Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls, edited by Hershel Shanks (Random House, 296 pp., $23)

FEW events of recent years have disturbed the peace of the academy as much as the discovery by Beduin, 45 years ago, of ancient Jewish scrolls in the neighborhood of the Dead Sea. In a New Yorker article of May 1955, Edmund Wilson gave wide currency to the thesis of an eminent French specialist, Andre Dupont-Sommer, that the scrolls published up to that time came from a community that anticipated many of the features of early Christianity and was rounded by a certain Teacher of Righteousness who preached much the same message as Jesus, who met the same fate at the hands of his enemies, and whose followers expected him to return as judge and savior. While this sensational announcement was quickly repudiated by the specialists, rumors of disconcerting revelations from the unpublished material continued to circulate. In 1991 Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh published The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, which claimed to uncover a Vatican-led conspiracy aimed at suppressing the publication of Qumran material opposed to such traditional Christian beliefs as the divinity of Jesus and the virgin birth. Nobody in the business took them very seriously, although the team of scholars to whom publication of the vast cache of material had been entrusted, including five Roman Catholic priests, had left themselves open to suspicions of this kind. This was not so much because of their less than impressive rate of publication (so far only about 20 per cent of the cache from Cave 4 has appeared), as because of their failure to make photographic reproductions available to their academic colleagues, a normal procedure in situations of this kind.

The editor of Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls, Hershel Shanks, has for some years been conducting his own guerrilla war to speed up the publication rate. Mr. Shanks is a lawyer and entrepreneur who launched the highly successful Biblical Archaeology Review, from which the articles in the book are taken. Since BAR is a popular, wide-circulation magazine in which many of the most distinguished Scrolls specialists have not published, his claim that the book is definitive and indispensable is off the mark. Mr. Shanks, himself neither a Biblical scholar nor an archaeologist, has included six pieces of his own, affording glimpses of the kind of unseemly haggling and academic in-fighting which have dogged the discovery and publication (or non-publication) of the Scrolls and fragments from the start.

The only member of the original publication team represented is Frank Moore Cross Jr. of Harvard, who writes on historical background and textual matters. Other articles focus on the community that occupied the settlement on the seashore near the caves in which the discoveries were made. Most identify them with the Essenes, a rather elusive sect which, according to the Roman naturalist Pliny the EIder, "is remarkable beyond all the other tribes in the whole world, in that it has no women and has renounced all sexual desire, has no money, and has only palm trees for company."

A section of the book deals with the so-called Temple Scroll, the longest at 27 feet, published by Yigael Yadin in 1977 following protracted and somewhat shady dealings involving an enterprising Arab dealer in Bethlehem and the TV evangelist who launched Jerry Falwell on his career. A German scholar, Hartmut Stegemann, argues implausibly that it is a long-lost sixth book of the Torah. Other articles deal with the contribution of the Scrolls to our knowledge of Second Temple and rabbinic Judaism. Kyle McCarter of Johns Hopkins writes on the Copper Scroll from Cave 3, a curious artifact containing a list of locations in which an enormous quantity of bullion, perhaps from the Temple treasury, had been stashed away.

Long before the chance discovery of the first scrolls there was speculation about the relation between the Essenes and early Christianity. In his 1916 novel, The Brook Kerith, George Moore presented Jesus as an Essene priest who got caught up in the political turmoil of the time, survived CruCifixion, returned to his monastery in the wilderness, and in a chance encounter with Paul attempted to dissuade him from going around preaching the risen Christ. The judicious contribution to the volume of James VanderKam of the University of Notre Dame takes a very different line. He rejects recent scholarly views identifying the Qumran Teacher of Righteousness with James the brother of Jesus or John the Baptist and his opponent the Wicked Priest with Paul or, perish the thought, Jesus Himself. Most of the similarities, he maintains, can be explained without a theory of direct borrowing. These similarities are, notwithstanding, impressive enough. They include a sacred meal of bread and wine prefiguring the messianic banquet, baptism by immersion, property held in common, and an important role for overseers or bishops.

VanderKam is not the only one to focus on John the Baptist as a possible link between the Qumran sect and the early Christian movement. The line of continuity might look something like this. A one-time member of the Qumran Essene sect, John went his own way, preached the same message to anyone who would listen, and gathered around him his own following, including his cousin Jesus. As the fourth Gospel tells it, Jesus began to recruit His own disciples from the Baptist group, made his first public appearance immediately after John was arrested, and began to speak about his inevitable violent death after John's execution by Herod Antipas. The early Christian movement therefore began as a splinter group of the Baptist sect, itself a splinter of the Essenes. This is speculative, of course, but no more so than most of the conclusions arrived at in Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls. And since all of the known contents of the caves are now at long last available in facsimile, readers who disagree can do their own speculating.

Mr. Blenkinsopp is John A. O'Brien Professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Notre Dame.