It's an event that some scholars have waited a lifetime for and now the general public is getting a chance to savor: a close-up and intimate view of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The general public now can see for themselves some of the two-millenniums-old material that offers clues to the foundations of rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.An exhibition of 12 major scroll fragments on loan from the Israel Antiquities Authority opened earlier this month at the New York Public Library. The fragments, which were first shown in Washington, will be on display in New York until Jan. 8, and then will be exhibited in the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco before returning to Jerusalem.
The scrolls, first discovered by a young shepherd in Qumran in the Judean desert in 1947, offer insights into Jewish life in the Second Temple Period from around 200 B.C. to A.D. 70. They are particularly important to biblical scholars because they provide Old Testament texts about a thousand years older than the earliest Hebrew Bible manuscripts previously known and offer important insights into how the official canon was formed.
The New York exhibition includes some of the scholarly debates, the controversy and even the humor that has accompanied the material which has captured the public imagination as have few other archaeological finds.
In a New Yorker magazine cartoon on the exhibit, the caption reads, "Who could have imagined that such a wonderful recipe for brownies would be hidden away in the Dead Sea Scrolls?"
One area of controversy surrounding the exhibit deals with the so-called "pierced messiah" text. In November 1991, Robert Eisenman, chairman of religious studies at California State University, Long Beach, announced that he had found five lines of text describing a leader of the community being put to death. He did not say there was any evidence to conclude the leader mentioned was Jesus, but the translation raised questions about the uniqueness of Christian accounts of the resurrection.
Since then, nearly all mainline scholars have rejected the interpretation, and a consultation of 20 biblical scholars in England said the text actually referred to a slaying Messiah, not one who is slain.
Yet the exhibit, which has benefited from the publicity surrounding the controversy, makes little distinction between the two interpretations, saying the text could be translated either way.
There has been scholarly controversy surrounding the scrolls and some interpretations for years, but they appear minor compared to the remarkable event of the U.S. exhibition of the fragments of the scrolls, which had been the province of a small group of international scholars until fall 1991.
"It's an amazing move just to have the scrolls moved out of Israel and across the Atlantic into a public museum," University of Notre Dame Professor Eugene Ulrich said. "It's a courageous move on the part of the Israel Antiquities Authority."
The scrolls are voices from a world that gave birth to two of the most enduring and influential religious movements in history.