When I published my initial two posts, the most frequent objection raised was the oft-heard refrain that, “The Dead Sea Scrolls predate the life of Jesus.” This statement has been repeated so many times that even learned minds have come to take it as fact.
In this entry, I aim to lay bare the data, exposing the flimsiness of the consensus argument. You might recall that, in The Historical Jesus Theory of Everything Part 1 and Part 2, I conclude that the Historical Jesus can be solidly identified as the Wicked Priest of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Judas the Galilean of Josephus. I also suggested that his given name was Judas bar Jesus, that he was a descendent of the Hasmonean (and possibly Herodian) royal family, and that his earthly remains were buried in the Talpiot Tomb of Jerusalem. His rival, the Teacher of Righteousness, is another well-known figure in Christianity: John the Baptist. None of this can be true if the scrolls date to before the time of Christ.
So what does the data have to tell us on this subject?
Out of the ~900 manuscripts found in the caves of Qumran, a mere 23 have been tested using carbon-14 dating (note: this number has increased as of last year, but results are pending). Radiocarbon dating is the current gold standard in calculating the age of ancient organic material. In brief, it measures the amount of the carbon-14 isotope found in all once-living matter and calibrates this figure against the known historical amounts of carbon-14 present in the atmosphere as determined via dendrochronology.
The results of carbon-14 analysis do not pin a precise date onto an object, but only provide a likely range of dates for which an object may originate. The one-sigma date ranges, which I highlight, only have only a 68% accuracy, while the two-sigma ranges, which I also include, provide a 95% probability of being accurate. The benefit of the one-sigma calibration is that it provides a smaller range of possible dates while being accurate enough that we can say it’s correct in two out of three cases. Nevertheless, in many instances, these date ranges can span 100 years or more. For many applications, this kind of margin is a non-issue. In the context of the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, 100 years can make all the difference between a text being from the pre-Christian era or a contemporary of the Jesus movement.
OK, now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a look at the numbers. By far the most controversial scroll used in estimating a date for the DSS Community is the Habakkuk Pesher. This commentary on the Biblical book of Habakkuk makes extensive mention of the community’s leader, the Teacher of Righteousness, as well as his notorious enemy, the Wicked Priest (who I, drawing on Geza Vermes, identify as being the same individual elsewhere referred to as the Spouter of Lies and the Scoffer). Whatever the date of this scroll, these individuals must have lived prior to that time, right?
Well, there’s a problem with that. You see, there’s another scroll that checks all the same boxes as the Habakkuk Pesher. It too purports to be an inspired commentary on a Biblical text, interpreting its verses in a way that speaks to the contemporary life of the DSS Community. It too refers explicitly to the Wicked Priest and the Teacher of Righteousness. This scroll is the Psalms Pesher. A table with the results of radiocarbon tests on both documents may be viewed below.
When the Psalms Pesher was run through the gamut of radiocarbon tests, a bafflingly different range of dates was arrived at. Scholars have been trying to reconcile the disparate dating of these scrolls since the initial carbon-14 results were made known. But couldn’t the dating of the Habakkuk Pesher and the Psalms Pesher both be correct–the older Habakkuk Pesher being closer to the historical events recorded therein? Not likely. As Greg Doudna, himself a proponent of a BCE scrolls dating, says:
Over a dozen exemplars of this type of commentary, known as the “continuous pesharim,” were found at Qumran, only in single copies and being practically identical in formal and scribal characteristics, language, and motifs. There is thus good reason to expect that 4QpPsa and 1QpHab should be contemporaneous both in composition and in their single scribal copies.
Doudna 1998, 452
So one of these date ranges represents the true date of composition for both texts. The reader can probably already guess where I land in this debate, but we’ll return to these two documents at the end of the post.
The radiocarbon test results of the Psalms Pesher have sent scholars scrambling to find a way to fit these unwelcome date ranges into their rigid paradigm. Multiple attempts have been made to reason away the late dating of this key text. Doudna himself speculated that there may have been contamination from castor oil gone undetected by the Tuscon lab where many of the scrolls were tested. Yet, in the very same paper, Doudna cites evidence that supports the accuracy of the Tuscon lab results. “Indirect means such as these strengthen confidence that most of Tucson’s AMS parchment datings were not affected by contamination” (Doudna 1998, 451). Here we have an example of a good scholar taking up the tendentious duty of arguing against the carbon dating in order to save his hypothesis that all of the scrolls were signed, sealed, delivered before the reign of Herod the Great. Doudna goes on to state that a lack of contamination is “a reasonable assumption in most cases” (452). Nevertheless, he resorts to special pleading when it comes to the Psalms Pesher writing, “Contamination cannot a priori be excluded” (452).
Don’t get me wrong: there are some scrolls that almost certainly belong to the time before Jesus–quite a few in fact. Let’s take a look.
What do these texts share in common? None of them, save for one (and we’ll get to that), are sectarian texts. Hence, it is not by any means a stretch to suggest that these texts precede the formation of the community. Not one of them mentions the Wicked Priest or the Teacher of Righteousness.
Now let’s look at the manuscripts with radiocarbon date ranges extending into the Common Era.
This chart is teeming with sectarian compositions! Specifically, the Temple Scroll (11QT), Thanksgiving Scroll (1QH), Community Rule (1QS and 4Q258), and Messianic Apocalypse (4Q521) are all generally regarded as sectarian documents. Can it be a mere coincidence that the further we move forward in time, the more sectarian compositions we find?
Going back to those documents with date ranges that precede the Common Era, there is one elephant in the room that needs to be addressed. The Damascus Document, 4Q267, lands between 168 BCE and 51 BCE based on the one-sigma calibration. Even the two-sigma date ranges, with the safer 95% probability of being correct, only bring this text up to 3 BCE at the very latest. This is problematic for our hypothesis, as the Damascus Document is indisputably sectarian and contains multiple references to the Teacher of Righteousness and the Liar/Scoffer…
But not this copy! In the fragmentary remains of this scroll which have survived the ravages of time, we find no mention of the community’s leader or his arch-nemesis. Remember, according to the Damascus Document itself, the community was in existence for a good 20 years before finding its Unique Teacher. In the opening portion of the scroll as found in the later Cairo manuscript, we find an exhortation that recounts the birth of the sect, the rise of the Teacher of Righteousness, the rebellion of the Scoffer/Liar, and the ultimate destruction (attributed to God) of the Scoffer and his followers. None of this is mentioned in 4Q267! What we find in its place is an alternate introduction lacking any of these key details. All passages recounting the careers of the Teacher and Scoffer are conspicuously absent here. It’s as if those events had yet to occur. Meanwhile, another copy of the Damascus Document found in the very same cave, designated 4Q266, carries a first-sigma date range of 4-82 CE.
There is one more vital piece to this puzzle that absolutely cannot go ignored: the fact that copies of some Dead Sea Scrolls found within the Qumran caves have also been found at Masada. This fortress, as the astute reader will know, was a Sicarii stronghold in the war of 66-73 CE and the last holdout of the Jewish rebels against the overwhelming forces of Rome. In particular, the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice has been identified as a sectarian document with copies being found in Qumran caves 4 and 11. The presence of this sectarian text at Qumran provides a direct link between the DSS Community and the Jewish Rebels–Sicarii Zealots–at Masada. The standard explanation for this inconvenient discovery goes as follows:
Perhaps the most significant aspect of Songs in the present connection is that it adheres to the 364-day calendar we have previously mentioned and that had been so important to the Teacher’s followers more than a century earlier. This calendar was integral to what made the work so attractive for the sicarii, for it was an antiestablishment, conservative symbol as much in their own time as in the Teacher’s.
Wise, Abegg, and Cook 2005, 34-35; emphasis added
Under Wise and company’s reconstruction, the Sicarii held to a unique calendar that was originally invented by a wholly unrelated Jewish sect “more than a century earlier.” This is all despite clear evidence for a first-century CE occupation of those very caves in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. Of these interpretations, I can only quote Wise’s own translation and state that, “they are not well-founded.” The necessity for Wise and his co-authors to cling to an early dating of the scrolls interferes with their ability to identify what has been hidden in plain sight: that the Sicarii were those violent rebels that the scrolls damn for splintering off from the original sect; that they are those Men of War who met their demise forty years after the death of the Teacher of Righteousness. Wise and his colleagues come close to the truth with the following statement, but can’t seem to take that final leap of logic. “Indeed, for all the importance of the calendar to the scrolls, the only group of ancient Jews that followed it to whom the ancient sources give a name is the sicarii, the last defenders of Masada.” (Wise, Abegg, and Cook 2005, 35)
The radiocarbon date ranges of two scrolls found at Masada follow the general pattern that we have already observed. Some of them, nonsectarian, seemingly date to the century before Jesus walked the earth, while the sectarian texts more likely date to the first century of the Common Era–either during or after the life of Jesus.
All of this is meant to show that the dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls is by no means a settled issue, and with so much uncertainty, we cannot rule out a first century CE provenance for the “Qumran Community”. I use this term in quotes because there is little evidence to support the sectarians living at the settlement in Qumran. The main reason often given is the proximity of the caves to the ruins of the Qumran settlement. New research is being done which casts into doubt this association, and we will focus on this in a future post. That said, it would be amiss if we used the archaeology of Qumran to propose dates of composition for the scrolls. We have no idea whether or not the DSS Community actually lived there and more and more it seems like they did not.
How, then, do we account for the early dating of the Habakkuk Pesher? Remember, carbon-14 dating provides a mere range of dates and attaches a probability to that range. Thus, there is a 95% chance that this document was composed (or more accurately, that the animal used to make the parchment died) by the year 2 CE. With over 30 items tested, at least one of them is statistically bound to have a true date outside of that range. Alternatively, as previously mentioned, the caves of Qumran show signs of habitation in the mid-first century CE. I posit that some of the scrolls were composed in the caves themselves during the Jewish War with Rome ~70 CE. Under these circumstances, an abundance of fresh materials may not have been available, and in this case, the scribes would have resorted to using whatever they had at their disposal, including older parchment. I find this to be a far simpler explanation than that offered by Doudna. It cannot be overstated that in dating all of the scrolls to a “single generation” before the Common Era, Doudna is arguing against both the radiocarbon dating and the paleography.
Just last year, it was reported that a new round of carbon-14 tests had been conducted on another set of the Scrolls. Information on the results of these tests has thus far been scarce, with the only preliminary information given being that “some scrolls may be older than previously thought.” We shall see. From what is being said, the authors of this new study are using artificial intelligence in combination with carbon-14 tests to create a new standard set of paleographical dates for this era. Professor Mladen Popovic, the leader of this new project at Groningen, describes the issue currently surrounding the paleography of the scrolls: “When it comes to dating the manuscripts, there is the problem that for most of the period, we have no internally dated manuscripts, and the few that we have date from the outer ends of the timescale.” Popovic goes on to undermine the existing paleographical dates even further. “Our paleographers will say that they can date Dead Sea Scrolls with a precision of 25 to 50 years’ date range, and [the research] is yet to substantiate their model” (Tercatin 2021).
Doudna holds a similar opinion when it comes to the paleography for this period. In his discussion on the early first-century BCE paleographic dates assigned to 4Q266 (Damascus Document) and 4Q521 (Messianic Apocalypse), dates in conflict with the radiocarbon results, Doudna states:
In light of the lack of a single internally-dated Hebrew or Aramaic manuscript in Palestine in the two-century period 150 BCE-50 CE for comparison, it might be suggested that the high-precision palaeographic estimates that have been given to these two texts are somewhat premature.
Doudna 1998, 460
Listen, I have the utmost respect for paleographers and the work that they do. The application of paleography on the scrolls is far from a worthless endeavor. For example, based on the semiformal Herodian script used in both the Habakkuk Pesher and Psalms Pesher, we can reasonably conclude that these two documents were roughly contemporary. But at present, this method is simply not capable of producing the precise measurements that some scholars are claiming it does. Perhaps this latest study will change that with its use of AI. The authors have so far teased that 8 scrolls appear to be the work of a common scribe. Included in this group is the famous MMT letter, which begins with a long list of Sabbaths the recipient was commanded to observe, and which many scholars believe to have been composed by the Righteous Teacher in an effort to set straight the path of the Wicked Priest. Recall that the Wicked Priest, like Jesus, is condemned by his detractors for breaking Sabbath. The “Round” semiformal script employed is believed to have been in use from about 30 BCE until circa 20 CE. At the risk of being written off as sensationalist, I dare say that this might very well be the handwriting of John the Baptist himself.
In the space above, I have attempted to provide the simplest explanation for the radiocarbon data we have on the Dead Sea Scrolls. In my next post, I will present a timeline of the DSS Community that I feel makes the best sense of the body of evidence. In effect, we will also construct a new chronology for the life of Jesus, The Scoffer. But what do you think? Are you open to the idea of a first-century CE provenance for the Dead Sea Scrolls? Or do you think the evidence points in the opposite direction? I’d love to read your thoughts in the comment section below.
References:
Doudna, Gregory. 1998. “Dating the Scrolls on the Basis of Radiocarbon Analysis.” In The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: a Comprehensive Assessment, Vol. 1, edited by James C. VanderKam and Peter W. Flint, 430-71. Leiden: Brill. https://www.academia.edu/42711131/_Dating_the_Scrolls_on_the_Basis_of_Radiocarbon_Analysis_1998_In_The_Dead_Sea_Scrolls_after_Fifty_Years_A_Comprehensive_Assessment_Vol_1_P_Flint_and_J_VanderKam_eds_Leiden_Brill_430_71.
Tercatin, Rosella. 2021. “How Old are the Dead Sea Scrolls? Carbon-dating Project to Offer Answers.” The Jesusalem Post, April 25, 2021. https://www.jpost.com/archaeology/how-old-are-the-dead-sea-scrolls-carbon-dating-project-to-offer-answers-666302.
Wise, Michael O., Martin G. Abegg Jr., and Edward M. Cook. 2005. The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation. New York: HarperOne.