ABSTRACT

What is 385the fascination that is exercised by this much-damaged Dead Sea library which causes us to grope so intently among the fragments of old manuscripts written almost two thousand years ago, and to speculate on the differences in doctrine among ancient sects whose mode of thinking was strikingly dissimilar to our own, sometimes spinning whole webs of theory out of passages incomplete or blurred, in order to find out who composed them and what situations provoked them? If the Old and the New Testaments represent Divine Revelation, no such investigations are important. If they are of merely human provenience, the investigators are impelled by mere human curiosity as to how they came to be written and what their relation is to a cult of immense prestige. I know that the more liberal churchmen would say that these documents occupied in their time a kind of intermediate position between Judaism and the New Testament; that Jesus and the older prophets were real spokesmen for the word of God, and are susceptible of being studied in their human roles with all the more interest on account of this. But this position raises theological problems which I do not want to go into here. I want merely to indicate the point of view from which I have been writing on this subject. I have discovered that I am by temperament, by congenital cast of mind, a born shrinker of myths. In my books on Marxist socialism and on the Civil War, I was 386at first, I suppose, attracted by the dramatic interest of the historical crises that these involved and by the ameliorative idealism that played such a large part in both, but by the time I had got done studying them and had actually written about them, I was aware that, as an inveterate myth-shrinker, I had to some extent undermined the idealistic pretensions of both. In my writings on the Dead Sea Scrolls, I have performed a somewhat similar function for the myth of the origins of Christianity—though I was not, of course, the first in this field. It was inevitable that the scholars who had dealt with the scrolls, and on whom I have depended for my information, should already have performed that function. They did so sometimes unintentionally; but now, although most of these scholars have still, or had begun by having, some ecclesiastical commitment, I have noticed that these commitments to official faiths appear to be less of an impediment and that they present their researches more candidly as motivated by an interest in finding out what actually happened in intelligible earthly terms—the desire by which I, too, who follow their conclusions at second hand, have been prompted to write about them. Albert Schweitzer, in The Quest of the Historical Jesus, written before the finding of the scrolls, has summarized the various attempts to reconstruct or account for the life of Jesus only to come to the conclusion at last that there was no way of knowing the historical Jesus, who "will be to our time a stranger and an enigma," since he is "a Being not subject to temporal conditions," but comes to us as "an imperious ruler," "One Unknown, without a name," who "speaks to us the same word: 'Follow thou meP and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfil for our time," etc. But, with no such conception of Jesus, one cannot accept this point of view, and it is becoming, I gather, more difficult, now that we have so much new evidence on the history of 387Jewish prophecy, for even the men of the Churches to accept it.