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The classical definition of New Testament studies essentially involves the historical-critical method. It is not so much a method, of course, as a theoretical construal of the field. New Testament studies has had as its object the historical reconstruction of early Christianity. It has demanded that the canonical writings be analyzed in strictly historical terms, which has meant, among other things, bracketing claims to divine inspiration in favor of human authorship, bracketing discussion of the miraculous in favor of observable causes, and subjecting all the sources to the most rigorous questioning in terms of dating, authorship, tendency and accuracy.

The result was a version of Christian origins that in many if not most points was at variance with the version accepted by the ordinary believer. If the believer thought, for example, that Christianity began in unity and only later fragmented into heresy, the historically correct version claimed the opposite: Christianity began in diversity and achieved unity only partially and only by great effort. The historical-critical perspective expressed a scholarly mission of correcting historical perceptions and thereby of purifying the Christian faith. Those who adopted this perspective could view themselves as holding a version of Christianity that had survived the toughest of tests.

Teachers making use of this perspective in the university, college or seminary generally assumed that their students would be the children of the pious but unenlightened faithful. They would have been raised in solidly and traditionally Christian homes (just as we professors, ex-monks, ex- seminarians and ex-churchgoers had been), would have read the Bible in worship and heard endless sermons based on it, and studied the Bible in Sunday school so that they had the facts of biblical lore (its geography, chronology, monarchies, prophets, Gospels) at their fingertips. They would have read the Bible in the home and in church as the word of God to be received in faith as divinely inspired and authoritative for all of life.

We teachers could fancy ourselves as playing a Socratic role for these students, inviting them to the examined life which alone is worth living. Just as in political science classes teachers challenged a student's assumption that because his father was a Republican, so he should be, and just as in economics classes professors challenged a student's assumption that capitalism is without question the best of all economic systems, so in religious studies teachers challenged students to examine their received traditions concerning Christianity. And nowhere was this done more frontally and forcefully than in the introductory course in the New Testament.

We did this -- or at least many of us did this -- with an astonishingly "uncritical" acceptance of the received verities concerning our own discipline. The historical-critical method, after all, had its own internal myth. According to this myth, biblical scholarship was a struggle outward from dogma into the freedom of history, and upward to the higher truth finally realized in 19th-century Germany. The myth declared historical -- critical method to be the only true way to read the New Testament, and dismissed all other modes of reading (particularly the despised errors of allegory) as "precritical."

Little did we realize (I hope) that in our classes we were in effect proselytizers for a different creed. We deceived ourselves if we thought that our students "accepted" the two-source hypothesis for the Gospels because they had carefully gone through the synoptics and reached an independent decision that just happened to coincide with ours, or that they "accepted" the pseudonymous authorship of the pastoral letters because they had independently examined all the arguments pro and con. In fact, they converted to our point of view because they accepted us as the new authority figures.

So satisfied were we in our secure possession of a higher truth regarding Christian origins that we did not think to ask some fairly important questions. We failed to ask, for example, what the results of our rapid deconstruction of the myth of Christian origins and its replacement with a more critical version might be. When political science students were challenged about being Republicans, they were not thereby disenfranchised from voting; when economics students were challenged on the merits of capitalism, they were not thereby excluded from purchasing notebooks, But when students were told that everything they had learned about their religion before entering this class was wrong, did we know -- or care -- if their capacity to function religiously in a mature fashion was diminished?

My first strong sense that there was a wide and growing gap between the discipline of New Testament studies and its intended purposes came after I joined the faculty at Yale Divinity School. I quickly discovered that the clientele was not at all what I had imagined. The students at YDS were not predominantly the children of lifelong believers; they were not well shaped by church tradition and well read in the Bible, ready and eager to take on the red meat of critical study. Far from it.

As I looked out over the 180 people taking New Testament interpretation, I saw folk who had never been to church in their lives, and for whom the YDS chapel was their first parish; who certainly did not know the Nicene Creed and probably not the Apostles' Creed. Some still stumbled over the Lord's Prayer. In short, they possessed none of the traditional church and biblical lore they were expected to have. Then what were they doing there? They had, a great many of them, adult experiences of transformation: they had been drugged and now were straight, had been drunk and now were sober, had been through divorce or depression and were seeking meaning. In short, they were filled with the raw stuff of religious experience for which they had no framework. Living in an academicized culture such as ours, they turned in their search not to the church but to the university -- in this case a university divinity school -- to find the meaning of what had happened to them.

How did these students experience the historical-critical method, which talked not about the experience of the resurrection but about the chronology of Acts, and which never engaged the figure of Jesus in the Gospels but only dissected the sources of the Gospels? It was as if people who had never experienced a living human body were being introduced to anatomy through attendance at an autopsy. The critical method handed them pieces, dismembered limbs and organs, no longer living, and no longer even recognizable as having come from a living body. They were not only shocked and disappointed, they were also disabled. The critical apparatus actually blocked their capacity to use the Bible for theology, pastoral care and prayer. We produced students who could not declare in a sermon, "Jesus said," without a disquisition on the "Quest for the Historical Jesus." In sum, even within what was assumed to be the original setting and purpose for the corrective task of the historical-critical method, the changing clientele made it either otiose or obstructive.

Teachers of Christian origins today are faced with a problem not unique to them -- it is shared in some fashion by all teachers in the humanities -- but nevertheless of pressing urgency. The problem is simply that they must now do two apparently irreconcilable things at once: they must introduce students to a tradition that they should have learned through some other primary socializing institution; and they must find a way to engage them in critical thinking about that tradition.

The challenge put to the historical-critical paradigm by the changing character of the student clientele has been matched by a series of severe criticism from within the scholarly discipline as well. (Indeed, some readers may feel that I am beating a horse now already well dead. But, in fact, that dead horse is still being driven daily through the pages of introductory textbooks.) The supposedly "scientific" and "disinterested" character of the historical-critical paradigm, for example, is increasingly recognized as a cover for a theologically tendentious agenda. The internal myth of this paradigm that regards everything prior to it as a series of errors has been identified as mythic and self-serving. But more than that: the dominance of this paradigm with all of its built-in theological biases has also been recognized as a block to more inclusive approaches to the material.

It is possible to approach early Christianity without, for example, assuming that "religion" is a less valuable phenomenon than "faith." or that "ritual" is a regression to superstition, or that "Christianity" is only authentic when defined antithetically to Judaism, or that "development" is automatically to be equated with "decline." It is also possible to recognize other ways of reading the New Testament: not only midrash, but also typology and allegory are modes of reading which, given their assumptions and rules of discourse, are every bit as disciplined and "true" as that offered by the literalist renderings of the historical-critical method.

From within the guild of New Testament scholars, a number of questions have also been raised about the goals of the historical-critical paradigm and its capacity to accomplish those goals. It is asked whether the ideal of an "objective history" might not be either fatuous or, worse, a form of ideology posing as science. And if historical reconstruction is the goal, isn't it hopelessly parochial -- indeed a kind of historian's bad faith -- to confine the investigation to the canonical writings? Why not include all the literature from early Christianity, if the goal is historical reconstruction? But even when extra canonical writings are included, isn't the attempt to delineate Christian origins doomed to frustration because of the paucity of the sources, their fragmentariness and their reluctance to perform as historical sources? Aren't most "Histories of the Primitive Church" a kind of paper-chase, in which a lack of genuine historical controls leads to ever more elaborate and ever less plausible "reconstructions" based less on facts than on the demands of developmental models?

Such questions partly derive from and partly have motivated developments within the study of early Christianity that have even further eroded the classical paradigm.. This has been a time of unparalleled access to and use of the rich comparative materials of the Mediterranean world: not only the apocryphal Christian writings but the fascinatingly complex literature of Second Temple Judaism, as well as the literature of Greco-Roman philosophy and religion. This has been a period in which the categories of the social sciences have been employed for the study of such ancient literature, alerting us to the ways in which ancient communities are rooted in social realities, as well as the ways in which social structures and ideologies reinforce each other. This has been a time, finally, when the literary analysis of ancient literature has become a very significant force within the field, insisting that documents do not exist only to provide historical information, but are to be appropriated as complex works of art as well as witnesses to and interpretations of religious experiences and convictions.

In a word, the character of our student clientele and the changes within scholarship alike make our adherence to the classical paradigm of the historical-critical method problematic, and invite us to think of new ways in which to engage our students in critical reflection on materials they may be meeting for the very first time.

These days when I teach, I try to apply what we have learned from the sociology of knowledge to our classroom situation. I invite the students to reflect on our own social setting. I try to identify the sorts of backgrounds and expectations I think they have, and talk about how each of us needs to move from our starting point to a shared realm of discourse. I identify what I regard as the scholar's "moral virtues" that enable this transition: a) openness to what is new even when it is threatening; b) respect for what is different even when it is strange; c) dedication to the truth even when it is difficult to achieve; d) willingness to use critical intelligence both with the materials studied and with the materials of one's own life.

I specifically address the distinctive social settings and functions of the church and the university. Looking at the context of the church, I describe the ways in which the Bible is read there, legitimately, as scripture, full of existential meaning, and how that form of reading has its own rules. Then I invite them to look at the social setting of the university and talk about the rules for discourse in the setting of the. liberal arts and humanities: how texts are read, how questions are framed, what counts as evidence.

This opening exercise is designed to enable students to engage in critical reflection on their background not as the only place that needs criticism, but in comparison with another -- equally relative -- social setting. They are thereby able to grasp that they are being invited not to a quasi-religious conversion from falsehood to truth, but rather to play a new and fascinating game whose rules they have yet to master. Another benefit of this exercise is that it relativizes (because it acknowledges) the role of authority in this process. I clearly am the authority within this academic game. But I try to be an authority figure who authorizes their ability to think critically -- and also one who lays out the academic game ahead of time for their inspection: there are no hidden trap doors, no secret rooms.

The next thing I try to do is expose the actual paradigm that I am using in this class, contrasting it, in fact, to other possible paradigms (the historical, the theological, the literary). My approach tries to respect four dimensions of the early Christian texts. The first dimension is anthropological. This means not only that we are approaching the texts as fully human productions -- I point out that statements of divine inspiration are statements concerning ultimate origin and authority, not method of composition - but even more that we take seriously that aspect of literature of most interest to cultural anthropologists: how it gives symbolic expression to human experience.

The second dimension is historical. The people whose interpretations of experience we are studying are not Trobiand Islanders, but Jews of the first-century Mediterranean world; to understand how they interpret their lives, we need to learn as much as possible about the properly historical realities within which they lived: the social and symbolic worlds of Roman rule, Hellenistic culture, and a variegated Judaism.

The third dimension is literary. We approach the New Testament writings not as sources for a historical reconstruction, so that they are of interest only as they can supply certain kinds of information, but as intentional literary compositions whose genres and conventions must be taken seriously if we are to learn anything from them at all. The fourth dimension is religious. Here I make a sharp distinction from theology. We are not reading the New Testament to learn the "theology of Paul," even if that were available to us; rather; we are attempting to get at the religious experiences and convictions that generated this literature and gave it shape.

The model that enables us to capture these four dimensions is a model of experience/interpretation. It takes seriously the fact that humans always seek to understand and interpret their experiences, but that certain experiences force more radical and inclusive types of interpretation. The model necessitates looking at three interrelated stages of the process: first is the shape of the symbolic world shared by the participants; second (and hardest to get at) is the set of experiences and convictions that generated a reinterpretation of that world; third.is the collection of literature containing (in quite diverse forms) that reinterpretation. In the study of Christian origins we are almost uniquely privileged to be able to analyze each of these stages with some confidence. This model invites students to see the New Testament as the product of a profoundly human process of experience and interpretation, by which people of another age and place, galvanized by a radical religious experience, sought to understand both that experience and themselves in the light of the symbols made available to them by their culture.

I hope, out of this, that students will learn not only about the New Testament but about how to think ahout their own lives. Ideally, Christian students come to understand that early Christian writings emerged from the same sort of process that produced other sacred scriptures. They therefore can appreciate more fully the deeply human character of their own tradition as well as the authentically human character of other traditions -- above all, Judaism. This insight can be applied even more directly by non-Christian students, who are able to appreciate the New Testament without feeling forced to appropriate it.

Awareness of the historical placement of the New Testament should caution Christian students against too quickly identifying their own religious perceptions with those of the first Christians. They should recognize the gap between Californians and Corinthians. An awareness of change and development within Christianity can give people the freedom to negotiate the differences without fear, aware that so things were from the start, when Paul told the Corinthians that they had to develop the capacity to maturely think through the complex issues of life together.

Grasping the literary dimensions of these writings enables students to see what kinds of questions readers can expect such religious texts to answer, and which they cannot answer. They can understand how any claim to "God's word" is clothed in linguistic particularity and rhetoric requiring interpretation, and that every tradition requires a reinterpretation in order to transmit symbols from one generation to the next as living vehicles of meaning and not as museum artifacts. Finally, aware of the religious dimensions of the texts, they are able to appreciate how claims to ultimate significance are inevitably forged in terms that are anthropologically rooted, historically conditioned and literarily defined; on the other hand, for the first time, many of them come to perceive Christianity as in fact making a number of extremely interesting religious claims.

Such a model of teaching is patently not perfect, but it does a better job than did the classical paradigm of bridging the gap between the discipline of New Testament studies as it actually exists and the students we actually face.

Given the shoddy level of analysis and argument evidenced by these books, perhaps the most pertinent questions to ask are: Why were they written? and Why were they published by houses of at least residual reputation?

Neither book adds a single thing to the world’s knowledge about Jesus. Neither makes the slightest claim to original research. Indeed, both authors gleefully acknowledge riding as amateurs on the backs of professional scholars: A. N. Wilson pays homage to Geza Vermes, while John Spong claims as his scholarly mentors Raymond Brown, Michael Goulder and Jane Schaberg. It should be noted at once that these scholars are not responsible for the confusions perpetuated in their names. Brown, in particular, deserves better than to have his careful work on the infancy accounts in any way associated with Spong’s fantasies.

More intriguing, neither author believes either what Christianity claims about Jesus nor what the Gospels say about him. The books appear to belong to that curious subset of contemporary literature that seeks to relieve others of the burden of an explicit Christian faith that the authors themselves have found otiose. They belong on the "Religion" shelf of the ever-proliferating self-help literature produced by those recovering from every imaginable form of dysfunction and addiction.

The therapeutic tone is at least muted in Wilson, although he apparently feels compelled to share the stages of his own disaffection from faith. With Spong, however, self-referentiality is the order of the day. His desire to convert "fundamentalists" from their naive acceptance of biblical claims burns with messianic fever.

In contrast to the critical scholars to whom they so breathlessly refer as authorities for their forays into historical reconstruction, our authors share a blithe disregard for careful historical method. Instead, they follow the (by now boring) path of rationalist reduction. Historical difficulties in the text are rendered as hopeless aporia, which yield historical skepticism. The void of skepticism is then filled with inventive speculation. The speculation turns out to be not a reasonable alternative reading of the available evidence but a complete and random reshuffling of the pieces to construct a picture more satisfying to the aesthetic (Wilson) or political (Spong) sensibilities of the authors.

In Spong’s "rethinking of the birth of Jesus," the sound if unexceptional observation that the infancy narratives are late in composition and provide little significant historical information quickly becomes the claim that "what really happened" has been "covered up" by the evangelists. One might think that the natural alternative to a (unlikely) virgin birth would be a (likely) normal birth. Christians who believed that Jesus was divine exercised the widespread Hellenistic prerogative of having their hero also born exceptionally.

But Spong’s rage against "literalists," whose belief in the virgin birth and whose honor of Mary have apparently been responsible for every oppression against women in Western civilization, demands a conspiracy of more sinister and titillating character. Enter his therapeutic rereading: Mary was in reality a teenaged girl who was raped and became pregnant with an illegitimate child and was taken under the protection of Joseph. Spong offers no evidence for this speculation beyond Schaberg’s already highly tendentious appropriation of anti-Christian slanders (apparently deriving from Jewish sources) peddled in the second century by Celsus.

It is apparent, however, that Spong is not truly interested in "what really happened." His interest is in freeing Christianity from its dogmative entanglements, which he more or less identifies with fundamentalism. Spong is negative toward the birth narratives because, he suggests, they represent a displacement in Christianity which began as an Easter rather than a Christmas event. But what is Easter for Spong? Well, it seems to have been "not so muc. . . a supernatural external miracle but. . . the dawning internal realization that this life of Jesus reflected a new image of God, an image that defied the conventional wisdom, an image that called into question the exalted king as the primary analogy by which God could be understood." The resurrection as end to patriarchy via conceptual correction? Of course, Spong insists that Christians got all this wrong from the start by thinking that Jesus was divine. Now, let’s follow the argument. The infancy narratives are simply a further expression of the fundamental error that birthed Christianity? Having a bishop with these views is a little like hiring a plumber who wants to "rethink pipes."

Bishop Spong thinks he has escaped his fundamentalist past, but he has not. He remains defined by the literalism he so strenuously battles, and his vaunted "liberalism" is one confined by a tired rationalism. The reader who struggles through the repetitions, non sequiturs and self-aggrandizing narcissism is not surprised to find Spong arguing that Jesus might have been married to Mary Magdalen, and that it was his own wedding at Cana for which he was wine caterer. The depth of the bishop’s theological insight is revealed not so much by his pitifully eager insistence that a Jesus who was born illegitimate and was married to a prostitute is automatically good news for women, but by his failure to deliver on his implied promise to deal positively with the infancy accounts as religious symbolism. Most readers unobsessed with literalism find that these stories say very little about the mechanics of birth, but a great deal about the dimensions of faith in threatening circumstances. Spong’s inability or unwillingness to accomplish such a positive appropriation is not surprising, since his reductionistic reading of the resurrection has removed the premise for it.

Wilson also has a chapter on "His Wondrous Birth" but his book deals with the entire gospel story. It is much more difficult to place Wilson than the instantly identifiable Spong. On the one side, he has had a bit of Greek and a bit of theology. On the other side, his interests seem to be those of the antiquarian and curio seeker rather than those of the historian or theologian. He employs the classic distinction between Jesus, the simple Jewish teacher (here construed, from Vermes, as a Galilean chasid), and Paul, the religious genius who invented Christianity. His "Jesus of history" must therefore lack all distinctive marks except a generalized "belief in God and in Judaism." Once Jesus is collapsed completely into Judaism, of course, and once the resurrection is understood simply as a physical resuscitation and dismissed as silly, Wilson is understandably left at the end of the book with puzzlement concerning his impact: ‘We can only be surprised that an historical figure of whom so little is known should have attracted to himself a reputation such as theology would wish to give him."

In the familiar manner, Wilson seeks to destroy the surface credibility of the Christian writings in order to reconstruct "what really happened" on his own terms. He nods to the critical problems in reading the Gospels, but finds a way through the alternatives of credulity and skepticism by using a criterion of historicity that can only be designated "idiosyncratic aesthetic." Tiny details that strike Wilson’s fancy, like the "cooked fish" of John’s feeding narrative, are used to reconstruct not Jesus’ teaching, for there is nothing to be said about that, but his public ministry. Wilson follows the gospel outline, correcting this point or that and making connections on the basis of nothing much more than oddity or psychological plausibility. Thus Wilson is convinced that Paul had to know Jesus personally, and so works him into the plot against Jesus, even identifying him with Malchus of the arrest scene. Likewise, the key to the Last Supper is "the man with the pitcher" who represents Aquarius, perhaps a portent of the approaching messianic age. Jesus, Wilson thinks, must have shared the Qumran community’s interest in astrology. All this and much, much more of the same sort of stuff.

I return to my opening question. If such books offer so little beyond the vagaries of their authors’ imaginations, why are they published? Can it be that a generation of book editors shaped by the same tendencies driving these writers is no longer capable of distinguishing the fraudulent from the real, or the sincere from the cynical?

Norman Golb’s claim ("The Qumran-Essene hypothesis: A fiction of scholarship," Dec. 9) that the recent release of previously withheld Qumran texts has made it clear that "many of them support the hypothesis of Jerusalem origin" is itself a fiction, the speculation of one scholar’s imagination. When I read that claim, I wondered to what recently released texts CoIb could be referring. He is impatient with the scholarly consensus that traces the scrolls to a community of Essenes, but his assessment of that consensus is highly questionable.

Let us look at some of his arguments. First, he claims that the excavated site of Khirbet Qumran (KQ) "was clearly a fortress, one of many that surrounded Jerusalem in Hasmonean and Herodian times," one of those to which 1 Maccabees 12:35 refers. "The site must be considered a fortress because its tower, water-storage system, strategic location and other characteristics... all point to its having been built and used as a fortress. Whatever "other characteristics" he has in mind, the points mentioned do not clearly argue only for an identification of KQ as a fortress. After all, the tower, reinforced after the earthquake of 31 B.C., is situated near the north entrance of the compound, and access to it was gained only from upper stories of the building, by a staircase to the second floor that is still partially preserved. That it was a sort of defense tower the archaeologists admitted. But what about the rest of the complex of rooms to the south of the tower, and the industrial complex to the west of it, all of which surely call for another explanation?

The seven huge cisterns, which collected water brought by the aqueduct from the Wadi Qumran, reveal only that they served a considerable group of people. They do not establish that the site was a fortress. The fact that more than 1,100 graves have been counted on the eastern side of the plateau and in adjacent areas reveals that a number of people must have lived in the area about KQ, and for a relatively long time. (The same would have to be said about ‘Ain el-Ghuweir, a site to the south and related to late stages of the occupation of KQ.)

The cemetery offers other reasons for hesitating about Golb’s explanation. The remains of a long wall were uncovered in the excavation of KQ. It clearly separates the main complex of tower, rooms and industrial area from the eastern part of the plateau. The archaeologists concluded that the wall had been constructed to demarcate the cemetery, the area of the dead, from the rest of the complex, because in Jewish belief contact with corpses and even graves (Num. 19:11-16, 18) would have been a source of ritual defilement for those who used the area to the west of it. This certainly explains the wall far better than the claim that it was part of the fortress-like character of the site. The height of that wall would scarcely have served a defense purpose. Moreover, the nature of main cemetery, numbering about 1,100 graves, most of which are carefully laid out in rows, "in contrast to the disorder usual in the ancient cemeteries in Palestine" (R. de Vaux, Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls), indicates that it was revered as the burial place of a group. That remains the best reason for claiming that KQ is what is left of some sort of community center.

De Vaux, the chief archaeologist of KQ, concluded his report by saying: "The essential fact is the communal occupation of Periods I and II. A group of men came to Khirbet Qumran and installed themselves there in the second half of the second century B.C., Period Ia. The buildings were very quickly extended and assumed what is more or less their definitive form, Period Ib. In 31 B.C. an earthquake damaged the buildings, which afterward remained abandoned up to the years just before and just after the beginning of the Christian era. They were then reoccupied by the same community, Period II, and survived until AD. 68, when they were destroyed by the Roman army." (De Vaux estimated that at its peak "the group would not have numbered many more than 200 members.") One need only visit the remains of ancient Greek Orthodox monasteries in the Judean wilderness to understand why a defense tower was part of such a community center.

The archaeologists admit, moreover, that Roman soldiers occupied the site of KQ after the destruction of the center itself. That, however, says nothing about the character of the center before its destruction. The building was destroyed by fire, and in the layer of ash related to that destruction arrowheads were found of the type used by Roman soldiers, like those found elsewhere in Palestine. For this reason the archaeologists concluded that the destruction of the complex of buildings was caused by Romans, who moved from the Jordan Valley in the summer of A.D. 68 to the Siege of Jerusalem but left behind a small garrison on the site—which occupied it for a number of years, apparently to control the Jordan area. Golb’s insistence on the "strategic location" of KQ is accurate and explains why the Romans would have stayed there after destroying and taking over the site.

None of the archaeological evidence mentioned so far establishes any connection between KQ and the Essenes. None of the scrolls or fragments recovered from the 11 nearby caves mentions the Essenes. But "Essene" is a name derived from Greek writers like Philo, who called them Essaioi, and Josephus, who called them either Essenoi or Essaioi, or a Latin writer like Pliny the Elder who called them Esseni. The scrolls themselves used "sons of Zadok" or "the poor," designations that do not help us to determine the identity of the people who may have produced them.

The relation of the Essenes to the Dead Sea Scrolls was apparently first suggested by Eleazar Lipa Sukenik, professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who acquired three of the seven scrolls of Cave 1 (Isaiah Scroll B, War Scroll and Thanksgiving Psalms). He made this identification before KQ was excavated, and even before any connection was established between that site and Cave 1 or the caves that were to be subsequently discovered. After a second cave was discovered by the Bedouin, archaeological authorities in East Jerusalem, then under control of Jordan, launched an exploration of the cliffs in 1952, seeking to find still other caves. They discovered Cave 3. Meanwhile, the site of KQ was being excavated. Though this site was known in the early part of this century and had even been identified as a Roman fort (with no explanation of why a cemetery would have been found next to a Roman fort), the archaeologists gradually realized that they were working on a complex of buildings of a different sort. Looking for an explanation, they recalled the statement of Pliny, which turns out to be the best reason for identifying KQ with the Essene community.

Having described the area to the east of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, Pliny continues with a description of the west side of the Dead Sea (Natural History). He first mentions the Esseni, giving his account of them in the historical present; then he says, "Below these was the town of En-Gedi" and then Masada. Pliny alludes in the same place to the destruction of Jerusalem. He died in the eruption of Vesuvius (A.D. 79), so he must have written that paragraph sometime between AD. 70 and 79. He writes as a Roman outsider who recognized that these Jews were "a unique race, remarkable beyond all others in the whole world, without women, without any sexual intercourse, without money, having only palm trees for companions." Yet they existed there "through thousands of ages (incredible though it be)." Pliny’s description of the west shore clearly moves from north to south. The only place above En-Gedi along that western shore known to have been inhabited in Roman times is KQ. Hence the Qumran-Essene hypothesis, used by the vast majority of scholars of many nations, confessions and backgrounds, which Golb is now trying to upset.

The interested reader can find all the ancient testimonies about the Essenes, together with English translations, in a booklet by Geza Vermes and Martin D. Goodman titled The Essenes According to Classical Sources. Moreover, the account given of the Essenes by Josephus has been studied in detail by Todd S. Beall in Josephus’ Description of the Essenes Illustrated by the Dead Sea Scrolls. Beall has discussed all the problems of this identification, listing the six discrepancies that have been noted between Josephus and the Qumran texts but concluding that "none of the above apparent discrepancies is serious enough to put into question the identification of the Qumran community with Josephus’ Essenes."

Second, Golb claims that of the more than 1,100 graves, 43 have been opened and "several contained the bodies of women and children." He concludes that this discovery contradicts "the original identification based on Pliny—that the site was the home of celibate Essenes." What Golb does not tell readers is that 26 of the graves opened were in the main well-ordered cemetery, and "all the skeletons in that part of the cemetery which is carefully planned are male"; the same is true of the tombs in the western end of the cemetery (R. de Vaux, Archaeology). In one grave, abnormal in type and situated apart from the rows, a female skeleton was found. Moreover, in the "second cemeteries," one on a plateau a little to the north of KQ, a female skeleton was found; in a cemetery to the south of the Wadi Qumran a skeleton of a woman and three others of children were found. No one knows how to explain these peripheral burials. But they do not certainly contradict the identification of the Qumran community with the Essenes, for, though Pliny speaks of them as living omni venere abdicata, Josephus admits that there was "another order of Essenes" different from the rest in that they married. Though women and children are mentioned in the appendix of the Manual of Discipline and in the Damascus Document, no women at all are mentioned in the Manual of Discipline itself. This absence of any mention of women in the main rulebook of the community, found in Cave 1, may not "urge the practice of celibacy," to use Golb’s expression, but it is in accord with the information of Philo, Pliny and Josephus about Essenes who did not marry.

Third, GoIb cites "recent official maps of Israel" which refer to KQ as ‘the fortress of the Hasideans," a place mentioned in one of the Bar Kokhba manuscripts of the second century A.D. Mesad Hasîsîn, "the fortress of the Hasideans," does occur in Mur 45:6, but that it refers to KQ is a conjecture of the editor and cannot be used to guarantee the fortress-like character of KQ. The fact that it is used in modern Israeli maps for KQ merely reflects that conjecture and does not make KQ a fortress.

Fourth, when Golb says that "there was nothing whatever at the site to attest to its being a monastery, a place where monks . . . lived," he is right. But such Christian terminology as "monastery" and "monks" should never have been applied in the first place to a Jewish site or to the pre-Christian Jews who gathered there. Many scholars realize today that antecedents of Christian monasticism have to be reconsidered in light of what has been discovered in the Qumran rulebooks, collections of hymns, prayers and rituals, and other sectarian literature. They reveal that many features of Christian monasticism were already found among Palestinian Jews in pre-Christian times, indeed among those who led at KQ a communal, ascetic form of life in obedience to a superior and regulated by rules and penalties—a form of life which a Jew joined voluntarily and in which he pronounced oaths. It is anachronistic to call such a Jewish group "monks." But to recognize that anachronism does not mean that such features did not exist in pre-Christian Judaism. Moreover, since such sectarian literature comes from the Qumran caves themselves, why should one not regard that mode of life to have been characteristic of the community known to have lived at KQ?

Last, most scholars studying the Qumran scrolls readily recognized their pertinence to the "momentous events that took place in Palestine between 200 B.C.E. and the fall of the Second Jewish Commonwealth." They relate them, indeed, to "the Hasmonean revolt" and especially to "the growth of all parties and sects" and the "dynamic interchange of ideas and patterns of struggle" among Jews of the time. Hence GoIb’s claim that no "organic connection" between the scrolls and such events has been perceived is incorrect. Such a connection, however, provides no proof that the scrolls discovered in the 11 caves of Qumran emanated from libraries in Jerusalem or that they were deposited in the caves by Jerusalemites after the fall of Galilee in A.D. 67, and/or that they have anything to do with the treasures of the Jerusalem Temple.

Some of the scrolls had been imported from elsewhere for community use, among which would be copies of so-called intertestamental literature (1 Enoch, Jubilees, etc.), perhaps even the Damascus Document (possibly a rulebook of a pre-Qumran phase of the community). Some of this imported literature could indeed have come from Jerusalem. But this origin hardly accounts for the multiple copies of such literature, the multiple copies of especially sectarian texts, the uniformity of scripts in many, many texts, and the distinctive mode of copying and writing, even ascribed by some to "a Qumran system." Hence GoIb’s claim that "no fewer than 500 different scribes copied these texts" is simply wide of the mark.

Norman Golb replies:

Far from my having pulled the theory of Jerusalem origin out of the air, I arrived at my conclusions on the basis of a preponderance of evidence. Joseph Fitzmyer chooses not to deal with most of this evidence, even with the Copper Scroll, the Masada discoveries and the finding of scrolls near Jericho in ancient times. Like other traditional Qumranologists, he employs arguments that mainly seek to protect the old interpretation.

Thus Fitzmyer asserts that there is a scholarly consensus supporting the Qumran-Essene hypothesis. On the contrary, the vaunted consensus no longer exists. Many scholars now avoid using the word "Essenes" in connection with the scrolls; others say that some scrolls, or many scrolls, or even a majority of them, were brought into Qumran "from the outside"; while still others now agree with me that the entire conception of a sect actually living at Qumran is fictitious. The great variety of opinions was strikingly brought out at the conference on the scrolls in New York this past December. Reacting to the present reality, the director of interpretive programs at the Library of Congress stated with respect to the library’s plans for an exhibition of the scrolls in April that "the scroll enigma includes the basic uncertainty about what that community was" (New York Times, Jan. 27). Fitzmyer’s denial of this reality seems more an expression of nostalgia than a description of the actual situation.

Fitzmyer also relies on the old way of dealing with the archaeology of Qumran, while at the same time disregarding newer findings and approaches to this question. Thus he states that the characteristics of Khirbet Qumran "do not clearly argue only for an identification of KQ as a fortress" (my italics)—whereas the material question is what the characteristics argue for best. The "industrial complex" he refers to is simply an area where pottery and glass vessels were made, evidently for the benefit of the inhabitants, and tells us nothing about their identification. If "ancient Greek Orthodox monasteries"—by which he means Byzantine monasteries of the fourth century at the earliest—had defensive features, that certainly does not imply that the military commanders in first-century B.C. and first-century A.D. Judea would ever have allowed a celibate, peace-loving sect to occupy a site of such strategic importance as Khirbet Qumran, and no evidence suggests that any Jewish purity-brethren ever did so.

Considerations of space prevented me from discussing the manuscript source underlying the present designation of the site; my purpose was to show, despite the "consensus" argument, that its military nature is indeed now recognized. It is not true, as Fitzmyer claims, that no other place has been found that could have been the habitation of Pliny’s Essenes. De Vaux asserted this—erroneously—in the 1950s; but P. Bar-Adon in his surface explorations subsequently found many other sites in the Judean wilderness near the Dead Sea where such a group might have lived, as Pliny says, "with only the palm trees for company." Fitzmyer omits from his citation of Pliny precisely those words that show that the Essenes could not conceivably have been living at Qumran when he wrote his description. If the creators of the Qumran-Essene hypothesis, first basing their position on Pliny, then discovered graves of women at Qumran and so fled to Josephus’s description of "another" group of Essenes in order to defend their identification, does that warrant our doing so today? Josephus nowhere speaks of Essenes near the Dead Sea, while Pliny explicitly states that the Essenes of the Dead Sea were celibate. The studied attempt to gloss over the resulting disjunction can hardly be said to succeed.

Fitzmyer repeats old arguments purporting to show that the layout of the Qumran cemetery reflects a special sort of religious community. As Z. Kapera of Poland demonstrated at the New York conference, however, this matter is most debatable. The regular rows of graves, all apparently dug at the same time, distinctly indicate a postbattle military cemetery. It is extremely difficult to believe that a group of purity-loving brethren dominated by priests—such as the Manual of Discipline describes—would have allowed a cemetery to be built so close to their actual living quarters, particularly when so much more space was available at greater distance from the site of habitation. Contrary to Fitzmyer’s suggestion, in no known form of ancient Judaism could a mere wall licitly separate the ritually pure from the impure. Asserting that the "sect" of Qumran held such a view merely begs the question.

Fitzmyer denies that the newly freed Qumran texts now being studied and published are having an adverse effect on the old interpretation. If he wonders which texts are having that effect, he might acquaint himself with such writings as the multifarious hymns portraying often contradictory ideas; the so-called MMT text written in an idiom, and containing various ritual laws, that set it totally apart from the Manual and its sister texts; the thunder-interpretation and other magical texts; the poem in praise of Jonathan the King (Alexander Jannaeus); and numerous other fragmentary writings found in the facsimile edition of the scrolls from Cave 4, a goodly number of which have been edited and translated by Michael Wise in R. Eisenman and M. Wise, The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered.

As more of the writings are being published, scholars are increasingly perceiving that they do not fit the old interpretation—a perception that, to be sure, became a virtual theme song in reports on the scrolls delivered during the sessions of the Society of Biblical Literature meeting in San Francisco this past November. Hence the continuously widening use of the euphemism that so many of the scrolls "came to Qumran from the outside."

One of the important emerging pieces of evidence is the growing number of scribal handwritings—at least 500—identifiable in the texts. Fitzmyer attempts to water down this evidence by inventing the concept of a "uniformity of scripts" in many texts, and by speaking of a "distinctive mode of copying and writing." There is no reason to believe that he is observing anything else than characteristics of ancient Judean Hebrew scripts as a class. I have so far found no scholar who challenges the tally of at least 500 scribes responsible for the surviving Qumran scrolls, and the old interpretation is obviously in deep trouble precisely because of this high figure alone.

Fitzmyer asserts that most scholars of the scrolls "readily recognize their pertinence" to the momentous events of Palestinian Jewish history. I am unfamiliar, however, with any studies by traditional Qumranologists that do so, and he names none. On the contrary, when a senior Qumranologist was asked in 1991 about the historical value of the scrolls, he replied that he would be "hard-pressed to tell you what light the scrolls have put on Jewish history" (Jerusalem Post, International Edition, Oct. 26, 1991)—and the examples could be multiplied. The scrolls have indeed been used to construct a narrow history of an imagined Qumran sect, and it is most surprising to see Fitzmyer attempt to transmute this into a historiographic virtue.

In brief, the great preponderance of evidence now known, including the presence of various currents of social and religious thought in the scrolls, emphatically points to their origin in a major urban center of Judea, which in the first century A.D. could only have been Jerusalem. Fitzmyer has not some close to weakening this interpretation, let alone to demonstrating that it is a fiction.