The Dead Sea Scrolls again

Seems like it's the Barbara Thiering show again. The information jockeys have decided that Dr Thiering's theories are ‘news’, and so once again we must argue the toss with our non-Christian and quasi-Christian friends over the merits of her arguments.

The irony is that experts in the field (Christian and non-Christian) give her theories little credence. When this is pointed out, the media suggest that academics and the Church are simply closing ranks to protect themselves.

To give you some ammunition for the fight, we present David Peterson's perspective on Barbara Thiering's work. David is a New Testament lecturer at Moore Theological College, in Sydney.

When Barbara Thiering's documentary ‘The Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls’ was screened on ABC television in 1990, it apparently received the highest rating ever for a television documentary. The publishers of her latest book, Jesus the Man—a New Interpretation from the Dead Sea Scrolls, are clearly hoping for a similar response. There is little in this book that she has not said before, but the media have promoted it as an exciting new approach. So what is it about her work that makes it appealing to the general public?

The press responses demonstrate that there are probably several explanations. Some suggest there has been a conspiracy to keep the Dead Sea scrolls from being published and that Thiering is valiantly exposing the truth behind the New Testament. Some are fascinated by the prospect that the power of the world's churches might be broken by undermining the authority of its foundational teaching. Others are merely looking for an interpretation of Christianity to suit themselves—one that leaves out the supernatural and any demand for personal commitment to Christ. But one belief is common to them all. All regard Dr Thiering as an expert in this field—a sober, highly intelligent and articulate academic. She has been a part-time lecturer in the School of Divinity at Sydney University and has written extensively on this subject. Surely there must be some truth in what she says?

Devastating criticism

What the media have failed to reveal to the public is that her academic work has received devastating criticisms from others working in the field. Let's look at some examples.

Reviewing her 1979 book, Redating the Teacher of Righteousness, Jerome Murphy-O'Connor (Revue Biblique, 1980) said that it demonstrated “(a) her uncritical acceptance of any opinion (however subjective) that fits into her theory, (b) her disregard for any known form of logic, and (c) her preference for unjustified assumptions”. Morton Smith, in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (1981), concluded that the “case is weak because the arguments for it are often based on absurd exegeses, some made up ad hoc ... others cogently deduced from absurd principles”. Ben Zion Wacholder argued that “she manufactures a chronology, reducing a clear passage into gibberish ... The author's main thesis can only be characterized as utterly implausible” (Journal of Biblical Literature, 1982). Reviewing her 1983 publication, The Qumran Origins of the Christian Church, BA Mastin said, “Her conclusions are dictated by her rationalism” and “she does violence to her sources by implying that what is transcendent was alien to the outlook of the authors of the New Testament ... What B. Thiering is writing is not real history” (Revue de Qumran,1985).

She has Protestant, Catholic and Jewish scholars against her! Philip Davies of Sheffield appears to offer some support in the quote on the back of Thiering's latest book. But Chris Forbes from Macquarie University's ancient history department has been in touch with Davies, who assures him that the quotation is used out of context, without his permission and against his express wishes. On Sunday May 31st, Thiering was challenged on ABC Radio for two hours by Professor Geza Vermes from Oxford and Dr Max Wilcox from Macquarie. She would not concede at any point that she could be wrong. She would not allow that her theories could be in need of the slightest modification. This is not normally evidence of great scholarship, but the sign of a closed mind. Scholars are part of a world-wide community of people in the same field of research. They listen to the criticisms o others and do not simply adopt their own standards of argument and logic.

Is this history?

The critics of her work have rightly suggested that she does not follow the ordinary canons of historical research. Take this paragraph as an example:

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In AD23, Joseph died. Mary, his widow, the ‘crippled woman’ (meaning that she was in the class of the aged) was ‘bound by Satan’. Now a celibate woman preparing to exercise a form of ministry, that of the order of Widows, she was under the authority of ‘Satan’, a name for the chief Scribe.¹

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Bits and pieces of the narrative in Luke 13:10-17 are applied quite arbitrarily to Jesus' mother, Mary, even though the passage gives no warrant for this. Thiering attempts to re-write the story of Jesus using information from the Dead Sea scrolls and selected sayings and events from the New Testament. This has the semblance of great scholarship. The main text of her book occupies some 160 pages, while the appendices and supporting endnotes take up another 268 pages. But her method of relating the scrolls and the New Testament is bizarre. She quickly moves from historical reconstruction, based on documentary evidence, to speculation which is written as a statement of fact. This is not a method of approach to ancient texts that reputable historians could endorse.

Her argument is circular because she uses the New Testament as a major source in dating the Dead Sea scrolls and then uses the scrolls to interpret the New Testament. She is not concerned about the fact that the carbon dating of the scrolls places most of them in the period before Christ. Furthermore, she does not pay regard to the structure and flow of the New Testament documents but picks and chooses things out of context, to suit her case. A detailed critique of her work by Philip Esler appears in The Bulletin for the first week of June this year.

Is this scholarship?

The justification for her far-fetched interpretation of the New Testament is the pesher method, which she claims to have learned from the Dead Sea scrolls. But there are enormous problems with this approach. The pesher technique in the scrolls is a method for interpreting the Old Testament, with special reference to the scrolls community. Thiering makes an unwarranted and unsubstantiated leap of logic when she asserts that the New Testament was deliberately written with coded information, to make a ‘pesher reading’ of Jesus' life and ministry possible. In her view, it was meant to be read on two levels: the literal level for ‘babes’ and the symbolic level for the ‘mature’. Her pesher method really gives the interpreter ‘carte blanche’ to say whatever he or she wants about the hidden meaning of the Gospels and Acts. Furthermore, the implication is that only the followers of Barbara Thiering in the last decade of the 20th century can find the key to unlock the deeper meaning of the text and be among the truly mature. The key has been lost for almost 2000 years!

This is pseudo-scholarship, out of touch with reality at many points. It advances neither the study of the scrolls nor seriously study of the New Testament. Barbara Thiering handles the sources with the freedom of a novelist but does so in the guise of a careful academic. True scholarship pays regard to the arguments and methods used by others in the field. True scholarship listens to the criticisms of others and is open to falsification or correction. So who will be fooled by her idiosyncratic approach? Only those who have made up their minds to believe anything instead of the New Testament.

Endnotes

¹ Barbara Thiering, Jesus the Man, Doubleday, 1992, p. 65.