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Thomas Heideman
posts on 1/14/2005 7:57:37 PM
There has been volumes of debate over the origins of christianity. Most recently, the Dead Sea Scrolls have come into the forefront as the most significant challenge to the traditional, supernatural interpretation of the origins of the gospels and the jewish belief matrix that led to the evolution of christianity. Whether or not the Dead Sea Scrolls and their ruminations about a Teacher of Righteousness represent the origins of the material that is found in the gospels, it is clear that there is a formulation within first-century Jewish thought that presupposes the incarnation of a divine being in human form. This suggests if not screams out that there is definitely a milieu in which the ideas that are central to orthodox christianity could have evolved out of a thoroughly Jewish and monotheistic ideology. Therefore, the suppositions that claims of divinity couldn't have arisen naturally or through normal myth generation processes is false. There is clearly a fringe, though palpable and forceful Jewish thinking that relates the incarnation of God in man and that is not something that can be changed by further scholarship. Secondly, the baseless arguments of an early Aramaic translation of the gospel of Mark mingling among the other works of the thoroughly Jewish Essene movement is not just incorrect, it is irresponsible. Carsten seems to forget that the original team responsible for interpreting and studying the Dead Sea Scrolls was largely comprised of Catholic monks, Allegro was the only secular scholar that was ever allowed to look at them before their public dissemination some half-century after their original discovery. The idea that a fragment from the gospel of Mark was extant, even among the less studied documents present is absolutely unthinkable. If there did exist such a papyrus, even if it were suspected that certain language was very close to the familiar work it would have received a great deal more attention by the original scholars who translated the scrolls. That Carsten conveniently discovers this himself shows how specious and ad hoc the entire argument is to begin with. If it were not that the Scrolls didn't bring to light something very damaging to traditional christianity, why the delay in keeping them from the public? Why the delay in allowing primary translations to be viewed and discussed by the scholarly community at large? Carsten should be more careful, this pseudo-scholarship and grasping at straws to maintain long-cherished religious dogma at the expense of legitimit scholarship is sickening and shows the extent to which the public at large is ignorant of science and the process of discovering natural explanations behind the most subtle and mysterious of nature's working. People who are truly interested in reading an influential work by a competent scholar should read John M. Allegro's "The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Christian Myth." However, it should be cautioned that his later work "The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross" should be ignored as fringe scholarship of its ownright. I think that the forcefull orthodox distaste for his works may have impelled him to indulge in a more shocking but less sound thesis that is a blight on an otherwise solid scholarly career.
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