
Mr. Ehrman, of North Carolina, also believes the term is useful. "We talk about 'Christianity,' 'Judaism,' and 'apocalypticism,'" he points out, "even though there are many varieties of each."
While he does not agree with Mr. Williams's critique of the term, Mr. Ehrman does share his colleague's desire to plot out what links these texts together. "One of the things historians do in trying to understand the past is to try to find and understand commonalities," says Mr. Ehrman. "Religious historians group things together based on shared beliefs and practices. When we say 'Jew,' we mean something by it. ... A lot of these terms are slippery, but when there are enough similarities, they are shared enough that you can label them."
Doing away with "Gnosticism" entirely, he concludes, "would be to fragment our knowledge to such an extent that we can't know what we're talking about."
In some ways, Mr. Ehrman says, the skirmishes over definition are "old battles." He also worries that efforts to disentangle the Gnostics from their defeat in early Christianity's battles over heresy may simply be swapping the losing side's black hat for a white hat.
"There's a feeling that the Gnostics have to be the good guys," he says.
Mr. Williams says that Ms. King's work in particular is a step toward "breaking away from the way in which these old categories end up privileging the mainstream model of Christianity.
"But," he continues, "my approach is different. ... I think it is important to approach them from a historical perspective, and not always to judge them theologically against normative Christianity." The various strands of belief that are labeled as Gnostic, says Mr. Williams, "were attempts at religious innovation that did not enjoy majority success. What came to be orthodox Christianity did. I treat them sociologically to understand why they were minority movements."
Back to the Future
A question that What Is Gnosticism? left open is just what the book's author proposes to replace "Gnosticism." After taking a wrecking ball to the concept, Ms. King offered only the haziest of ways forward at the conclusion of her study.
So what should replace it? "What if we write the history of Christian identity creation," she says, "and instead of having our already-established categories of orthodoxy and heresy, with all of their diversity, we start asking, Where do Christians draw lines? Who did it? What was at stake? Using what tools?"
Ms. King says that her latest works — The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle (Polebridge Press, 2003) and The Secret Revelation of John (Harvard University Press, 2006) — are attempts to write new chapters in that history of early Christian identity, one historical text at a time. Both of Ms. King's studies closely examine one text often defined as Gnostic, and include a translation of the work.
Many of the scholars in the field see such close readings as a strong trend in current scholarship.
"What's going on now is close work on individual texts or groups of texts, asking specific sets of questions," says Mr. Williams.
But how does Ms. King's theoretical approach make her studies different? For one thing, her rejection of "Gnosticism" leads her to place both the Gospel of Mary and the Apocryphon of John at a distance from the classic Gnostic definition.
In The Gospel of Mary of Magdala, for instance, she concludes that the text contains few elements that scholars define as Gnostic. Rather, she observes, it was that gospel's arguments "that the resurrection is spiritual, not physical" and its affirmation "that women can serve as teachers and preachers" that led it to be branded later as a heretical text.
Ms. King's latest book, The Secret Revelation of John (Harvard University Press), transforms a text often used to define Gnosticism, the Apocryphon of John, into a wrestling match among Plato, the Pentateuch, the New Testament Gospel of John, and other ancient spiritualities. She argues that while some parts of this particular writing possess classic Gnostic characteristics (the God of the Old Testament, for example, is cast as a renegade and ignorant child of the embodiment of Wisdom), other parts of the text argue against the classic definition.
In an interview, Ms. King points to a lengthy litany of demons that the Apocryphon of John associates with various parts of the body. Previous scholars have taken this passage to represent a Gnostic rejection of the body as evil, she says. But Ms. King reads it as exactly the opposite: a blueprint for healing. "It is said that Gnostics had no valuation of the body," she says, "but then you have this text — more than half of which is a description of the body."
The Nag Hammadi texts reveal many new things about early Christianity, scholars say. But they do so in dribs and drabs. The texts are fragmentary. They are complex. They offer no smooth avenues or easy interpretations.
"Any time you have new texts of this complexity," says Ms. King, "it requires living with them for awhile, and working with them and working with them, until you gain that kind of understanding. It's partly a matter of research and partly a matter of rethinking. I think this is a big challenge not just for the broader public but for scholars: to be able to reimagine the history of Christianity and to make these texts a part of that history. Right now, they're still off to the edge."
Interview from PBS Thinktank
What Do We Know About the Bible?
Ben Wattenberg: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Recently an Israeli antiquities collector revealed the existence of a stone artifact inscribed with the words 'James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.' The discovery set off a storm of controversy among archeologists, historians, and biblical scholars. What is science-once the scourge of religion-now telling us about the people and culture of Biblical times? Can the bible serve as both a book of religious faith as well as historical facts?
Eric Meyers, professor of archeology at Duke University, editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Arcaheology in the Near East, and co-author of the Cambridge Companion to the Bible.
And Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, and author of The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The topic before the house: What do we know about the Bible?
Ben Wattenberg: Many archeologists have long regarded Biblical scripture as a collection of myths and legends. But beginning around 1960, archeologists began turning up artifacts bearing direct references to important figures in the Bible--King David, Herod, Pontius Pilate, and others. If authenticated, the inscription on the recently discovered ossuary would be the oldest direct evidence of the existence of Jesus.
Piecing together ancient history from stone tablets and pottery shards is no easy task. At many known sites, like Jericho, only a fraction of the ancient ruins have been explored. In Jerusalem, religious restrictions and political violence hamper archeological work. But new technologies are making it easier to pinpoint potential sites. Growing interest among scientists could lead to a golden age of biblical archeology.
Ben Wattenberg: Hershel Shanks, Eric Meyers, thank you for joining us on 'Think Tank.' Hershel, let’s begin with the story that made front pages, the ossuary? Is that how it’s pronounced?
Hershel Shanks: That’s how it’s pronounced. It’s a bone box. In the First Century, Jews in Jerusalem would bury their dead or put them in a niche in a cave. And after a year when the flesh had desiccated and fallen away, they would take the bones and put them in a bone box called an ossuary, a limestone box, long enough to accommodate the longest bone. And this one is inscribed in Aramaic 'James the Son of Joseph, the Brother of Jesus.'
Ben Wattenberg: Now is that the first reference to Jesus in a historical artifact?
Eric Meyers: If the artifact is legitimate then beyond doubt it would be the first extra-biblical reference to Jesus.
Ben Wattenberg: Do you think it’s authentic?
Eric Meyers: I think there’s a high probability that it is, but given the fact that we don’t know its context and that it comes from a looted environment and sold on the open market, I think we have to have a question mark ultimately.
Ben Wattenberg: You have a question mark, Hershel?
Hershel Shanks: Yes, certainty is rare in archaeology.
Ben Wattenberg: Your magazine published it, is that right?
Hershel Shanks: That’s right. Biblical Archeology Review, and the author of the story is one of the world’s leading experts in scripts, a man by the name of Andre Lamaire from the Sorbonne. And we’ve tested the authenticity from everywhere to Sunday. And I’m convinced that there’s almost no question as to its authenticity. The bigger question is whether the three people that are mentioned - James, Joseph, and Jesus - are the three people by those names in the New Testament.
Ben Wattenberg: Is your guess that as archeologists continue the work there would be further historical references, non-biblical references to Jesus?
Eric Meyers: The problem with that is Jesus is a very common name in the First Century. And it’s a shortened form of Joshua-- Jeshu or Jeshua. And so there are numerous mentions of Jesus in Jewish epigraphy and inscriptions from the First Century, but not with the configuration as Hershel has said with these three particular names. Each name is very common in and of itself. Tom, Dick, and Harry as it were. But this configuration is virtually unique.
Ben Wattenberg: What else have you all come up with recently that tends to confirm or deny things in the Bible?
Hershel Shanks: We have a few other artifacts that refer to people that are mentioned in the New Testament. Pontius Pilate is one, Herod the Great. And then going back further, we have a very recent, the last decade, the discovery excavated by professional archeologists of a reference to the House of David or the Dynasty of David within a hundred, a hundred and fifty years after David’s reign.
Ben Wattenberg: What would that be? About a 1000 BC or something?
Eric Meyers: Nine, Nine Twenty-five (BC), something like that. Tenth Century (BC).
Ben Wattenberg: Wow.
Hershel Shanks: That is the inscription. The reign was probably a Thousand to Nine Sixty (BC), something like that.
Ben Wattenberg: How do you go about trying to authenticate these inscriptions? I mean that they’re real? How does that work?
Eric Meyers: Well paleography is not a new science, that is, a study of the shape of the letters, for example in the ossuary. This is a discipline that’s sixty, seventy years old, and is quite advanced. And we have tables and charts that scholars have established as being guidelines to the dating of these letters. Now when you get such inscriptions in stone we have similar paleographical guidelines to understand the dating. And unfortunately the David inscription is also found in a dump at the Tel Dan excavation and it’s out of its context. But it is certainly...
Ben Wattenberg: Do you do carbon dating?
Eric Meyers: You can’t do it for inanimate objects.
Ben Wattenberg: What are the main schools of thought about how accurate the Bible is in-as reality of that time?
Eric Meyers: It’s a pretty heated debate. In general, European scholars have opted for a low chronology, that is saying that the biblical text was produced in late first temple times, at the time of Deuteronomy let’s say the Sixth or Seventh Century, but most of it was created in the postexilic era, the Persian period, Fifth Century BC, Fourth Century BC. Some even want to say it was written, fictionally, in the Hellenistic Period, Third or Second Century BCE. And many scholars, therefore, doubt the veracity, the truth of the reports of the pre-exilic period. That is the first temple period, the united monarchy, the origins of Israel, the exodus of...
Ben Wattenberg: King David, King Solomon, that kind of stuff.
Hershel Shanks: Yes, yes, yes.
Ben Wattenberg: But people are always saying, you know, you can use the Bible almost as a guidebook to the Middle East. All the cities that are mentioned...
Hershel Shanks: No. No. That has to be qualified. The search today is for the core truths of the Bible. There’s no question that the Bible went through stages of composition, was edited by people who used old sources. And to try to separate all this is very difficult. It’s very uncertain. If you want certainty, go into mathematics. Don’t go into ancient history. The effort has to be to look to see the core of the story, or whether there’s a core truth to it. And I think that, while there’s obviously going to be some uncertainty, uh, the basic structure of the story is sound. And it’s very hard for me to imagine that it was simply created fictionally. That someone sat down and said I want to make a story. What they did was to take a story that was there, that was developed over the centuries and gave it a little twist for their own purposes.
Ben Wattenberg: Right.
Hershel Shanks: But still the core is there. And there are exaggerations, too. So our task is to try to find that core. And some of the scholars that Eric was talking about, I think, sort of glory in their own cynicism, in their own knocking of the Bible.
Ben Wattenberg: Are these the so-called minimalists who are sort of fighting this?
Eric Meyers: It’s more widespread than the phenomenon of biblical minimalism. And when I said Europe, I intentionally meant to indict the European scholars in general. They have more or less dismissed the early period of Israelite beginnings and origins years ago. This was something they started doing in the Nineteenth Century. And so this is just coming around a hundred and fifty years later in a more extreme form.
Ben Wattenberg: This was sort of the burgeoning of rationality throughout the Western World. As they said everything’s got to be proved and these are all folk tales and what not.
Eric Meyers: Yes, I’ve taught in Europe two semesters, one in Frankfurt, one in Berlin, and lectured widely there. And people when they hear my sort of conservative, maximalist view, I mean, you know we wind up in the beer hall until early wee hours debating how so many Americans could buy into this.
Ben Wattenberg: But the not so hidden agenda of the minimalists is to attack religion and elevate rationality. I mean it came about in that general area.
Eric Meyers: It’s not attacking a religion. It’s attacking the veracity of the narrative, the truthfulness of what is reported in those books.
Ben Wattenberg: Well, if you take it one step further, you then say well you know it’s all a myth, it’s all a story.
Hershel Shanks : Yeah. They would...they would...
Ben Wattenberg: We are the great Nineteenth Century rationalists and we finally are starting to look at things scientifically. And now my understanding is that there’s a somewhat of a reversal going back. That many scholars now, as you all do, believe that much of the Bible has been authenticated? I mean there was that sort of swing.
Eric Meyers: In its larger framework, yes. Not in every detail, of course.
Ben Wattenberg: No, of course not.
Hershel Shanks: Yes, you have to really talk about specifics. So that when you’re talking about the patriarchs, that’s one thing. When you’re talking about the conquest, for example, there archeology can play a role.
Ben Wattenberg: The conquest...
Hershel Shanks: ...the conquest of Canaan.
Ben Wattenberg: Right.
Hershel Shanks: When the Israelites came out of Egypt, they passed through the desert forty years and then they conquered Canaan according to the book of Joshua.
Ben Wattenberg: And not according to the Marquis of Queensbury rules either. Pretty tough stuff.
Eric Meyers: Not according to the book of Judges either, which I think is what the point Hershel’s going to make, where it wasn’t a conquest. There was a peaceful settlement. There were some battles here and there but it was not the way previous generations understood it. And without archeology we would be in no position to understand it with the kind of refinement and nuance that we do today.
Ben Wattenberg: Now how much do we know about the period in which Jesus lived and immediately thereafter compared to this earlier period.
Hershel Shanks: Enormously more.
Eric Meyers: Well it’s quite different and it’s easier because we’re in a period where written textual material was transmitted in a much better way and more preserved text. We have ancient coinage, which has only invented it in Sixth Century, Seventh Centuries, before that and not in the earlier periods. So we have coins and you have to remember that the New Testament is about one fifth the size of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. And so all of the New Testament scholarship that is focused on the historical Jesus and the context of Jesus has produced enormous results over the last two generations.
Ben Wattenberg: And the Dead Sea Scrolls are part of that new scholarship?
Hershel Shanks: They’re part of that. They really provide the Jewish background. This historical Jesus research that’s been going on over the last couple of decades is really quite extraordinary. And the public I think is very unaware of it. For example, there was a big discussion about whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem. He probably wasn’t. He was supposed to have come down with Joseph and Mary because of a census. But the census was at a different time. It doesn’t fit. And it’s very unlikely that people would travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Also, there’s a good reason for him to be born in Bethlehem, to get him down in Bethlehem. And that is that he’s supposed to be a scion, a descendant of King David who was the original Messiah.
Ben Wattenberg: Right.
Hershel Shanks: And his genealogy is given as coming from David. And where was David born?
Eric Meyers: Bethlehem.
Hershel Shanks: In Bethlehem, of course.
Ben Wattenberg: So the Davidic line would be...
Hershel Shanks: That’s right. He’s always called in the New Testament Jesus of Nazareth. So I don’t mean to say that I’m on one side or the other of that debate. But that’s the kind of discussion that’s going on in historical Jesus research. And mainstream, this isn’t some extreme kookiness.
Ben Wattenberg: After both of you, your many decades of study of these texts, are these divine documents?
Eric Meyers: I would put it slightly differently. The Bible is certainly a document prepared and written down by human hands. But without the belief in a supreme being, which underlies it, you would not have the level of high literature that you have in those documents. So it is the record of a discussion between human beings and whom they believe to be God.
Ben Wattenberg: I mean it’s a very important question in American life today generally and people are talking that we’re at the edge of a third Great Awakening, where there will be another surge of religious belief in American life, so it’s not just an argument among scholars.
Eric Meyers: I think we’re seeing that religious awakening in America and certainly I see it on campus every day. But it takes a...
Ben Wattenberg: How do you see it? I mean, what do you see?
Eric Meyers: Well, I meant that evangelical life has never been richer and...
Ben Wattenberg: This is at Duke University?
Eric Meyers: At Duke University and other campuses. You have religious life flourishing, at least on our campus and other campuses that I visit. And I think this is a real genuine searching. But it’s taking two forms. As I said there’s the evangelical thrust and those who are looking for more literal understanding in God’s word as reflected in the Bible, Old and New Testament. And there’s people who follow teachers like me and the rest of our faculties in places like Duke, where we go for the nuance and higher criticism. We try to put it in a way that is compatible with the modern scientific rationalistic spirit.
Ben Wattenberg: Tell me about the Dead Sea Scrolls. How important are the Dead Sea Scrolls?
Eric Meyers: Well, to me, the Dead Sea Scrolls is certainly the most important archeological discovery of the modern era, even beyond the Twentieth Century, because it embraces archeology, the physical ruin of the site, plus eight hundred different manuscripts, canonical, non-canonicals and has shed light on the end of the second temple era, period in Judaism as never before.
Ben Wattenberg: What would the timeframe then be?
Eric Meyers: Well about Two Hundred BC to Seventy AD, roughly those three centuries.
Ben Wattenberg: And this was what? Apparently a library or something, that it would have that much material?
Eric Meyers: This is an ancient archive that was stored by the site, some of it produced by the sectarians who lived there, some of it brought with them when they left the mainstream at the beginning of their tenure in the Second Century (BC). And so you have canonical, that is, material that ultimately appears in the Bible as we know it, and materials that are unique to this sectarian group known as the Essenes.
Hershel Shanks: There’s a commonality between the Dead Sea Scrolls and this really fantastic ossuary that we’ve just brought to light. And that is, as Eric said, the ossuary was looted. We don’t know where it came from.
Ben Wattenberg: It was looted.
Hershel Shanks: It may have been found when they were digging a trench to lay a pipe or add a room to a building or whatever.
Ben Wattenberg: Not stolen but just...
Eric Meyers: Well modern tomb robbers of some kind.
Ben: Right.
Hershel Shanks: And the Dead Sea Scrolls were also looted. We bought most of them from the Bedouin who looted them. And that was certainly the wise thing to do in retrospect. They bought them. And that’s what happened here. So we would know much more if we knew the context. If they were professionally excavated, we always like that. But I guess my position is if we can’t have that, it’s better to have what we do have than to pretend that it didn’t exist. And it’s the same thing with the ossuary as with the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Ben Wattenberg: Are the Dead Sea Scrolls considered authentic? I mean, is there any argument about that?
Eric Meyers: I don’t think anyone would question their authenticity today. When they were first found in the Nineteen Forties, Late Forties and Early Fifties, there was some debate whether they were Early Medieval or Post Seventy (AD), but I think that has all but disappeared. They have been tested for carbon fourteen, and all the dates have been reestablished and resecured through scientific carbon fourteen testing.
Ben Wattenberg: What did your magazine do with the Dead Sea Scrolls? I mean, you played a real role in publishing them.
Hershel Shanks: Well, the Dead Sea Scrolls from Cave Four, comprising over five hundred different manuscripts were assigned to eight scholars to publish. And they kept...
Ben Wattenberg: Assigned by whom? Are they owned by the government of Israel? Or?
Hershel Shanks: No, no. At that time it was by Jordan. There were no Jews on this Judenrein committee. And they kept it to themselves for years and years. Initially they’d published a little then in 1960 they stopped. Decades passed and other scholars couldn’t get access to them. Some of them died and passed them on to their students, who then considered them theirs and they wouldn’t let other scholars see them. And we complained. We complained about them in writing in the magazine and ultimately we published transcripts and pictures of the unpublished scrolls. They weren’t the best copies, but that really forced those few scholars who had access to them to recognize the claims of the public and they opened them up and now they’re free to all scholars to study.
Ben Wattenberg: The photographs that you published of the Dead Sea Scrolls are of the Bible as it existed what a thousand years ago?
Hershel Shanks: No, it didn’t exist two thousand years ago as the Bible. It’s anachronistic to talk about the Bible then. The books of the Bible that were accepted into the canon were accepted later. And also the texts, the Biblical texts, were standardized later so that there is quite a tolerance of different editions of the various books that we know of as in the Bible today.
Eric Meyers: The documents that we have from the Dead Sea Scrolls date from roughly Two Hundred BC to Seventy AD. And among those documents are hundreds of fragments and full complete copies of what we call canonical Biblical texts, such as the Book of Isaiah, we have in multiple copies. The most common copies we have are the Book of Deuteronomy. And it is remarkable that so many of these editions, without vowels by the way, turn out to be the same text virtually, with some modification, as that text adopted, let’s say, Three Hundred AD by the Rabbis and ultimately regularized by the Masserites in Nine Hundred AD. So it shows us that the Bible was stabilized textually at a very early period. On the other hand, it shows us, for example, in the Book of Samuel, that you have variations that are very significant. It shows us a Book of Jeremiah in the Greek that has a underlying much shorter version, that’s attested at Qumran. So it’s full of significant information that sheds light on the textual transmission history of the Old Testament.
Hershel Shanks: I agree with Eric, in general, the text closely follows today what we have from two thousand years ago. And the Dead Sea Scrolls brought us back an additional thousand years. The oldest Hebrew Bible that we had was about a thousand (AD). Now we have those texts going back another thousand years. While that is all true, some of the most interesting things are the differences that we find. And in the Hebrew Bible, for example, in Deuteronomy Thirty-two it talks about the land being distributed according to the sons of Israel. That doesn’t make any sense because, at the time they’re talking about, Israel hasn’t been established. And in the Qumran text that we now have, it says that it was distributed again, according to the sons of God--in Hebrew. And there was a version of it that said according to the sons of God. And you have that in the Hebrew Bible, so the suspicion is that it had a polytheistic stain to it, so that it was changed to the sons of Israel in the Hebrew text.
Ben Wattenberg: As students of the Bible, if you look back at the cultures of that time, or of those times, were the people then people that we would recognize. I mean, I know they were physically, but I mean have all the vast cultural array of modernism just changed us as a species? Or would we know how the world works?
Eric Meyers: I think intellectually and spiritually we could identify with them. But given the nature of what you had to do to survive in a single day, I think we’d all have enormous problems: No electricity, no flush toilets, all of these things would put a hamper on all our life. Just the amount of energy invested into food production per day I think would stymie most families, whether it’s America or Europe. Not in Africa. I recently visited Africa and there you can see pre-industrial life pretty much...
Ben Wattenberg: Well, I mean a hundred years ago, a hundred and fifty years ago, in America you could also. I mean you didn’t have any of that stuff. So.
Eric Meyers: Right. But the people, basically, I think we’d have to say were the same in their intellect and in their spirits and in their hearts.
Ben Wattenberg: Which is what makes the Bible such a universal document.
Eric Meyers: And that’s why it carries well, through time, with an eternal message.
Ben Wattenberg: Okay. Hershel Shanks, Eric Meyers, thank you very much for joining us on 'Think Tank.' And thank you. Please remember to send your comments via e-mail. For 'Think Tank,' I’m Ben Wattenberg.
