The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls

cuts at the whole historical basis of

Christianity. The fact that scrolls
written before the birth of Christ
contain much of Christ's ideas and
that they can clear up contradictions
which have puzzled scholars for
centuries demands a re-thinking of
our beliefs about Christianity.
Johannes Lehmann asks who really
was Jesus? How can we reconcile
the picture of Christ which has come
down over the centuries with the man
the Romans crucified and whom they
must have regarded as a dangerous
political firebrand.
Investigation of the Dead Sea
Scrolls suggests that the Essene
Sect. can provide the answers. Yet
the Essenes were never mentioned in
the Bible. Lehmann demonstrates
how first the suspicions of the Roman
authorities and then the teachings
of Paul could have acted as filters
for the interpretation and eventual
distortion of the recorded facts about
Jesus.
Did Jesus live in the desert wilder-
ness with the Essenes? How is it that
references to the disciples also point
to the militant members of the
Essenes, the Zealots? Simon called
Zelotes, Judas Iscariot, a form of
sicarri, another slang name for the
militants. Simon Peter, Bar-jona, is
interpreted as son of Jona, but it is
more likely one of the forms of
Baryonium another name for militant
Essenses.

continued on backflap
continued from front flap

Why did Christ hold the passover

meal, the Last Supper, on the wrong
day? Was John the Baptist also an
Essene? Could he in fact have spent
so much time so close to the Essene
community without being a member?
The teachings of Christianity
remain untouched and as potent as
ever. But the powerful influence of
the Essenes and the entirely different
picture of the life of Christ makes this
a startling and controversial book.

ISBN 0 285 62022 3

Jacket design by Eric Mudge-Marriott

SOUVENIR
PRESS -.-
THE
JESUS
REPORT
THE
JESUS
REPORT
JOHANNES LEHMANN

TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL HERON

SOUVENIR PRESS JPublishers JLondon

First published in the United States 1971
by Stein and Day/New York
First British Edition 1972 by Souvenir Press Ltd,
95 Mortimer Street, London W. I, and simultaneously
in Canada by J. M. Dent & Sons (Canada) Lrd, Ontario, Canada
English Translation Copyright © 1971 by Souvenir Press
Copyright © 1970 under title
Jesus-Report: Protokoll einer Verfalschung by Econ Verlag GmbH
All rights reserved
No part may be reproduced in any form
without permission in writing from the
publisher except for a reviewer who wishes
to quote brief passages for the purposes
of a review
ISBN 0 285 62022 3
Printed in Great Britain by
Fletcher & Son Lrd, Norwich
 CONTENTS

Introduction 9
1 The Blind Spot 13
2 The Secret 23
3 The Narrative of Flavius [osephus 35
4 The Proof That Came Later 45
5 The Sons of Light 57
6 John the Baptist 67
7 Lunar Calendar and Last Supper 77
8 The Poor in Spirit 87
9 The Reason for the Silence 97
10 The Touching Up 107
11 The Second Filter 117
12 From Scapegoat to Lamb of God 127
13 The Fly in the Amber 137
14 Rabbi J.'s Answers 147
Notes 155
Bibliography 173

5
THE
JESUS
REPORT
 INTRODUCTION

LL institutions have an innate tendency to

settle down and become complacent, and try hard to
show that they have a value per se. The institution of
the church has not escaped this ideological process,
either, and so it has needed control and revision just
like other organizations. It is neither sacrosanct nor
untouchable, and it has frequently had to accept re-
interpretations during the two thousand years of its
existence, whether it wanted to or not.
All these reinterpretations were based on the as-
sumption that with the passage of time the institution
of the church had moved too far away from its original
program, because unlike other religions Christianity
claims to have a historical origin and to be based on a
historical personage who lived in a historical and con-
sequently verifiable age.
So if new facts are discovered that explain the ac-
cepted historical background better or differently, the
church has to orient its teaching and its "message"
toward what was originally meant, and not toward
what has grown out of it in the course of two thousand
years. Yet for nearly two thousand years we did not
know of a single document from those days, apart from
the actual Bible, that could have confirmed, cast doubt
on, or amended the life and teaching of Jesus of
Nazareth.

9
 But owing to one of those incalculable accidents of
history, we have now had for twenty years a series of
documents that throw an entirely new light on the
historical background of the Christian faith. We find
ideas, words, and whole sentences from the New Testa-
ment in them, although they were written before the
birth of Jesus of Nazareth. They are the famous Dead
Sea scrolls, which were found in 1947 and are the
ancient scriptures of a Jewish monastic sect, the
Essenes, who lived around the birth of Christ in
Qumran, a settlement on the Dead Sea.
Is it possible that Jesus was not the creator of a new
personal doctrine? Did he only repeat what others had
thought before him? Then who was the real founder of
Christianity? Was he really the "Christ" from whom
Christians take their name?
The churches cling firmly to this belief, even though
they admit that today Jesus of Nazareth would not
agree with everything that has happened since he died.
Yet in spite of their admitted inflexibility, they claim to
teach basically what Jesus taught.
Since the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls we are
entitled to doubt even this, but in spite of the immense
amount of specialized literature that has been written
about the scrolls, the churches remain silent. They state
their position on many subjects, but they are allergic
when it comes to the question of the historical truth and
hence of their own axiomatic existence. They admit,
because they are forced to, the astonishing similarity
between the original Christian church and its doctrine,
and the Dead Sea scrolls, but believe they can disprove

10
 the resemblance because the sources do not tally ex-
actly. This runs counter to experience, and the critic
notices the lack of sound scholarly methodology. The
New Testament, too, is full of contradictions-for all
the frequently emphasized uniformity of its aims.
The reason for this is historical development. For a
long time theologians have known that the New Testa-
ment scriptures we use are not preserved in their origi-
nal version. It is demonstrable that the further away
they were in time from the death of Jesus of Nazareth,
the more the different authors of the gospels deviated
from the original. Paul, who never saw Jesus and
carried the "gospel" from the cramped Jewish world to
the Greek sphere of culture and so inevitably distorted
it, was long ago called the first falsifier of Christianity.
But it was not clear how far Christianity had departed
from its original aims even in the first century A.D. until
the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls.
The church finds it hard to defend itself against its
members' inability to believe, and the number of people
who feel this conflict more or less consciously is grow-
ing. Today these marginal members, whose only con-
nection with the church is often the celebration of
family events, such as weddings and christenings, are
readier than ever to pose and discuss the question of the
real Jesus and the present-day church.
This book assembles the facts necessary for this
discussion. Fundamentally what it supplies is not 50
much new as unfamiliar information, because in the
past scholars and theologians did not always pass on
their knowledge to members of the church, or at least

11
not impartially. It is an attempt to free the knowledge
of experts from ideological and emotive accretions,
and present it lucidly and intelligently. That is one
reason-though not the only one-why I give the man
from Nazareth, to whom each one of us adopts a posi-
tive or negative attitude, the neutral designation of
"Rabbi J."
"What is truth?" asked Pontius Pilate nearly two
thousand years ago. The question is still valid today,
and it is a question the church has to ask itself today
as it did in the past.
For perhaps church and Christianity are no longer
identical and we simply do not see it. Perhaps faith has
been replaced by ideology and we do not perceive it.
Perhaps Rabbi J. would not be a member of a "Chris-
tian church" today and we dare not face the possibility.
Perhaps we are equating things that are not really con-
nected, because the blind spot in our eyes deceives us.
Perhaps everything is quite different from what is cur-
rently accepted. That at least is the theme of the "mys-
tery of Rabbi J." that can be discussed and written
about today on the basis of the sources available to us.

12
 One
THE BLIND SPOT

ONE of us ever knew Rabbi J. Everything that

we have been able to learn about him and his extraor-
dinary life, we know through intermediaries, for Rabbi
J. is dead. And even the intermediaries did not know
him. Theirs were not eyewitness accounts, and for some
time people believed that that might be the reason for
the confusion and the strange obscurity surrounding
Rabbi J.'s life. For the more they depended on the dif-
ferent and frequently contradictory accounts, the fur-
ther Rabbi J. retreated.
To many people Rabbi J. was like a star in the sky
that becomes invisible at the very moment that we look
at it directly, yet twinkles again when we look past it,
because a remarkable caprice of nature has arranged the
blind spot in our eyes so that anything we gaze at in-
tently remains in darkness.
In other words, if we begin to look past Rabbi J.,
and his face no longer holds the center of the stage, we
learn more about him. The less we look at him, the
better we can get to know him; the hazier the Rabbi's
face, the clearer his life.
In his views, wishes, and dreams, he differs ever
more sharply from the figure propagated by his biog-
raphers and created by his worshipers.
As we soon notice, neither group told the story of

13
Rabbi J.; they simply mirrored their own destinies in
his life. They said Rabbi J., but they meant themselves;
they projected their difficulties on to him and trans-
ferred their hopes to him. They made a legend out of
Rabbi J., because they did not, could not-and did not
want to-understand him.
For example, Rabbi J. was a Jew-the title "Rabbi"
makes that clear to everyone-but hardly anyone who
knows anything about him faces up to the fact; reluc-
tantly people feel that he may have looked like the man
next door, only rather more distinguished. Legends
adapt themselves, especially when it is not considered
to be an advantage to be a Jew. We know no picture
that shows him as an Israelite, with a dark skin and
large, hooked nose, and wearing a burnoose, as was
usual in his day when the region was still called Pales-
tine. Rabbi J. has even lost his face, although there is a
description of him. The Roman official Lentulus de-
scribes him as having "nut-brown hair, that is smooth
down to the ears and from the ears downward forms
soft curls and flows on to his shoulders in luxuriant
locks, with a parting in the center of his head after the
fashion of the Nazarenes, a smooth clear brow, and a
reddish face without spots or wrinkles. Nose and mouth
are flawless, he wears a full luxuriant beard, which is
the same color as his hair and is parted in the middle;
he has blue-gray eyes with an unusually varied capacity
.
f or expressIOn.... "1

Today we still see these figures with beards like

Moses, venerable patriarchs in caftans, by the Wailing
Wall in Jerusalem; we meet the same types with brown

14
earlocks as they stand by Abraharn's tomb at Hebron,
muttering prayers and swaying constantly like pendu-
lums. And why should Rabbi J. have looked any differ-
ent from his descendants?
Historians doubt if this description is genuine, for
why should a Roman have described a Jew so gener-
ously? Everyone knows what Jews look like. But why
did Lentulus say that "he was of medium height, fifteen
and a half fists tall"?' Who would bother to invent a
detail like that, for a height of just under five feet was
nothing special even in those days, and who would con-
tradict all the other accounts by saying: " ... he is cheer-
ful in seriousness; sometimes he weeps, but no one has
ever seen him laugh"?"
Who was this Rabbi J.? One thing is clear: he was
a Palestinian Jew and probably he did not wash as often
as we consider necessary nowadays.
He spoke Aramaic, a language that is no longer
spoken today; he lived in a barren wilderness, in which
a modest plantation around a spring is still called par-
desh after the ancient word for paradise; he lived in a
world in which water was so precious that at baptism it
was made the symbol of the conversion from life hither-
to to real life; in the solitude of an interminable land-
scape he saw the glittering stars of a hot desert night;
he prayed to an invisible God who was never portrayed
and whose name Jews hold too sacred to pronounce
even today; he lived in different scenery and in a dif-
ferent world from ours, and the things he took for
granted are foreign to us. And if you have not been in
the [udaean desert and near the Dead Sea, if you do

15
not speak his language and do not live in the same
tradition and world of ideas-and only a Jew can do so
-then you will never really understand Rabbi J.
SO my attempt to write about his life is difficult. I
am not a Jew and I grew up in the Christian West. I
start off with the best premises for misunderstanding
him, even though I know all about the Pharisees and
5adducees, the Temple at Jerusalem, the Babylonian
exile, and the major and minor prophets. For in my
opinion nearly everyone in the Christian West who has
studied or written about the Jew J. has inevitably mis-
interpreted or misunderstood him.
The reason for this is that Rabbi J.' s life has passed
through two filters. One filter made people obscure his
life from the very beginning for their own special rea-
sons, because they dared not put down the true motives
behind it. So some of the difficulties are obviously in the
life of the man himself. His actual life is in opposition
to his biography, and only the fact that the obfuscation
was not wholly successful enables us to discover the
true motives, by doing a little detective work and think-
ing logically, and so draw a new picture of him.
The second filter did not 50 much obscure as distort
his life. Its effect was to make the already vague picture
lose nearly all its individual features. The Rabbi became
his own legend simply because after a certain time peo-
ple no longer understood or wanted to understand many
details of his life and 50 arrived at a new personal inter-
pretation against which he could no longer defend him-
self.

16
 There is an amazingly simple example in Rabbi J.'s
life of how translators could misunderstand the elemen-
tary meaning of words by trying to be too profound,
just because they were not Jews. One of the stories
about Rabbi J. begins by mentioning a day without tell-
ing us to what it refers. The passage reads: "And the
third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and
the mother of J. was there: And both J. was called, and
his disciples, to the marriage.':"
Nowhere in the gospel according to St. John do we
hear about the first or second day, although the pre-
vious more or less connected stories are introduced on
three occasions by the locution "the next day." Which-
ever way one reckons the "third day" is either unin-
telligible or unnecessary. For this reason many transla-
tors have had trouble with this passage. One of them
left the apparently unintelligible words out and wrote:
"There was a marriage at Cana in Galilee."
A modern German translation reads: "Three days
later a marriage feast took place at Cana, a town in
Calilee.:" While another modern translation, which
says, "Two days later a marriage took place at Cana in
Calilee.?" is talking absolute nonsense, for if Rabbi J.
was still by the Dead Sea, he would have had to cover
the seventy-five miles from Jericho to Cana in one day
to be at the wedding the day after next.
Many theologians interpreted the "third" day sym-
bolically. Because turning the water into wine at the
marriage in Cana was Rabbi J.' s first miracle, they saw
in this a secret reference to the Resurrection, the mirac-

17
ulous event which also took place on a third day. Thus
the marriage at Cana prefigured the image of the "heav-
enly bridegroom."
In any case the passage is obscure, if not completely
unintelligible, to a Christian; it is not to a Jew. He can
translate the Greek of the New Testament back into
Hebrew and see what the Aramaic original might really
have meant. For all the information about Rabbi J. has
come down to us in a foreign language, namely Greek.
The Jewish religious scholar Shalom Ben Chorin writes
about this passage in his book I.-the Nazarene from
the Jewish Point of View: "But if we translate the text
back into Hebrew, into the atmosphere and background
to which it belongs, we read: U bayom hashlishi. . . .
Yom hashlishi, the third day, is simply Tuesday, be-
cause the Jewish week begins on Sunday and ends on
the seventh day, the Sabbath. The individual days have
no names, with the exception of the Sabbath or Shab-
bath, which means day of rest. They are only numbered
first, second, third day, etc., and the third day, Tuesday,
was and still is the classical day for Jewish marriages,
for it is Kephel ki tov, the day of the twice-repeated "it
was good" in the story of the creation in Genesis (1 :10,
12).
Although the Talmud prescribes Wednesday as the
day for the marriage of virgins, Tuesday, the third, was
then and still is preferred as a wedding day by simple
country folk-and those are the kind of people we are
talking about in GaliIee.
Twice in the Bible it says "for it was good," so that
one ki tov applies to the bridegroom and another to the

18
bride, and they will enjoy a doubly fortunate marriage.
That is the simple solution of the puzzling time ref-
erence in the story of the marriage at Cana. Scholars
have made a tremendous mystery out of this third day,
but none of them realized that it was no more than a
Jewish farmers' wedding in Galilee.
For nearly two thousand years scholars laboriously
probed mysteries that were no mysteries, and we may
well ask why no Old Testament scholar ever drew the
attention of his fellow experts on the New Testament to
the Jewish system of numbering the days of the week.
A New Testament scholar might even have noticed it on
his own if he had visited the museum on the Acropolis
in Athens. The museum is closed on Tuesdays and a
notice in Greek says merely: "Closed on the third day,"
for the Greeks still number the days of the week like
the Jews, as they did in the past.
So there are still a whole series of ideas in the stories
about Rabbi J. that become more nonsensical the more
exactly and literally they are rendered, because no
one bothers to ask what they meant in their original
cultural context. We shall see that the mere fact of trans-
lating ideas into another linguistic and mental world
can cause radical misapprehensions that completely dis-
tort and falsify the actual teaching of Rabbi J. and his
own assessment of himself. The unnecessary mystifica-
tion about an ordinary day of the week is the most
harmless example. There are cases where translators,
rendering the original literally and so making nonsense
of it, have brought into being whole dogmas by reading
into the misunderstood passages new religious concepts

19
from their own culture and thus contradicting the origi-
nal aims of Rabbi J.' s teaching.
But to begin with I should like to stick to the his-
torical sequence of events and talk about the first filter
that obscured and made a mystery of Rabbi L's life
from the very beginning.
At first sight it looks as if Rabbi J. had the misfor-
tune to choose followers who were rather simpleminded.
Every time he tells a parable, the disciples say that they
do not understand it and ask what it means. This could
be a stylistic trick of the evangelists to give Rabbi J.
a chance to explain, but the disciples were not really
stupid. Obviously the parables were deliberately for-
mulated so that they could not be understood straight-
forwardly. Obviously they contained, besides the literal
meaning of the words, a second, hidden, meaning which
only initiates understood. A passage in the New Testa-
ment makes that clear: And the disciples came, and
11

said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in para-

bles? He answered and said unto them, Because it is
given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom
of heaven, but to them it is not given. For whosoever
hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more
abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall
be taken away even that he hath. Therefore speak I to
them in parables: because they seeing see not: and hear-
ing they hear not, neither do they understand.... But
blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for
they hear.?"
The essence of the parables is over and over again
the coming of the kingdom of heaven, the secret of the

20
kingdom, the kingdom of God, and as the New Testa-
ment says: "Hear ye therefore the parable of the sower.
When anyone heareth the word of the kingdom [of
God], and understandeth it not. ... 119
There was really nothing to understand. Expecta-
tion of the end of the world or at least the end of the
Roman occupation and a kingdom set up by God was
common ideological currency at the time. What Rabbi J.
said was quite in keeping with Mosaic Jewish thought;
John the Baptist had preached the very same thing and
the Old Testament is full of such expectations. So where
was the secret? Why could not everyone know and
understand what he said? The idea suggests itself that
the Rabbi's words concealed another secret that was
not explicit, that they had a double meaning as in a
mystery religion. His audience obviously felt this, too:
"And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these say-
ings, the people were astonished at his doctrine: For he
taught them as one having authority, and not as the
scribes.'?"
But what was the other thing he taught? Because it
is the best conclusion we can draw from the gospel
stories, we have grown accustomed to talking about the
doctrine of love as opposed to that of the law. Yet if that
was the essence of his teaching, what was there to make
a mystery about? Anyone who thumbs through the
Talmud keeps on coming across ideas about love and
loving one's neighbor. It must have been something
else that was accessible only to initiates and had to be
guarded like the secret of the Messiah. A secret that
only men whom God had given the necessary insight

21
understood. As it says at the end of many parables that
J. told the people without explanation: "He that hath
ears to hear, let him hear."
What was there to hear? I claim that this is the blind
spot that results from looking straight at the figure of
Rabbi J. SO I am trying to look past him to his environ-
ment, his age, and his fellow men. For I do not want to
tell the story of Rabbi J. in the way that Europeans have
done for nearly two thousand years. I want to discover
the Rabbi J. whom his contemporaries knew, honored,
or despised.

22
 Two
THE SECRET

N spite of the tremendous impact the life and ideas

of Rabbi J. have made on the world-his birth is still
the caesura on which we base our chronology-there is
not a single contemporary description of his life. Not
even the Jewish historian Flavius [osephus, who wrote
a detailed history of the Jewish people in the first cen-
tury A.D., knew him. The only sentence in [osephus,
"J., who was called the Messiah, is worshiped by a com-
munity in [erusalem.": is not by him, but is a later addi-
tion, and the Roman historian Tacitus, who is the only
profane source to mention the Jew J., merely writes in
explanation of the name "Christiani": "Christus, from
whom their name comes, was condemned to death by
the Procurator Pontius Pilate in the reign of the Emperor
Tiberius.""
Rabbi J. himself has not left a single line behind. So
what we know about him is based solely on the three
sources of information which are contained in the New
Testament. One source is the epistles of St. Paul, who
never saw or heard Rabbi J. The second consists of a no
longer extant original text from which later came the
three so-called synoptic-i.e., comparable-gospels of
Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and the third is the gospel
according to St. John, which is based on a quite differ-
ent tradition.

23
 All four gospels appeared more than a generation
after Rabbi J.'s death and were written and edited by
people who were demonstrably not eyewitnesses, but
secondhand reporters.
As we know, the four accounts frequently contra-
dict each other. That may be because each of the "eye-
witnesses" saw, heard, or remembered what happened
in a different way, but it may also be because the defini-
tive editors brought the accounts up to date by their
contemporary standards and "improved" them. For ex-
ample, Rabbi J. could not possibly have spoken his last
words in the three different versions found in the New
Testament. Unless we assume that he spoke all three
versions one after the other while he was on the cross
and each evangelist only reported one (why, one won-
ders), the only remaining possibility is that at least two
of L's utterances were invented.
Mark, the earliest gospel, ends J.'slife with the cry
of despair: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me?" We find this in Matthew, too, the next account in
time. In Luke, who already gives a detailed description
of the spread of Christianity in his Acts of the Apostles,
the idealization of Christ's death, at a greater distance
from the historical event, is already reflected. (The re-
cently formed church interpreted J.'s death similarly in
retrospect.) The last words Luke gives are "Father, into
thy hands I commend my spirit." Here despair and the
life crowned with failure have already become accept-
ance. And in John, the gospel that was written last, we
find triumph and victory: "It is finished." A plan had
been put into effect. There is no trace of failure and the

24
terror of the disciples who ran away after his death, be-
cause inconvenient truths ought not to exist. A veil was
cast over the painful memory i the truth was corrected.
If we work from the premise that a certain fact in
Rabbi J.'s life was not stated and could not be made
public, there is yet a third explanation of how the con-
tradictions in the gospels arose: all those passages that
touched on the secret or whose wording suggested asso-
ciations with it to the readers of those days had to be
made unrecognizable. This could be done by omission,
adaptation, or additional explanations. As each of the
evangelists set about the task differently, the result of
their labors was the contradictory accounts we have
today.
For example, when the Roman soldiers came to
arrest Rabbi J. "with swords and staves," and the aggres-
sive Peter promptly chopped off Malchus's ear, we ac-
cept it as a bit of convincing realism. But how did Peter,
the disciple, get hold of a sword in the first place? And
how is it possible that the very man who preached love
and atonement, also said: "Think not that I am come
to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but
a sword.:"
How was it that a man who let himself be called
Messiah and savior forbade his disciples to tell others
about it? How could a man who merely summoned peo-
ple to lead a God-fearing life clash with the Roman
occupation forces, who executed him as a political crimi-
nal; and who can explain why the first Christians in
Jerusalem, who felt themselves to be devout Jews and
prayed every day in the temple without any intention

25
of starting a schism, were nevertheless persecuted by
Paul as if they were conspirators?
There is something inconsistent here. Rabbi L's pic-
ture is drawn so that it has two facets. Consequently
scholars have often tried to oppose to the naive harm-
less image of a wandering preacher that the majority
make out of Rabbi J. the revolutionary and agitator J.,
because they suspected the real reason for all the mys-
tery there.
Lastly, [oel Carmichael, in his book The Death of J.,
has tried to show that Rabbi J. was nothing but a politi-
cal rebel against the Roman occupation forces. At first
Rabbi J. attempted an uprising by peaceful means, but
then became convinced that nothing could be accom-
plished without the sword. That is how we should
understand the isolated passage in Luke where J. asks:
"When I sent you without purse, and scrip, and shoes,
lacked ye any thing? And they said, Nothing. Then said
he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him
take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no
sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.?"
According to Carmichael, he entered Jerusalem with
a small armed force and was hailed as the Messiah, the
people's liberator. What the evangelist toned down into
the purging of the temple was really the occupation of
the temple by J., the rebel- surely an exaggeration.
Afterward he had to flee and spend the night outside
the walls of Jerusalem.
At all events it is true that at some point in time
close to his entry into Jerusalem and the purging of the

26
temple, Rabbi J. was in hiding outside the city walls
(otherwise Judas would not have had to betray the
hiding place), and that he was executed by the Romans
on the political charge that he called himself the King
of the Jews. Carmichael sums it up as follows: "In our
own terms, Jesus was a national leader, one of the many
who as we have seen sprang up among the Jews during
their long-drawn-out subjugation by Rome.:"
Failure would also explain the cry of despair: "My
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Later the
evangelists saw to it that this portrait was "piously re-
touched to smooth away those aspects of Jesus' enter-
prise that were to prove indigestible to later Christian
theory-the violence that attended Jesus' movement, its
anti-Roman political implications, and above all, per-
haps, its material failure-all were either forgotten or
obliterated in the new perspective of Jesus' cultic
magnification.":
This thesis of Carmichael's is attractive insofar as
it gives a factual explanation of how such an apparently
harmless, devout man came into conflict with the oc-
cupying power and was treated on the same level as
Barabbas, an agitator.
If the Jew J. was judged by the Romans-and he was
-then it must have been for a political crime. That is
the only possible interpretation. But now we can under-
stand why the evangelists draw a onesidedly devout
picture of Rabbi J. and conceal the political aspects of
his life as far as possible. If the Rabbi's steadily increas-
ing following was to exist in the Roman Empire's sphere

27
of influence, the authors of the New Testament must
have felt obliged to play down any opposition to the
occupying government.
According to Carmichael, therein lies the real mys-
tery of the man J., which he legitimately links up with
the concept of the Messiah, whom the Jews looked on
as a national liberator at God's behest. When liberation
by this Messiah failed, the later Christians-according
to Carmichael-introduced the suffering Messiah, for
whom there is no prototype in Jewish history. In other
words they completely transformed the proper func-
tions of the Messiah.
Carmichael's theory certainly clears up a political
aspect of Rabbi J.'s life which undoubtedly existed but
which is not immediately recognizable after the re-
touching of two thousand years. In my opinion, how-
ever, this explanation does not reveal the whole of Rabbi
J.'s secret, but only the part that led to his death.
What Carmichaelleaves out for convenience' sake
are all those passages where Rabbi J. is attacked for his
ethical and religious teaching. A hostility to the scribes
and Pharisees that is never explained or justified runs
right through the gospels. We have grown accustomed
-somewhat unjustly-to looking on the Pharisees as for-
malists and hypocrites, whose dead faith in the Mosaic
law was opposed to the message of Rabbi J., whom we
see as a reformer to whom what truly mattered was the
real law of God. But why on earth should anyone think
that this "fool from Galilee" was such a dangerous
opponent that desperate measures had to be taken to

28
get rid of him? If he preached a new doctrine at which
the people marveled, it would hardly have consisted of
the announcement that he was planning a revolt and
consequently was some kind of Messiah, a liberator
from servitude. Anyone who has read a smattering of
the Jewish history of that period knows that it literally
teemed with rebels and revolts. In other words the new
teaching must have had a different emphasis-an em-
phasis that also justified the conflict with the Pharisees.
For about two hundred years before and after the
birth of Christ, the Pharisees and Sadducees were the
two great dominant currents in Jewish life. They dif-
fered mainly in their attitude to the Torah, the collection
of Jewish laws. Carmichael writes on the subject:
"Ever since Ezra (444 B.C.) the Torah had been the
unchallenged religious source of religious authority for
the whole of the Jewish people. Since it had been fixed
in writing, however, it was obviously incapable of deal-
ing with every specific problem that might arise in the
course of time.
"The Sadducees, as the aristocratic, priestly group,
held the view that the Torah as written had to be sup-
plemented by priestly decisions as the occasion arose.
Thus the scope of the Torah tended to contract gradu-
ally with time.
"The Pharisees, on the other hand, believed that the
Torah was binding not merely by virtue of the collective
oath taken by the representatives of the people in the
time of Ezra but also because it was the direct expression
of God's will. They enlarged the scope of the Torah,

29
and made this socially feasible by evolving the concept
of an Oral Law. This was as ancient as the words of the
written Torah itself, and just as binding. liS
The Sadducees were conservative, whereas the
Pharisees-the product of what we would call today a
"pietistic" movement of Chasidirn, or devout-acquired
a reputation for hypocrisy because they always had an
explanation ready for every situation, even when it was
not covered by the Torah. But it is possible to take a
different view of them, as Carmichael does: "The Sad-
ducees were conservative guardians of an ancient text;
they considered the Pharisees innovators who acted as
disturbers of the public order and as gadflies generally.
. . . In the time of J. the Pharisees, without being politi-
cal, were essentially oppositionists; they found many
sympathizers among those irked by the rule of the
Sadducees."
The question is why our Rabbi, who had publicly
proclaimed the kind of innovations that forced people
to attack him, attacked the Pharisees and not the Sad-
ducees. For it was really the Pharisees with their flexi-
bility and adaptability who should have been less scan-
dalized by Rabbi J. than the orthodox Sadducees. If
Rabbi J. was an innovator, he should have found sym-
pathy among the Pharisees rather than the Sadducees,
especially as the Sadducees were closely connected with
the government and the temple, and for that very rea-
son would inevitably have taken offense at any revolu-
tionary deviation from their religious and political point
of view.
The New Testament paints a different picture. There

30
Rabbi J. is always clashing with the Pharisees, but he
comes into conflict with the Sadducees only when resur-
rection and expectation of the end of the world are con-
cerned. For the Sadducees did not believe in resurrection
and had no sympathy with apocalyptic ideas of the kind
traditionally ascribed to Rabbi J.
Now we see Rabbi J. more clearly-a man with
everyone's hand against him who preached the joyful
message of the coming of God's kingdom and was
driven to his death as an unwelcome individualist be-
cause the religious establishment had the power and so
had right on its side.
But was Rabbi J. a solitary prophet? According to
the New Testament it looks as if he was. In it there are
only two movements: the Pharisees and Sadducees.
Rabbi J. (and John the Baptist, too) differed from both
of them. But now we know from a profane nonbiblical
source that there was a third religious group in existence
at the time. There is not a single word about it in the
New Testament, either for or against, although it too
was a product of the movement of the Chasidim and so
originally related to the Pharisees.
It was a religious movement, numerically about as
strong as the Pharisees, which expected the imminent
end of the world and preached repentance and reforma-
tion because the kingdom of God was at hand. This
third group, whose renewal of faith made them adhere
to the law all the more strictly because they thought
that the priests in the Temple at Jerusalem were cor-
rupt, had one distinguishing feature that was unknown
in the whole history of the Jewish faith before: they

31
were monks. Western history has accustomed us to
the idea that monks are part and parcel of the religious
life. But even what we accept as axiomatic was once
revolutionary. We have only to read about the effect
that John the Baptist, a hermit in a camel's-hair cloak,
had on the people of Jerusalem: they made a pilgrimage
to him in the desert and were baptized, and among them
was Rabbi J.
This third religious reformist movement, which
Rabbi J. neither mentions nor attacks, was, unlike the
Pharisees and Sadducees, a secret cult inside [udaism,
Strict rules, which included starvation as a punishment
for the monks, forbade the revelation of the secrets of
the inner circle, access to which was possible only after
a waiting period and initiation rites.
Now if we assume that Rabbi J. was close to this
sect or even belonged to it, would not the fact that he
appeared in public and yet had sworn to keep the mys-
teries secret explain those passages which we find ob-
scure, unintelligible, or contradictory, because they do
not express clearly what it was forbidden to express?
Is this Rabbi J.'s secret? That as a strict orthodox
Jew, expecting the imminent arrival of the kingdom of
God like John the Baptist, he preached a doctrine which
was only for initiates and which he dared utter only in
ambiguous parables? He who hath ears to hear, let him
hear.
Unlike the authors of the New Testament, Flavius
[osephus, the Jewish historian, wastes very few words
on the Pharisees and Sadducees, but nineteen hundred
years ago he described in astonishing detail the secret

32
sect which he expressly calls the third force in the Jewish
faith and which is unmentioned in the New Testament.
Supposing that Rabbi J. had had some connection
with this "third force," why was it not mentioned in
the New Testament? Such skeptics as Voltaire and Fred-
erick the Great noticed the striking similarity between
the teaching of Rabbi J. and the doctrine of this sect.
Was the secret sect an invention of [osephus?

33
 Three
THE NARRATIVE OF
FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS

MONG the [ews," wrote Flavius [osephus in

The Jewish War, "there are three schools of thought,
whose adherents are called Pharisees, Sadducees, and
Essenes respectively. The Essenes profess a severer dis-
cipline: they are Jews by birth and are peculiarly at-
tached to each other.
"Of the two schools named first, the Pharisees are
held to be the most authoritative exponents of the Law
and count as the leading sect. They ascribe everything
to Fate or to God: the decision whether or not to do
right rests mainly with men, but in every action Fate
takes some part. Every soul is incorruptible, but only
the souls of good men pass into other bodies, the souls
of bad men being subjected to eternal punishment. The
Sadducees, the second order, deny Fate altogether and
hold that God is incapable of either committing sin or
seeing it; they say that men are free to choose between
good and evil, and each individual must decide which
he will follow. The permanence of the soul, punish-
ments in Hades, and rewards they deny utterly.?"
In other words, according to this description, too,
the Rabbi's real opponents ought to have been the Sad-
ducees, who rejected everything that we look on as
Christian. But since Rabbi J. attacked mainly the Phari-
sees, we also ought to be able to discover differences

35
between the Pharisees and the Essenes-so long as we
are sticking to the premise that the Rabbi may have had
some connection with the Essenes. [osephus enumerates
three such differences: the Essenes' strict ethics, their
monastic life, and their doctrine of the immortality of
the soul, which can be traced back to Gentile influences.
"It is indeed their unshakable conviction that bodies
are corruptible and the material composing them im-
permanent, whereas souls remain immortal for ever.
Coming forth from the most rarefied ether they are
trapped in the prison-house of the body as if drawn
down by one of nature's spells; but once freed from the
bonds of the flesh, as if released after years of slavery,
they rejoice and soar aloft. Teaching the same doctrines
as the sons of Greece, they declare that for the good
souls there waits a home beyond the ocean.... Bad
souls they consign to a darksome, stormy abyss, full
of punishments that know no end ....
"They tell these tales firstly because they believe
souls to be immortal, and secondly in the hope of en-
couraging virtue and discouraging vice, since the good
become better in their lifetime through the hope of a
reward after death, and the propensities of the bad are
restrained by the fear that, even if they are not caught
in this life, after their dissolution they will undergo
eternal punishment. This then is the religious teaching
of the Essenes about the soul, providing an inescapable
inducement to those who have once tasted their
wisdom."
For nearly two thousand years these ideas of the
Essenes and the Christian doctrine of the immortality

36
of the soul have been connected with the concept, quite
alien to the Old Testament, that life on earth is a trial
and a journey on the way to eternal bliss. The Old
Testament makes no mention of the immortality of the
soul in this form nor of a domain of eternal bliss. What
we normally call a later Hellenistic addition to Christi-
anity emerges here as part of the ideology of a Jewish
sect that existed before Rabbi J. was born. The concept
that the body is only the prison of the soul, which is un-
known in the Old Testament, also occurs among the
Essenesaccording to [osephus.
Because of these beliefs the rules of the Essenes are
against the physical and sensual side of life, and the
things of this world: "They eschew pleasure-seeking as
a vice and regard temperance and mastery of the pas-
sions as a virtue. Scorning wedlock ... contemptuous
of wealth, they are communists to perfection, and none
of them will be found to be better off than the rest. ...
Showing indignation only when justified, they keep
their tempers under control; they champion good faith
and serve the cause of peace. Every word they speak is
more binding than an oath; swearing they reject as
something worse than perjury.... [a novice says that]
he will ever love truth and seek to convict liars, will keep
his hands from stealing, his soul innocent of unholy
gain ... they abstain from seventh-day work more
rigidly than any other Jews ... they do not venture to
remove any utensil or to go and ease themselves.
"They are wonderfully devoted to the work of
ancient writers, choosing mostly books that can help
soul and body; from them in their anxiety to cure dis-

37
ease they learn all about medicinal roots and the proper-
ties of stones."
The German word Heiland (meaning savior but with
connotations of healing) has a strange connection with
the Essenes. The name Essenes or Essaeans is reminis-
cent of the Aramaic-Assyrian word Assya, which means
doctor. A distinguishing mark of Rabbi J. was to heal
and help the sick, and he ordered his disciples to con-
tinue this work.
According to [osephus, the community of the Es-
senes, which had about four thousand members" al-
together, existed in two forms. The ascetic branch lived
according to strict rules as a monastic community,
whereas the other Essenes could live in towns and vil-
lages, and get married like ordinary citizens.
"They possess no one city but everywhere have
large colonies. When adherents arrive from elsewhere,
all local resources are put at their disposal as if they
were their own, and men they have never seen before
entertain them like old friends. And so when they travel
they carry no baggage at all, but only weapons to keep
off bandits."
Consequently the following instruction could easily
come from the rules of the Essenes: "Take nothing for
your journey, neither staves, nor scrip, neither bread,
neither money.... And whatsoever house ye enter
into, there abide, and thence depart. And whosoever
will not receive you, when ye go out of that city, shake
off the very dust from your feet for a testimony against
them. And they departed, and went through the towns,
preaching the gospel, and healing every where.:"

38
 Yet this quotation does not come from the Essenes:
it is an order given to his disciples by Rabbi J. in the
gospel according to St. Luke: to mention but one of
many parallels.
The Essenes' monastic community was governed by
special rules. As in Christian monastic orders there were
various grades of membership corresponding to various
degrees of enlightenment of the kind found in mystery
religions. Everyone who entered the monastery gave
his belongings to it: "Each man's possessions go into
the pool and as with brothers their entire property be-
longs to them all.... Men to supervise the commu-
nity's affairs are elected by show of hands, chosen for
their tasks by universal suffrage."
It was probably much the same among Rabbi L's
disciples, and we know the administrator of the com-
munal purse. He was Judas, for "he ... had the bag,
and bare what was put therein.':"
The Essenes' day was split up into specific periods
for work, ritual ablutions, and meals, which were begun
and ended by a special grace. "They show devotion to
the Deity in a way all their own. Before the sun rises
they do not utter a word on secular affairs, but offer to
Him some tradi tional prayers as if beseeching him to
appear. After this their supervisors send every man to
the craft he understands best, and they work assidu-
ously until an hour before noon, when they again meet
in one place and donning linen loincloths wash all over
with cold water. Thus purified they assemble in a build-
ing of their own which no one outside their community
is allowed to enter: they go into the refectory as if it was

39
a holy temple and sit down in silence.... The priest
says grace before meat: to taste the food before this
prayer is forbidden. After breakfast he offers a second
prayer; for at beginning and end they give thanks to
God as the Giver of Life. Then removing their garments
as sacred they go back to their work till evening. Re-
turning once more they take supper in the same way,
seating their guests beside them if any have arrived.
Neither shouting nor disorder ever desecrates the house:
in conversation each gives way to his neighbor in
turn....
"Persons desirous of joining the sect are not imme-
diately admitted. Excluded for a whole year, a man is
required to observe the same rule of life as the members .
. . . When in this period he has given proof of his tem-
perance, he is associated more closely with the rule and
permitted to share the purer waters of sanctification,
though not yet admitted to the communal life. He has
demonstrated his strength of purpose, but for two more
years his character is tested, and if then he is seen to
be worthy he is accepted into the society. But before
touching the communal food he must swear terrible
oaths ... that he will ever hate the wicked and cooperate
with the good ... will never hide anything from mem-
bers of the sect or reveal any of their secrets to others,
even if brought by violence to the point of death. He
further swears to impart their teaching to no man other-
wise than as he himself received it ... and to preserve
the books of the sect and in the same way the names
of the angels (messengers). Such are the oaths by which
they make sure of their converts."

40
 That is an abbreviated version of Flavius [osephus's
story, and we wonder how he knew all this if the Essenes
were really such a secret sect. A biographical note solves
the puzzle. As a nineteen-year-old he actually belonged
to the Essenes for three years, before he was arrested
during a rebellion by the Romans, in whose service he
then wrote The Jewish War.
Strictly speaking, [osephus did not betray anything
that an outsider could not have found out. There is not
a word about the books of the sect and its "angels"
(the Greek word for messenger), not a word about
where the Essenes' monastery was.
But what he does tell us contains many striking
parallels with the New Testament-the sharing of pos-
sessions by the disciples and later by the early church
in Jerusalem, and the pooling of property by the Es-
senes; the communal meals and the special kind of
grace, the only sign by which the disciples recognized
the resurrected Christ at Emmaus; the sect's ritual rules
for purification and the baptism performed by John,
which is simply called "purifying" in some passages in
the Bible": the rejection of swearing, "But let your com-
munication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is
more than these cometh of evil'": and lastly, inter alia,
the ethic of loving one's neighbor, connected with the
concept of a heavenly tribunal decreeing rewards and
punishments for the immortal soul, an ethic which
Philo of Alexandria describes even more clearly than
[osephus: "The Essenes have been brought together by
their zeal for rectitude and the passionateness of their
love of humanity.:"

41
 50 it is not surprising that down the centuries there
have always been theologians who believed that Rabbi
J. was an Essene. As early as 1792 the theologian Karl
Friedrich Bahrdt" wrote in his Letters to Truth-seeking
Readers that J. was connected with the Essenes through
Nicodemus (in the third chapter of St. John) and [oseph
of Arimathea. Bahrdt also noticed that J. used "two
kinds of discourse" so as not to transgress the role of
secrecy.
The Age of Enlightenment used the Essenes to ex-
plain some of the miracles. Certain scholars asserted
that the crucifixion and resurrection were only a theatri-
cal production staged by the Essenes and consequently
that the white-clad youth who announced the resur-
rection to the women in the empty tomb was simply
one of the Essenes, who, as is well known, wore white
clothes. A hundred years ago the white robe of the
Essenes inspired another theologian to explain that
Rabbi J. was the son of an Essene youth to whom Mary
had given herelf in an ecstasy, because she had taken
him for an angel in his white raiment." The child had
then been handed over to the order, which was quite
usual according to [osephus's account.
August Friedrich Cforer, born zu Calw, student at
the Tiibingen Foundation and curate of Stuttgart, wrote
in 1831: "The Christian church emerged from the
Essene community, whose ideas it developed, and its
organization would be inexplicable without the Essenes'
rules.'?"
Theology and the church did not take up these ideas

42
of liberal theologians because they saw in them an at-
tempt to undermine the uniqueness of J.'slife and teach-
ing. No one was prepared to admit more than a vague
resemblance between the accounts of [osephus, Philo,
and the New Testament, and with some reason. For the
Essenes are not mentioned once in the New Testament,
not a single text of the Essenes had been handed down,
and no one knew where the Essenes' monastery might
have been located, if indeed it had ever existed.
Pliny is the only person to make a brief reference to
it: "The Essenes have withdrawn a considerable dis-
tance from the west shore of the Dead Sea to be shel-
tered from its deleterious effects-a solitary community
living without women that has renounced every con-
tact with Venus and money, and whose only compan-
ions are the palm trees .... At their feet once lay the
town of Engeddi. ... On the other side lies Massada, a
fortress on a rock, not far from the Dead Sea. fln
No Essene monastery has ever been found there,
and we may well doubt whether Pliny's geography was
very strong, for Massada does not lie on the other side,
but on the same shore as Ein Gedi, as Engeddi is writ-
ten today. And there are palm trees by the Dead Sea not
only at Ein Gedi, but also some twenty miles farther
north at Ain Feshka, not far from the mouth of the
Jordan near Jericho, where in the midst of a lifeless
stony desert right on the Dead Sea frogs still sit croak-
ing in the channels of a clear freshwater spring.
So if Pliny's poetic observation that palm trees were
their only companions is right, the only possible sites for

43
a settlement on the west shore of the Dead Sea are those
two places where a spring emerges from the fissured
rock, twelve hundred feet below sea level.
But there was no one like Schliemann, who took
Homer literally and discovered Troy, to take Pliny's
details seriously and search for and find the Essenes'
monastery. For nineteen hundred years [osephus, Philo,
and Pliny were suspected of being Oriental storytellers,
until the secret books of the Essenes-the famous Dead
Sea Scrolls-were discovered by chance in the Qumran
caves not far from Ain Feshka.

44
 Four
THE PROOF THAT
CAME LATER

T was not the actual discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls

that formed one of the most exciting chapters in modern
archeology, but the attempts of scholars to acquire the
irreplaceable documents from the Arab desert nomads
and their intermediaries by haggling, bribery, and trick-
ery-often risking their lives in the process-to prevent
their destruction by the hazards of war, ignorance, or
disappointed money lust.
It all began when fifteen-year-old Mohammed ad
Dhib, of the Taamirah tribe/ bored while keeping his
sheep, threw some stones into one of the narrow caves
that abound on the steep slopes around the Dead Sea.
According to other reports he was looking for a lost
sheep when he found the cave. Be that as it may, Mo-
hammed heard a clinking noise instead of stone strik-
ing stone, and he rushed away in panic-stricken fear of
evil spirits.
The next morning he had calmed down and decided
to go with a friend to collect the gold treasure hoard
that he suspected was there. They were bitterly disap-
pointed when all they found were a few earthenware
vessels and some old leather scrolls. They took one of
them back to camp and unrolled it until it reached from
one side of the tent to the other, as they later recounted
in amazement. It was one of the scrolls that later cost

45
a quarter of a million dollars to buy and which is now
on display in the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem.
The Bedouins did not know what to make of them,
and one day took a couple of scrolls to Bethlehem to
Chalil Iskandar Shahin, a Syrian Christian, who ran a
grocery-cum-cobbler's shop, and was known as Kando.
Kando was not interested, but as the old material might
come in handy for mending shoes, he kept the leather
scrolls. (The very thought that the oldest extant manu-
script of the Bible might have been used piecemeal for
soling shoes is still enough to make any scholar's heart
stop beating.)
Later, when Kando examined the scrolls more
closely, he got the impression that they might be more
than the usual fake antiquities and took one to the
Syrian Monastery of St. Mark in the Old City of Jeru-
salem. Perhaps the Metropolitan would be interested in
old documents. But the Metropolitan did not appreciate
the value of the scrolls, either, and began to offer frag-
ments to various institutions for examination, after he
had taken a supply of scrolls from Kando on commis-
sion for a few shillings.
So far the story of the discovery can still be recon-
structed fairly reliably. But the confusion of war before
the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, the compul-
sion to keep absolute secrecy about the finds, which
automatically belonged to the state by law as archeo-
logical material and could not be traded in, and the par-
tition of the country into an Arab and a [ewish sector,
explain why no two stories coincide.
Basically two stories of the same discovery can be

46
distinguished.' One of them tells how the Hebrew Uni-
versity in the Israeli sector of Jerusalem came upon the
scrolls, and the other how in the Arab sector of the city
the American Oriental Institute and the Dominican
Archeological-Theological Institute on the one hand and
the Jordanian Government Archeological Office in Am-
man on the other tried more or less legally to do busi-
ness with the suspicious Bedouins.
In both versions Kando of Bethlehem and the Syrian
Metropolitan of St. Mark's Monastery in Jerusalem are
the shadowy key figures. They possessed seven scrolls,
whose value they did not even suspect, and offered them
to one prospective purchaser after another, each of
whom thought that he was the first person to hear about
the finds.
Thus the Israeli archeologist Dr. Sukenik of the
Hebrew University tells us that on November 23,1947,
an unknown Armenian showed him a fragment of a
scroll for the first time. It was an extraordinary situa-
tion. Dr. Sukenik stood on one side of the barbed-wire
fence the British Military Government had erected
around the Hebrew University as a protection against
the Arabs, the Armenian on the other. Across the
barbed wire Sukenik heard about the finds by the Dead
Sea. He checked the piece of leather and the characters.
They really were of great antiquity.
A few days later, on the twenty-eighth, the United
Nations in New York was to decide on Palestine's fu-
ture. It was a foregone conclusion that there would be
a war between Arabs and Jews if the UN decided on the
foundation of the state of Israel. When Dr. Sukenik

47
heard over the radio that the UN had postponed its
decision for a day, he seized the last opportunity to
travel to nearby Bethlehem with the Armenian a few
hours before the outbreak of war.
While hour after hour went by, Dr. Sukenik sat
with the Armenian and some Arab merchants in a tum-
bledown building in Bethlehem and haggled at Oriental
length. Gradually the Arabs became less suspicious and
let Sukenik see at least two scrolls and a clay vessel.
Once again precious minutes passed. At last he had
progressed so far that he was allowed to take the scrolls
to Jerusalem for examination. While he breathlessly
compared the new scrolls with others to determine their
age and contents, he heard the news of the partitioning
of Palestine over the radio. The state of Israel was
founded, war began, the other scrolls were lost to him,
and Bethlehem became a part of Jordan.
Meanwhile the Syrian Metropolitan offered his
scrolls to the American Oriental Institute in the Jorda-
nian sector of Jerusalem. In February 1948 he told
the institute over the telephone that he had found some
old scrolls in the library of his monastery. Dr. Trever,
who was acting as director of the institute at the time,
showed interest, and the scrolls were brought to him
next day in an old chest. The first rapid comparison with
other old Hebrew manuscripts electrified Trever, for the
wri ting on the leather scrolls was even older. There be-
fore him was the oldest copy of the Book of Isaiah, cen-
turies older than the hitherto known texts. Trever was
given permission to take photocopies of the scrolls-and

48
only then did the Metropolitan admit that the scrolls
were not from his monastery, but had been found some-
where in a cave about a year before. The location of the
cave was still the secret of the Bedouins.
The Metropolitan took the scrolls away with him
and smuggled them into America, ostensibly to save
them from the hazards of war, but probably to sell them
there for a high price. When Sukenik heard about it,
he wrote in his diary: "The Jewish people have lost a
precious heritage."
But it was not lost. The Metropolitan could not find
a buyer. The photocopies taken by Trever had been pub-
lished, 50 that acquisition of the originals was not ab-
solutely imperative. Seven years later, in 1954, Suke-
nik's son, Yigael Yadin, who became famous for his
excavation of the mountain fortress of Massada, was
on a lecture tour of the United States. One day he re-
ceived a telephone call from a journalist, who told him
to read next day's Wall Street Journal. In it he found a
small unobtrusive advertisement saying that four Dead
Sea scrolls were for sale. Yadin at once made contact
with the Metropolitan's agent through intermediaries.
Neither knew who the other was. They agreed on a
price of a quarter of a million dollars, which Yigael Yadin
soon raised through friends and a guarantee from the
Israeli government.
On July 1, 1954, the four scrolls were taken from
the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York to the Israeli
Embassy in a large black chest. Seven years after their
discovery, the scrolls were back in Israel. Professor Su-

49
kenik never knew about it-he had died the year before
-and the Metropolitan did not find out to whom he
had sold the scrolls until a year later.
Let us go back to 1948. Neither Professor Sukenik
nor the American Oriental Institute had admitted know-
ing anything about the scrolls or that they were des-
perately looking for the caves in order to prove the
authenticity of the documents. But the American In-
stitute had photocopies of some of the scrolls and de-
cided to publish them. On April 11, 1948, a whole year
after their discovery, Millar Burrows, the director of
the institute, told the world at large of the discovery of
a manuscript of the Bible that was a thousand years
older than any previously known copy.
But owing to an editorial lapse, the report said that
the scrolls had been found in the Monastery of St. Mark
in Jerusalem. Sukenik knew better and so he wrote a
letter to the editor of the newspaper saying that the
scrolls had been found near the Dead Sea. Burrows read
this correction by chance in the Rome Daily American
of April 28 on his way back to the United States, when
his ship docked in Genoa, and he also learned for the
first time that not only his institute, but also the Hebrew
University, barely two miles away, possessed parts of
the scrolls. But he was still better off than Lancaster
Harding, the director of the Jordanian Government
Archeological Office in Amman. Not until November
1948, when he read about it in a scholarly journal, did
he learn that one of the most astonishing discoveries
ever had been made in his country eighteen months
before.

50
 There was no question of keeping things secret now i
the Dead Sea scrolls had hit the headlines, although no
one knew where the cave was.
Lancaster Harding visited the Monastery of St.
Mark, hoping to find out the location of the cave. Risk-
ing death from the fire of Israeli snipers, he reached the
monastery in the narrow lanes of the old part of Jeru-
salem. In the meantime the Metropolitan had been told
the exact location by Kando and had secretly organized
an illegal search of the cave. By chance Harding met an
old monk in the monastery whom he questioned about
the matter and who, before anyone could stop him,
described the approximate site of the discovery. The
cave ought to be somewhere south of the spot where
the road from Jerusalem forks to Jericho and the Dead
Sea in the Jordanian depression.
There were hundreds of caves in the porous stone
of this region and it seemed unlikely that anyone would
rediscover a specific cave that Mohammed had only
stumbled on by chance after two thousand years. Lan-
caster Harding tried to recruit Bedouins for the search,
but they refused for fear they might become involved
with the police.
And so it was that a Belgian observer for the United
Nations set out on a seemingly hopeless search for the
cave in January 1949, in the company of two soldiers
of the Arab Legion and a Jordanian captain. After three
days the cave was rediscovered for the second time in
two years.
It lay between the mouth of the Jordan and the
spring of Ain Feshka, not far from the ruins of Qumran,

51
a settlement on the shores of the Dead Sea that has been
abandoned for centuries. They found remains and frag-
ments of the scrolls and were able to determine from
other finds that the scrolls and earthenware vessels
dated to a period close to the birth of Christ and were
not, as many people suspected, from a medieval hiding
place.
But who had hidden the scrolls? Only two scrolls
reproduced an Old Testament text. They were two dif-
ferent, well-preserved copies of the Book of Isaiah, one
published by Sukenik, the other by Burrows. As both
scrolls tally with the text of Isaiah that we know, even
down to a few unimportant variations, the theologians
happily accepted them as a confirmation of the Chris-
tian tradition and saw no need for any revision of Chris-
tian dogma or principles.
The other scrolls did not concern the theologians.
They were not biblical texts, but scriptures hitherto un-
known from any other translation or manuscript. There
were commentaries on the prophets Habakkuk, Micah,
and Zephaniah, and a scroll of hymns or psalms of
thanksgiving in which familiar quotations about await-
ing the end of the world were commented on. There
was mention of a Teacher of Righteousness and of the
Sons of Light, who had withdrawn into the desert, and
of the sons of the Sons of Darkness, who had been led
astray by froward priests. They were mainly apocalyptic
scriptures, whose authors could not be determined with
certainty. Nevertheless, it was remarkable that many
words and ideas from these unknown scrolls reap-
peared almost word for word in the New Testament.

52
 The decisive document that made identification pos-
sible was the so-called Manual of Discipline. Every-
thing that had previously only been known from the
descriptions of [osephus reappeared here, although not
word for word and with some variation of detail. The
Essenes' library had been found, but there was no trace
of an Essene monastery.
After the rediscovery of the cave, there was calm
again by the Dead Sea. The only visitors were the Taa-
mirah Bedouins, who, accompanied by their flocks,
made their way through the region in spring when the
mountain wilderness showed a trace of greenery. And
once again it was these Bedouins who discovered the
second cave in 1952. The haggling over every square
inch of the scrolls began again, and adventure stories
could be written about it. Then archeologists found a
third cave.
Next, two hundred caves were systematically ex-
amined, often at the risk of the searchers' lives. Within
a radius of a few miles round Qumran they found a
dozen more hiding places with scrolls, household uten-
sils, and coins. Some of the texts were written in secret
script; others were compilations of references to the
Messiah. The "New Covenant," which Luther trans-
lated as "New Testament," was also mentioned, and
there was constant reference to the Teacher of Righ-
teousness. (As many scrolls are hard to open, some of
the texts have not yet been deciphered.) Incidentally,
Qumran is a place that had already attracted the atten-
tion of archeologists in the last century. As the word
Qumran is pronounced by the Arabs like Gomorrah, and

53
both words have gmr (or qu-m-r-n) as their consonan-
tal stem, which is the only one that matters in Semitic
languages, scholars had the idea of looking for the bib-
lical Gomorrah there. (The modern view is that the
Gomorrah that perished by fire lies at the other end of
the Dead Sea near Sodom.)
Archeologists were stimulated to make these early
excavations by a ruined area-the name Kirbeth Qum-
ran means simply the ruins of Qumran - in which
scholars soon recognized the foundations of the walls
of a Roman castle that controlled the beginning of the
road to the western shore of the Dead Sea in a strate-
gically favorable spot. In other words, it was a strong-
hold similar to the fortress of Machaerus, on the
opposite shore, in which John the Baptist was held
prisoner by Herod.
When the first cave was rediscovered in 1949,
superficial digs were made in various parts of the ruined
area, but nothing special was found. Not until two
years later, at the end of 1951, did Lancaster Harding
of the Jordanian Government Archeological Office and
Pater de Vaux, director of the Dominican Archeologi-
cal-Theological Institute in Jerusalem, decide to exca-
vate at Qumran yet once more.
For five years, during the comparatively cool winter
months, they excavated at Kirbeth Qumran in a land-
scape of terrible solitude. They found a cemetery with
more than a thousand graves, in which only men were
buried. They found a room with more than a thousand
beakers, bowls, plates, and dishes, and next to it a large
refectory, in which the president's seat was marked by

54
tiles; they found workshops for artisans, cisterns, and
baths for ritual purification. They found a writing room
with a huge wooden table and two inkwells-the scrip-
torium in which the majority of the texts found in the
nearby caves were probably written. Coins and pot-
sherds found in the caves and at Qumran proved the
connection. The Essenes' monastery had been found.
Not far from the spot where John the Baptist, the
voice crying in the wilderness, preached repentance to
mankind and where Rabbi J. himself was baptized, not
far from the place where tradition has it that he with-
drew into the wilderness for forty days and forty nights
and was tempted, not far from Jericho, the oldest city
in the world and the first city that the children of Israel
conquered in the promised land after forty years of
wandering in the wilderness, not far from the place
where the patriarch Moses is buried, in the middle of a
landscape of terrible beauty, lies Qumran, the monas-
tery of the Essene monks. In this monastery, long be-
fore Rabbi J.'s birth, ideas were written down that
occurred later in his teaching and revolutionized the
world. Is Qumran the "cradle of Christianity"?

55
 Five
THE SONS OF LIGHT

ONCEPTS and ideas have their history, too.

When John the Baptist preached repentance in the wil-
derness because the kingdom of God was at hand, it
was not his own doctrine. As much as two hundred
years before him, especially devout Jews (the Hebrew
word for them is Chasidim, accent on the last syllable)
had believed that the end of the world and the kingdom
of God were near, for "there were evil people in Israel
at this time," it says in the First Book of Maccabees,
"who persuaded the people, saying, Let us make a cove-
nant with the heathen around us and accept their
religion; for we have had to suffer much since the day
when we separated from the heathen.":
The children of Israel had always suffered at the
hands of the heathens, i.e., those who were not Jews.
They got to know them as occupying powers. After the
captivity in Babylon came the Persian empire; after
the Persians, whom Alexander the Great defeated in
333 B.C., came the Greeks. When Alexander died, his
empire was divided up among the Diadochi after lengthy
struggles. At first it was the Ptolemies in Egypt who
drew the Jewish territory into their sphere of dominion.
In 200 B.C., the Syrian branch of the Diadochi, the
Seleucids, succeeded in taking over the power in [udaea,
When the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV ascended the

57
throne in 175 B.C. and installed a Greek cult in the
Temple at Jerusalem, the Jews rebelled. Under Judas
Maccabeus they fought against the heathens and their
Greek-influenced religions, whereas others, resigned
after centuries of foreign dominion, voted for accep-
tance of the foreign religions out of political oppor-
tunism.
The Chasidim protested against the sinfulness of
their day, and because they were persecuted they left
the villages and towns and retreated to the desert of
[udaea between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, where
they hid in caves.' They were the forerunners of the
Essenes. There they awaited the coming of the kingdom
of God, while leading lives of the strictest orthodoxy.
But while one group of Chasidim clung to their
expectation of the end in spite of all their disappoint-
ments, others became skeptical and separated from the
original movement. That gave them their name, for the
word pharisee means simply "separated one." Already
in the New Testament we can sense the skepticism of
the Pharisees when the coming of the kingdom is men-
tioned-and that is the reason why John the Baptist
attacked them so vehemently as a generation of vipers.
Kurt Schubert writes as follows: "The most important
element in the controversy between the newly arisen
Phariseeism and the priestly radicals of Qumran was
the preaching of the end of the world. The Pharisees
refused to recognize the various apocalyptic pronounce-
ments as inspired."?
That is why there are books in the Old Testament
"that are not considered equal to the Holy Scriptures

58
and are yet useful and good to read," as Luther defined
the Apocrypha, the Old Testament books which were
not accepted in the canon, the recognized list of gen-
uine books. They consist mainly of those books and
prophets who foretold the end of the world-the very
books and prophets that are constantly quoted in the
Essenes' scrolls.
So the Essenes had their own tradition in addition
to the canonical scriptures. Their canon was larger
than that of the Pharisees, enriched by those prophets
of the hope which the others had resigned themselves
to rejecting.
On the one hand the Chasidic Essenes were strictly
orthodox and so more Jewish than other Jews. They,
too, like the Sadducees, traced themselves back to
Zadok, the high priest, and their monastic life had a
markedly priestly orientation. On the other hand these
chosen among the chosen people had become cut off
from the tradition and development of [udaism down
the centuries owing to their fixation on a past historical
situation-the profanation of the temple in the time of
Antiochus. They were conservatives, rooted in their
own historical past, not that of the Jewish people.
To the Essenes the temple at Jerusalem was still
corrupted by sacrilege. They did not even turn toward
the temple to pray; in the temple the Sons of Darkness
reigned, but they, the Sons of Light, prayed in the op-
posite direction, toward the east, where the sun rose.
And so the Essenes gave themselves a name which
was based on a concept unknown to the rest of Judaism.
They called themselves the Sons of Light, who fought

59
against the froward priests and the Sons of Darkness.
The so-called War Scroll that was found in the first
cave describes in detail the struggle of the Sons of
Light at the end of time: "To the understanding: the
order of the war. The first engagement of the Sons of
Light against the Sons of Darkness ... when the Sons
of Light who are now in exile return from the 'desert
of the nations' to pitch camp in the desert of [udah.?"
The Manual of Discipline, the rules of the Essene
monks, also says that it is a duty: "to love all the Sons of
Light each according to his stake in the formal com-
munity of God; and to hate all the Sons of Darkness,
each one according to the measure of his guilt, which
God will ultimately requite.?"
Light and darkness are continually occurring as
antithetical synonyms for truth and godlessness: "The
origin of truth lies in the Fountain of Light and that of
perversity in the Wellspring of Darkness.?"
And even people who only remember the Bible
vaguely think that they are rereading it when it says in
the Manual of Discipline: "All that is and ever was
comes from a God of knowledge. Before things came
into existence, he determined the plan of them.?" This
verse in the Manual of Discipline comes immediately
before the passage in which the light is called the truth.
The celebrated mystical and mysterious prologue at the
beginning of the gospel according to S1. John uses very
similar language to express identical ideas: "In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning
with God. All things were made by him; and without

60
him was not any thing that was made. In him was
life; and the life was the light of men. And the light
shineth in the darkness; and the darkness compre-
hended it not.:"
Here the New Testament and the Essenes' secret
doctrine meet, here the faith of an orthodox Jewish sect
encounters the Jew who called his disciples children of
light and himself the light of the world.
Is Qumran the "cradle of Christianity" and is
Christianity nothing but the historical development of
the teaching of Chasidic hermits, who, angered by a
Seleucid king, vainly awaited the end of the world and
the coming of the Messiah in the desert? To put it
theologically, did Rabbi J. have a personal revelation,
or was he merely the skillful propagandist of a long-
established sect and its doctrine?
Until the Dead Sea scrolls were published in 1948
we could only speculate about this possibility. The
writings of the New Testament and the accounts of
[osephus and Philo were known. They suggested a con-
nection, but they did not prove anything.
That has changed since we have known the texts
of the Essene community by the Dead Sea. Now we
can compare individual sentences from different docu-
ments; we can put the New Testament alongside the
Essenes' texts and examine them.
Moreover, we know that the Essene texts are older
than the New Testament scriptures. That is proved by
comparing the characters, by the scientifically demon-
strable age of the scrolls, and especially by the fact that
Qumran was destroyed in the year 70, at the same

61
time as the temple in Jerusalem-the coins confirm this
-and that the accounts of the New Testament were not
finished until after the year 70.
Now if a comparison of New Testament and Qum-
ran manuscripts shows that not only a similarity but
also a direct dependence in individual words, ideas, and
doctrine exists-then no amount of pious faith and
counterargument is of any use. It is an undeniable fact
that Rabbi J. took over the Qumran doctrine, possibly
altering and concentrating it, but that he is not the
creator of the doctrine we ascribe to him.
The conceivable alternative explanation that it was
the evangelists and St. Paul who subsequently used
Qumran ideas and put them into Rabbi J.'s mouth,
does not improve matters. If we can still prove that
Christianity and its doctrine as expressed in the Bible
are Essene-inspired, it means merely that Christianity
does not stem from Rabbi J. but from later interpreters,
and so the dependence of the Christian faith on the
monks of Qumran must be equally admitted, unless we
decide to reject wholesale the finds of otherwise valid
scholarship.
So far I have mentioned only one-perhaps chance
-example of striking similarity, and I realize that the
reader will expect a number of other examples before
he can form an opinion. But I should say that it is only
the first of many which I shall quote later.
First we must ask ourselves whether the evangelists
-whatever their reasons may have been-say anything
to show that it was physically and geographically pos-
sible for Rabbi J. to have met the people from Qumran.

62
 We can read in Matthew and Mark that John the
Baptist appeared in the [udaean desert and baptized in
the Jordan and "there went out unto him all the land
of [udaea, and they of Jerusalem, and were all baptized
of him ... ."9 St. John describes the place more specifi-
cally as east of the Jordan near Bethabara (Bethany)."
Today a memorial church stands on this very spot
in the no-man's-land between Jordan and Israel, some
five miles east of Jericho and also some five miles from
the place where the Jordan flows into the Dead Sea. It
is the next place from which one can reach the Jordan
from Jerusalem. From Jerusalem one can see the Dead
Sea lying far below. If you stand on the hill beneath
which Jericho, the oldest city in the world with its leg-
endary walls, lies buried-and at one point you can
look back into the Stone Age down a shaft beside the
walls-then you look across the date palms of the oasis
of Jericho to the Jordan and the place where John bap-
tized people. Less than two hours on foot across dull
lifeless scree and you reach the place where the voice
crying in the wilderness preached, where today the
Jerusalem road leads through a ford to Bethany.
If you look out from Jericho to the opposite side,
your guidebook explains that there high up on the
mountainside is, according to tradition, the place where
Rabbi J. was tempted by the devil in solitude after his
baptism. That would mean that after his baptism he
must have hurried to Jericho and gone into the moun-
tainous wilderness on the far side of the town.
But if you stand on the site of Jericho and look
neither left at the Jordan nor right at the Mountain of

63
the Temptation, but straight ahead, you have the dull
gliHer of the Dead Sea ahead of you, framed by the
grayish-brown mountains of the [udaean desert. And
it is just there, behind the first mountain spurs on the
Dead Sea, remote from the world in a lifeless desert
and yet only ten miles away, that the Essene monastery
of Qumran stands. From Qumran you can see the site
where John baptized, and Machaerus, the fortress in
which he was beheaded. Now as in the past there is
nothing but desert in between, because there are no
springs. For centuries Bethany, Jericho, and Qumran
have been the only oases far and wide, and at the point
of intersection of the three towns lies the baptismal
site, close to the lowest point on the surface of the earth.
Why should not the place to which he withdrew
for forty days and forty nights have been near Qumran,
seeing that the hermit John would scarcely have lived
in a town like Jericho or Bethany, but might easily have
inhabited one of the caves around Qumran, for even a
hermit needs water occasionally?
I find it very odd that Rabbi J. came to the Jordan
simply to be baptized, summoned by John the Baptist's
call to repentance, and then went straight back to
Galilee, as suggested by the erroneous translation of
the "third day," on which he is supposed to have been
in Cana for the marriage.
There is yet another passage which generally passes
unnoticed because it seems to be only a minor detail
in a more important story. Unlike the other evangelists,
St. John tells us that Rabbi J. appointed his first dis-
ciples the day after his baptism in [udaea. In this story

64
there is a passage which could just as well have been
omitted, if we assume that it was only a matter of the
enrollment of the first disciples. It reads as follows:
"Again the day after, John stood and two of his dis-
ciples. And looking upon J. as he walked, he saith,
Behold the Lamb of God! And the two disciples heard
him speak, and they followed J.... Then J. turned, and
saw them following, and saith unto them, What seek
ye? They said unto him, Rabbi [which is to say, being
interpreted, Master], where dwellest thou? He saith
unto them, Come and see. They came and saw where
he dwelt, and abode with him that day: for it was about
the tenth hour."l1
In retrospect we may take it for a pleasant adorn-
ment-but the question is why on earth the first thing
that the two disciples asked, when they heard that the
Lamb of God was passing by, was where he lived. Or,
if we work from the theory that the evangelists subse-
quently invented material that had no foundation in
fact, what made John mention (but not explain) an
unnecessary detail of that kind, if it did not have a
special meaning? Might we not have expected a sen-
tence such as "And the three of them walked together
to Jericho"? And the question is not answered; if any-
thing it is further obscured by the time mentioned,
lithe tenth hour" (4 P.M.). This time reference may have
had a meaning for initiates. For example, the fact that
strangers to Qumran were admitted to the evening
meal, but not to the midday meal, as [osephus says.
This time would have little meaning if it referred to a
visit to Rabbi J. in a secular district such as Jericho.

65
Apart from tradition, what is there to say that Rabbi J.
did not live in one of the caves in or around Qumran?
There is another point. When the Rabbi was in the
wilderness, "[he] was with wild beasts; and the angels
ministered unto him.?" In various languages, Greek
for example, messenger and angel are the same word,
and the Essenes had a characteristic "angelic doctrine"
that had to be kept secret. What is there against Rabbi
J. having spent his "novitiate" in a cave outside Qum-
ran, as [osephus described postulants doing? Then the
"angels" would have been messengers from Qumran.
Since the Essenes are not mentioned in the New Testa-
ment for a definite reason, this brief reference to un-
specified "angels" could be left in, in spite of all the
other "editing": "He who hath ears to hear, let him
hear."
I admit that one has to have seen with one's own
eyes how close together the baptismal site and Qumran
are in the terrifying expanse of barren mountains to
be able to connect them with an inner logic that goes
beyond the purely geographic evidence. Nevertheless,
why precisely Qumran and not Jericho, Bethany, or a
place on the banks of the Jordan?
The answer is again geographical, but this time
with a "theological" justification as well. It depends on
how we accentuate one particular sentence in the Bible
so as to extract a quite different meaning from it.

66
 Six
JOHN THE BAPTIST

HE account of John the Baptist and the Rabbi's

baptism is one of the few passages in the New Testa-
ment where the four evangelists tell the same story,
although with considerable variation. (The only mate-
rial common to all four gospels consists of J.'s baptism,
the number of disciples, the story of the passion, but
not the Last Supper, one "miracle"-the feeding of the
four or five thousand-and the psychologically inter-
esting information that the Rabbi could not perform
miracles in his home town.)
John the Baptist plays a leading part in the Rabbi's
biography. J. receives his ministry at the time of his
baptism by John. It is the Baptist who, according to
one account, calls him Messiah, and according to an-
other suspects him to be the Messiah and lets him be
questioned by his disciples. Rabbi J. does not begin
his mission until after the Baptist's arrest.
The Baptist was looked on by his contemporaries
as the reincarnation of Elijah, for in the Book of
Malachi we find the sentence: "Behold, I will send you
Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and
dreadful day of the Lord.": John the Baptist, whom we
also know as "the voice of one crying in the wilder-
ness," preached this day of the Lord, as Matthew, for
example, describes him:

67
 "In these days came John the Baptist, preaching in
the wilderness of [udaea, And saying, Repent ye: for
the kingdom of heaven is at hand. For this is he that
was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying, The voice
of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of
the Lord, make his paths straight.':"
The connection is illuminating. The man who sum-
mons men to repentance in the wilderness is the voice
of one crying in the wilderness. And as the Baptist was
considered to be the Rabbi's forerunner, it is perfectly
logical for him to summon everyone to prepare for the
coming of God's kingdom. Normally we link this
preparation with baptism; it is the way of preparation.
But it is possible to interpret the biblical passage about
the preacher in the wilderness differently, as Shalom
Ben Chorin wri tes:
Although he is admittedly described as the voice
11

of one crying in the wilderness (Matthew 3:2; Luke

3:4), there is an error in translation here that goes back
to the Septuagint [the Greek translation of the Bible].
John is supposed to appear here as the fulfilment of
Isaiah 40:3, the first chapter of the scripture of con-
solation coming from the Babylonian captivity. But
following the punctuation of the cantilenas of the
Masoretic text," we really ought to read this passage
as follows: Voice of one crying:
In the wilderness
Make a way for the Lord.
Make straight in the desert
A highway for our God !"4

68
 Thus the same words suddenly yield a completely
new meaning. The general summons to prepare the
way of the Lord is made specific. The way is not to be
made just anywhere, but in the wilderness.
If we look up Isaiah in the Old Testament, now
that our curiosity has been aroused, we find that all the
old editions, beginning with Luther, read "the voice
of one crying in the wilderness." The newly revised
Lutheran Bible of 1964 is the first to render the passage
in Isaiah 40:3, correctly:
"A voice cries: Prepare the way of the Lord in the
'Id
Wl erness .... 11

Although the corresponding passage in the New

Testament is a literal quotation from Isaiah, the revised
Lutheran Bible still retains the same mistranslation in
its version of the gospels:
"The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare
ye the way of the Lord....115
According to the now correct translation of the Old
Testament, the way of the Lord is defined (it is to be
built in the wilderness). According to the inaccurate
New Testament translation, the Baptist is described
(the voice of one crying in the wilderness). This is not
the result of chance or accident.
When the Old Testament was translated into Greek
by seventy translators-the Latin word for seventy,
septuaginta, gave this edition its name-250 years be-
fore these events on the orders of an Egyptian king,
the second filter began to function and inevitably

69
altered and often distorted the original ideas, for every
translation implies a transference into a new world of
ideas and experience.
And the writers of the gospels, which were finished
more than a generation after the death of Rabbi L no
longer lived in immediate expectation of the Messiah.
For them the Messiah had already come; he had entered
Jerusalem humbly on an ass. The idea that the way of
the Lord had to be prepared in the wilderness and
nowhere else no longer had any meaning for them. Nor
had he come to them in the wilderness. The desert
religion of Moses had emigrated from Palestine in the
form of Christianity to countries where deserts were
not a characteristic feature. Moses may have fourid the
God of the old covenant in the wilderness, but the new
covenant was sealed in Jerusalem.
50 the message of John the Baptist with its specific
reference to time and place became the timelessly true
message of the coming of the Lord. The process of
idealizing the message and the symbolization of mis-
understood references began because historical reality
had been forgotten.
In retrospect everything was referred to Christ,
because other references did not seem to make sense.
50, as the Hebrew text has no punctuation marks, the
translators transferred the emphasis from the coming
of the Lord in the wilderness to the preacher who lived
in the wilderness. From being a Jewish sect in Palestine,
Christianity began to become a world religion. The
kingdom of God could begin anywhere, not only in
the desert of the detested murderers of God. The trans-

70
lators mistranslated because they were thinking in
terms of their time and their world, and not in those of
the time and world of Rabbi J.
In Rabbi J.'s world there was nothing new or spe-
cial about political malcontents and religious ascetics-
their motives were often indistinguishable-withdraw-
ing into the desert.
The chosen people's tradition of staying in the wil-
derness went much further back than the Chasidim.
After the exodus from Egypt, the people of Israel had
become God's people in the wilderness. And the man
who has never been in the rocky [udaean desert or the
Negev will find it hard to understand the irrational
forces that the disturbing solitude and stillness of such
a landscape can arouse. Not without reason did the first
Christian monks seek God in the solitude of the desert.
Moreover, the situation of Qumran and the bap-
tismal site in the [udaean desert is not fortuitous. From
Qumran you can see Mount Nebo, the mountain from
which, according to the Bible, Moses saw the promised
land he himself was never to set foot in. Close to
Qumran on the road to Jericho, legend locates the tomb
of Moses, with whom God had spoken and made a
covenant, the God from whom the people of Israel
constantly backslid, beginning with the golden calf
and continuing down to the time of the Maccabees,
when foreign influences and foreign religions came
into the country again under the Diadochi, who ruled
after King Alexander of Macedon.
When the orthodox Chasidim went out into the
[udaean desert to follow the law of Moses to the letter,

71
they sought out the very place in the vast desert region
between Beersheba and Jericho which was traditionally
doubly connected with Moses, the founder of their
faith. On the borders of the promised land that Moses
saw, and near Jericho, the first town that the children
of Israel conquered, they founded the monastery of
Qumran in order to await the new covenant with God
the Father there, as it says in the Essene Manual of
Discipline. It was the same new covenant which Rabbi
J. announced at the Last Supper and Luther translated
as "New Testament."
We who were born later and are members of an
alien culture forget all too easily, aided and abetted by
theologians and priests, that the new covenant did not
mean a new religion. The first Christians continued to
pray in the temple at Jerusalem and required Rabbi J.'s
followers to be circumcised and to follow the Mosaic
law.
By the new covenant the Jews understood that
God would embrace his chosen people again and would
lead them to independence from their subjection to the
occupying power, for the chosen people saw them-
selves not only as a religious but also as a political and
national community. Whenever things went badly for
the Jewish people, as in the Babylonian captivity,
prophets such as Isaiah preached the savior from
slavery, the Messiah, the one promised by God who
was to be the "King of the Jews" and "Prince of Peace."
As far as the Jewish people were concerned, the savior
did not come to free them from sin, but to liberate
them from foreign domination. When the God of

72
Abraham, Isaac, and [acob helped his people, it meant
that he had already forgiven the sin of apostasy.
The people from Qumran also believed in the
Messiah, the savior from subjection to Rome, and
many scholars think that the "Teacher of Righteous-
ness" mentioned so often in the Dead Sea scrolls was
one of the sect's first failed Messiahs.
In the Essenes' view, the temple religion was cor-
rupt. They did not expect the Messiah and the new
covenant with Yahweh to come from Jerusalem, but
from among themselves, the Sons of Light, who had
been preparing themselves for the coming of the Lord
since the days of the Maccabees by leading a monastic
life. Here, on the spot where Moses had seen the
Promised Land, he would appear and conclude a new
covenant.
And that is literally what we find in the Essenes'
Manual of Discipline. To bring about the coming of
God's kingdom, "they are to be kept apart from any
consort with froward men, that they may indeed go
into the wilderness to prepare the way, i.e., do what
Scripture enjoins when it says: 'Prepare in the wilder-
ness the way ... make straight in the desert a highway
for our God.' 116
And that is exactly what John the Baptist did and
preached. The only thing is that now we understand
what he meant. The Messiah was not to be expected
from among the sacrilegious priests of corruption and
the Children of Darkness, but from those who served
the Lord in the wilderness, the Children of Light. That
is the Baptist's real message. If Yahweh was to help his

73
people, it was only because men like the Essenes, living
apart from the froward men, followed the true Mosaic
law. The renewed covenant and with it the savior and
promised redeemer could only come from those who
kept the old covenant. God was not preparing his king-
dom in Jerusalem, but in the wilderness.
So was John the Baptist an Essene?
Millar Burrows, who played a decisive part in the
publication of the scrolls but finds it quite painful to
have to acknowledge similari ties between the people
of Qumran and Christianity, has to admit that there
are certainly "many points in which John's ideas re-
semble those to be found in the Dead Sea scrolls. Like
the Essenes he devoted himself to the task of preparing
the way of the Lord in the wilderness. His baptism of
repentance may have had a connection with the ritual
baths of the Qumran sect; he emphasized as does the
Manual of Discipline that without previous spiritual
purification a bath in water cannot redeem a sin.
"Parallels have also been found between the Mes-
sianic expectations of John and those in the Dead Sea
scrolls. His prophecy that the man who came after him
would execute judgment by fire is undoubtedly related
in some way with Zarathustra's idea of a world con-
flagration, which would finally melt the mountains
and pour forth over the earth like a river, and this
concept is vividly depicted in one of the Psalms of
Thanksgiving-a Qumran scroll-in the images of the
floods of Belial which will destroy even the foundations
of the moun tains in their flames. The concept of a
Messianic baptism by the Holy Ghost also occurs in

74
the scrolls. The statement in the Manual of Discipline
that at the end of time God will purify man by pouring
forth the spirit of truth on him is reminiscent of
John's teaching that the Messiah would baptize his
people with the Holy Chost.?"
That sounds very cautious, and Millar Burrows is
tormented by the very idea that it is "not at all im-
probable that John knew about the ideas of the Qum-
ran sect.:" There is no need for anyone who has seen
the barren plain that lies between the oases of Qumran
and Jericho to be so circumspect.
The Viennese Orientalist Kurt Schubert wrote in his
book The Dead Sea Community: "The place where
John baptised in the Jordan, just before it flows into the
Dead Sea, was not far from the monastery of Qumran,
which was in its second flowering at the time. Given
such a state of affairs, it is inconceivable that there was
no contact between the two."
However there is not a single document that men-
tions John's membership in the Qumran sect, and we
can only say that his connection with the Sons of Light
seems possible geographically and probable through
the similarities in doctrine. But in Luke, quite unex-
pectedly after Zacharias, John's father, utters his song
of praise, in which light and darkness are mentioned,
comes an observation that we now read with fresh
attention: "And the child grew, and waxed strong in
spirit, and was in the deserts till the day of his shewing
unto Israel." There are two remarkable things here:
his presentation to the people of Israel ready to start
his work, as if it had been secret before, and the word

75
"deserts." Zacharias, John's father, was a priest in the
temple at Jerusalem, Le., he was one of the froward
priests. Luke's account of the remarkable episode says
that Zacharias was dumb until his son's birth, that he
called him John, meaning "God is merciful," although
none of his kindred was called John, that he praised
God in unusual language, and that then John grew up
in the desert.
We know that Nicodemus, the ruler from Jeru-
salem (John 3), also sympathized with Rabbi J., as did
[oseph of Arimathaea, the counselor, who buried him.
In [osephus's account of the Essenes I find: "Scorning
wedlock, they select other men's children while still
pliable and teachable, and fashion them after their
own pattern."
If we assume that John the Baptist was brought up
at Qumran, that he summoned people to repentance
and baptism (in the Essene sense) by the Jordan (as we
know), that he was great enough to recognize another
man as the "Lamb of God" and Messiah, one the
latchet of whose shoes he was unworthy to unloose,
would this Messiah have been a complete unknown who
came to the Jordan by chance, perhaps even a Son of
Darkness, who had not prepared the way of the Lord
in the desert of Qumran? If John the Baptist, who was
connected with the Essenes, recognized in Rabbi J. the
Messiah for whom the way had to be prepared in the
wilderness and nowhere else, should not the teaching
of the Essenes be recognizable in Rabbi J.'s teaching
through all the filters?

76
 Seven
LUNAR CALENDAR
AND LAST SUPPER

BOUT 950 A.D.,Al Qirqisani, a Jew, wrote

that there was a certain sect that hid its books in caves.
Later two Mohammedan authors refer to it, and one
of them, Al Biruni, says that these cave people, who
lived before Christ, were reputed to have had a strange
calendar. The Sabbath was not the day of rest, but the
night between the third and fourth days, i.e., the night
of our Wednesday, from which "they counted the
days and months-and the great cycle of festivals be-
gins then, for it was on the fourth day that God created
the stars. Accordingly the Passover began on Wednes-
day.:"
This way of counting is obviously based on the idea
that itdid not make sense to talk about days and nights
before the stars were created on the fourth day of crea-
tion. On the other hand, the Jewish way of reckoning
the Sabbath is based on the idea that God rested on the
seventh day. Consequently the Jewish day of rest is on
Saturday-from the Christian point of view-or, more
accurately, since in the East the day is reckoned from
the onset of darkness, from Friday night to Saturday
night.
This remarkable way of reckoning the days of the
week turns up again in the so-called Damascus (or
Zadokite) Document. It was found in the synagogue

77
of the Jewish Karaite community in Old Cairo and
gets its name from an emigration to Damascus. The
document, discovered in the last century, had no paral-
lels in Jewish literature. It mentioned a Teacher of
Righteousness, a new covenant, and a froward priest.
When the Dead Sea scrolls were deciphered,
scholars found the parallels. Parts of the Damascus
Document were copied by the Essene monks and kept
in Cave 6, although many details did not tally exactly
with the teachings of the Essenes. In other words, the
Damascus Document is part of the Essene library, for
the strange way of reckoning the days of the week also
recurs in the texts that were found by the Dead Sea."
Whereas the other Jews-even today-use the lunar
calendar, in which the months are shorter than in the
solar calendar, it was very important for the Essenes at
Qumran, "neither [to] advance the statutory times,
nor [to] postpone the prescribed seasons or Festivals.':"
As proof of their conviction, the Essenes had copied
out the relevant passages in the Old Testament. They
were rediscovered in the caves, for example the pas-
sage from the Book of Jubilees where it says that,
"there will be people who observe the moon exactly;
for this corrupts the time and advances it by ten days
year after year. So for them years will come when they
mistake the Day of Atonement and make it an ordinary
day, and an impure day into a feast day .... So I order
thee and testify so that thou mayest testify unto them;
for after thy death thy children shall act perversely by
not observing a year of 364 days, and so they will con-

78
fuse new moon and time and Sabbath and feast
days...."4
This observation is correct, for the extra six hours
in the solar year can easily be corrected every four
years by the insertion of a single day. With the lunar
calendar, on the other hand, the corrections are com-
plicated and only possible after such lengthy periods
of time that in the interim whole days get displaced.
The lunar calendar gains eleven days on the solar
calendar in a single year, so that with the passage of
time whole months have to be inserted-in order to
make the spring new moon coincide with the Sabbath
again, for example.
As the Essenes were especially strict about keeping
the Mosaic law and the Jewish feast days, it must also
have been important for them to keep the calendar as
accurate as possible. A festival celebrated on the
wrong day was no festival. It can be proved from the
Dead Sea scrolls that the Essenes did, in fact, observe
the solar calendar.
In the "War Scroll:" the number of fathers of the
community corresponding to the number of weeks in
the solar calendar is given as fifty-two and the number
of major officials as twenty-six, i.e., half of fifty-two.
Thus every major official would have to serve for one
week twice a year, whereas the temple at Jerusalem
had only twenty-four major officials in accordance
with the length of the lunar year. So it can be stated
with certainty: "In the temple at Jerusalem the lunar
calendar was observed, among the Qumran Essenes

79
the solar calendar. Consequently they had a feast day
when the others had a weekday.:"
But what has this got to do with Rabbi L whose
shadowy biography we are trying to illuminate?
Whereabouts in the gospels is there the slightest men-
tion of lunar and solar calendars, 50 that we can
establish a link between him and the Dead Sea sect
from another point of view? Where does it say that
the Rabbi counted the days of the week from Wednes-
day like the Essenes, so that the Sabbath fell on a
different day from that in the Jerusalem calendar?
There are two allusions to it, one direct, the other
indirect. The indirect allusion is connected with the
frequency with which Rabbi J. performed cures on the
Sabbath, although the rule against healing on the day
of rest could be broken only in cases of mortal danger,
and among the Essenes, not even then.' If Rabbi J. did
not intend to annul one jot or tit tie of the law, it sounds
unlikely that he would have performed forbidden ac-
tions on the Sabbath, even if it was made for man and
not vice versa. This favors the interpretation that it was
not a Sabbath to Rabbi J. and that according to his
reckoning he was healing on a weekday, although it
was a holy day to the indignant Pharisees.
Because we have no idea how strict the Sabbath law
was, we do not find anything unusual about the Rabbi
walking through the cornfields with his disciples on a
Sabbath-in other words, taking a country walk out-
side the town." That was quite out of the question on
a Sabbath, for one of the Sabbath commandments laid
down that people were allowed to circulate only within

80
the town limits, or at the most allowed to go a thousand
cubits (about fifteen hundred feet) outside them, as the
Damascus Document prescribes. Here, too, it seems
obvious to assume that it was not a Sabbath in the
Rabbi's view, but was one according to the Pharisees'
reckoning, and that they at once attacked him for that
reason.
But there is also a crucial point in Rabbi J.' s life
that can be explained only by the Essenes' calendar and
provides a direct allusion. It is the date of the Last
Supper. Millar Burrows sums up the problem as fol-
lows: "The difficulty consists in reconciling the ac-
counts of the first three gospels with St. John's. The
Passover meal was held on the night of 14th Nisan,
since the day was reckoned from nightfall to nightfall.
According to the synoptic gospels J.' s Last Supper was
a passover meal on the night of 14th Nisan and he was
crucified on 15th Nisan. In the gospel according to St.
John, he was crucified on 14th Nisan.... 119
This reckoning has led some scholars to claim that
the fourth evangelist had absolutely no idea of Jewish
usage and customs, and that consequently he was
probably not a Jew, but a Greek, or at least an author
who was under Hellenistic influences, which would
also tally with St. John's conspicuous anti-Semitism.
If Rabbi J. wanted to celebrate the Passover meal, he
could only do so on the right date, because before then
there was no unleavened bread, without which the
Seder night, the night of the Passover feast, could not
be celebrated.
If, on the other hand, we rely on the chronology of

81
Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we get into difficulties with
the dates, as Shalom Ben Chorin has shown: "If he is
supposed to have been arrested by the Jewish authori-
ties on this night, after the feast (i.e., on the Jerusalem
temple's Sabbath), it would have been inconceivable
for the trial to have taken place in the house of
Caiaphas, the high priest, on this holiest of holy nights,
for J. to have been handed over to Pilate on the morn-
ing of the feast, and to have been crucified on the first
day of the Passover festival. Moreover the gospels
keep on saying that everything had to be done quickly
because of the approaching Sabbath, but never men-
tion that the feast day would be profaned by a trial,
execution, and burial.
"Anyone who is familiar with Jewish law and cus-
toms at once feels that all this is a sheer impossibility.
If J. had been arrested on the Seder night, he would
have been held in custody until after the feast days,
and all the rest would have taken place afterward ...
the obvious inconsistency has only been solved today,
for as Hermann Raschke so rightly says, 'everything is
different after Qumran.' We may assume here that J.,
who was openly opposed to the Pharisees and Sad-
ducees, and presumably had contacts with the Qumran
sect through his rabbi, John the Baptist, used the Qum-
ran solar calendar, so that his Seder feast took place
one day earlier than that of the official priesthood in
Jerusalem.?"
If we base ourselves on the reckoning of the fourth
evangelist and consequently on the Qumran calendar,

82
Rabbi J. could still have been judged, crucified, and
buried before the Israelites' normal date for the Pass-
over. Any other reckoning either disregards the strict
Jewish Sabbath customs or tries to distort the true
state of affairs, like the synoptic gospels, which unani-
mously write: " . . . on the first day of the feast of un-
leavened bread," and 50 get the reckoning wrong.
But if Rabbi J. celebrated the Seder meal (the Last
Supper) before the Jerusalem Seder night, he must
have had great difficulty as a stranger in obtaining not
only unleavened bread, but also the necessary ritual
utensils. For the law demands that on the night before
the Passover feast all the everyday pots, plates, and
utensils be exchanged for the kosher Passover utensils
-a circumstance that even today compels every Jew
and every hotel under kosher management to have en-
tirely separate cooking and eating utensils ready for
this one week and, in hotels at least, to exchange them
in the presence of a rabbi.
SoRabbi J. could not simply go into the first inn he
came across and order the Seder feast. The Passover
utensils had not yet been brought and could not be
brought, since nonkosher food was still being eaten-a
fact that seems quite unimportant to a Western Chris-
tian, but is of the utmost significance to a Jew, because
the only way in which he can express his faith is by
observing the law.
Thus the premise for an earlier Seder feast based
on the Qumran calendar was that in Jerusalem, too,
there lived Essenes, who had already prepared every-

83
thing, for only the Essenes, who celebrated their Sab-
bath earlier than the other Jews, could accept J. and his
disciples at the Seder feast. So what we learn about in
Sunday school as a miraculous prophecy by Our Lord
suddenly becomes nothing more than the passing on of
an Essene address. When the disciples ask where they
are to prepare the Passover meal, J. answers: "Go ye
into the city, and there shall meet you a man bearing a
pitcher of water: follow him. And wheresoever he shall
go in, say ye to the goodman of the house, The Master
saith, Where is the guest-chamber, where I shall eat
the passover with my disciples? And he will shew you
a large upper room furnished and prepared: there make
ready for us.?"
Without reference to the Essenes this episode
would be so banal that one could not help wondering
why the evangelists found it worth mentioning at all.
In later ages people no longer understood it and inter-
preted it as an example of the Rabbi's prophetic gifts.
The filter of accidental incomprehension obscured its
true meaning.
Two other details also rapidly lost their meaning
for non-Iewish Christians, because they did not differ-
entiate between the various Jewish traditions.
For example we find it quite normal for Rabbi J. to
have eaten the Last Supper with his twelve disciples.
But according to Jewish custom-even in those days-
women and members of the family partook of the meal,
just as Christmas is not an exclusively male feast with
us. Several passages in the New Testament tell us that

84
Jesus was in the company of women. Women were
present at the crucifixion (according to the accounts,
even his own mother) ; women were also the first to go
to the tomb.
Why were these women not present at this im-
portant meal? Shalom Ben Chorin writes: "The fact
that only the twelve disciples took part in the meal, in
accordance with the Qumran rules, also suggests the
influence of Qumran on J.'s last Seder in Jerusalem.?"
According to these rules, only members of the Essene
group were allowed to partake of the ritual meals-and
membership was confined to men."
In the Manual of Discipline of the Essenes, the rule
governing meals is followed by another rule: "This is
the rule governing public sessions. The priests are to
occupy the first place. The elders are to come second,
and the rest of the people are to take their places ac-
cording to their respective ranks... .1114
In connection with this, there is a passage in the
New Testament where the disciples quarrel about who
has precedence over the others. It comes exactly where
one would expect, at the beginning of the account of
the Last Supper: "And there was also a strife among
them, which of them should be accounted the
greatest.'?"
Even the fourth evangelist, who says nothing about
a Last Supper in the sense that the synoptic gospels do,
introduces the washing of feet at this point. As with
the other evangelists, it serves to put a new interpreta-
tion on precedence: "If I then, your Lord and Master,

85
have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one
another's feet .... Verily, verily, I say unto you, The
servant is not greater than his Lord.... "16

Obviously for St. John the Seder meal took place so

normally according to the rules for the feast that he
does not even mention the two blessings that are usual
when breaking bread and handing around the cup of
wine. Breaking bread and handing around the cup of
wine were and still are part and parcel of the Seder
feast and, down to the individual words that are
spoken on these occasions in memory of the exodus
from Egypt, are nothing more than the normal unfold-
ing of the feast that is celebrated year after year." But
we Western successors of a Jewish sect look on it as
something special, the "institution of a sacrament."
What is really strange, the different date for the Last
Supper, the all-male assembly and the quarrel about
seating arrangements, we accept without comment be-
cause we know no better. In reality what we take for
granted is the strange thing, namely what leads back
into the past behind Rabbi J., whereas we are accus-
tomed to look on him as the beginning of the new. It
is just the same with his teaching.

86
 Eight
THE POOR IN SPIRIT

HERE are passages in the Bible that remain mean-

ingless even in the most accurate translation, such as
the sentence about the salt that loses its savor, that
"becomes stupid," as Luther translates it, and is cast
out.' Salt cannot lose its savor; if it does it is not salt.
It seems probable that J. is using a quite different kind
of simile that we no longer understand, just as the
statement that everyone shall be "salted with fire'" ob-
viously comes from a world whose mental imagery was
quite different from ours.
The first beatitude from the Sermon on the Mount
in Matthew is also one of these unintelligible biblical
passages.
Luther translates it literally: "Blessed are they who
are spiritually poor, for the kingdom of heaven is
theirs."? A more recent German Catholic edition trans-
lates equally correctly and literally, but in the opposite
sense: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven.:"
Both versions attempt to link the word poor with
the word pneuma or spiritus in an intelligible way.
The result in Luther is people who are religiously
lacking; in the other, which is equally unlikely, people
who are lacking in courage. Since the beatitudes as a
whole console the underprivileged, both versions sound

87
right. But why was something as valuable as the king-
dom of heaven promised precisely to them? Should we
not assume that the first beatitude states the general
theme?
But whereas all the other beatitudes are worded
clearly and intelligibly, the first one remains obscure
and ambiguous, so that even serious modern transla-
tions of the Bible offer increasingly fantastic interpre-
tations that throw accuracy to the winds. The official
New English Bible of 1961 understands the poverty
financially and makes the spirit knowledge: "How blest
are they who know that they are poor, the kingdom of
heaven belongs to thern.:" The NT 68-the Narratives,
Letters and Testimony of the New Testament in Mod-
ern German also puts an economic interpretation on it:
"Happy are they who rejoice in being poor: the king-
dom of God belongs to theml'" The New Testament for
Men of Our Time (another German edition) simply
does not understand the verse and says: "God loves
men who beg for the spirit as beggars a gift, to them
the kingdom is allotted.:"
None of the modern translations asks whether the
concept of pauperes spiritu has any parallels in litera-
ture or whether it has a history from which the hidden
meaning could be clearly interpreted. As these parallels
do exist and as we do know the history of this concept,
it borders on dishonesty and deliberate suppression of
the historical truth when theologians, clergymen, and
biblical institutes behave as if they knew better out of
conservative stubborness or Occidental arrogance.
Perhaps one has to be a Jew like Shalom Ben Chorin

88
to say the obvious, because, unlike the Christians, he is
not abandoning any cherished but deluded ideas:
"Who are the poor in spirit or the spiritually poor?
Are they the intellectually retarded? Is this a glorifica-
tion of simplicity, naivete, or even stupidity? Is this
verse a consolation for the uneducated as opposed to
the haughty scribes?" That might be a more feasible
assumption, but a glance at the Dead Sea scrolls gives
a different and more reliable answer. Here, in the
Qumran sect, we learn about the concept of aniye
haruach, those who remained poor for the spirit's sake.
These are the people who put into practice the Francis-
can ideal of poverty centuries before Francis of Assisi,
who renounced worldly possessions so as to be able
to devote themselves entirely to the spirit.
It becomes clear from 1.'s parables that he shared
the Qumran sect's contempt for earthly goods. "For
what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole
world, and lose his own soul?" (Matthew 16:26.) "It
is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle,
than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."
(Matthew 19:24.) "Lay not up for yourselves treas-
ures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt ...
but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven." (Mat-
thew 6:19-20.)
It would be possible to quote many of L's words,
or words attributed to him, which express the same
idea. The spiritually poor, with whose beatitude the
Sermon on the Mount begins, are, then, those who
remained poor deliberately in order to prepare them-
selves for the spirit, the spirit of God, in the knowledge

89
that all kinds of sin shall be forgiven except the sin
against the Holy Ghost (Matthew 12:31).9
Kurt Schubert of the Viennese Institute for [udaism
confirms this in his book The Dead Sea Community:
"The man who is poor in spirit is neither a pauper nor
a fool. The same conception of poor is also found in
the Qumran texts. The community called itself a com-
munity of the poor, and the members called themselves
poor for the sake of the spirit, poor in the expectation
of grace, and poor in expectation of thy (i.e., God's)
salvation.?"
And even Millar Burrows, professor at Yale Uni-
versity, who has written several hundred pages trying
to show the differences between Christianity and Qum-
ran, has to admit that "Many of the contacts between
J.'s sayings and the Dead Sea scrolls are in the area
of moral teaching. Especially striking are the parallels
in the Sermon on the Mount. ... There is a text from
the Cave 4 containing a series of beatitudes beginning
with the word 'blessed,' like those of Matthew 5:3 ff.fIl1
In this way the celebrated beatitudes of the Sermon
on the Mount, which many look on as the epitome of
Christian consolation, regain their real meaning. Like
the parables with their concealed meaning, like the
allusions to the Sons of Light and of Darkness, like the
date of the Last Supper, the beatitudes can be under-
stood only in their original sense when seen from the
Qumran point of view. They, too, are codes for the
initiate, not glad tidings for everyone.
The kingdom of heaven was not a universal prize
for everyone; it was reserved for the Essenes, the

90
people who professed the true faith, who introduced
communal property and renounced riches, who kept
the 613 commandments and prohibitions of the Mosaic
law, who observed the rites of purification and kept
the secrets of the new covenant.
That and nothing else is the meaning of the first
beatitude. Any other interpretation contradicts what
J. meant and said here, however Christian it may sound
to our ears. What matters is not what theologians have
made out of it for two millennia, but what was actually
meant. The other six beatitudes do not introduce any-
thing that had not already been mentioned by [osephus
and Philo as characteristic of the Essenes, and the
phrase about those who hunger and thirst after righ-
teousness and the consolation for those who are per-
secuted for the sake of righteousness at once evoke the
memory of the "Teacher of Righteousness" whom the
Essene community revered.
It may be just coincidence that the passage about
the light of the world comes immediately after the
beatitudes in Matthew, and that the "Sons of Light"
recur over and over again in the scrolls. It may also be
a coincidence that Matthew then adds the passage in
which Rabbi J., in the Essene manner, intensifies the
law of Moses with his "But I say unto you," rather
than transcends it, as we in the West think. But I claim
that even the skeptic can no longer call it a coincidence
when the next verse says that swearing is forbidden (as
it was by the Essenes but not by other Jews) and is fol-
lowed shortly afterward by a prayer that is directly in
line with the apocalyptic expectation of the end of the

91
world and in which it says: IIThy kingdom come. Thy
will be done in earth as it is in heaven. ll u
The wisdom of a monastic community by the Dead
Sea that wanted to hasten the kingdom of heaven on
earth by leading lives pleasing to God; not supersession
of the Mosaic law, but its unconditional intensification
to include mental sin; codes for the initiate-that is the
core of Rabbi J.'s teaching, firmly embedded in the cos-
mic framework of the coming dominion of God on
earth which meant hope in this world, verifiable and
real, announced by the coming of the Messiah, the
savior from oppressors and foreign powers and re-
ligions, but no hope in the other world. For that is the
meaning of the Jewish Apocalypse: to recognize the
sign when God the Father shall set up his heavenly
kingdom on earth, so that people can do penance in
time.
That is what John the Baptist summoned people to
-for the kingdom of heaven was at hand-that is the
point of such parables as the wise and foolish virgins
who await the bridegroom, and that is why we find the
apocalyptic descriptions in the New Testament: coded
messages for the initiate.
For out of the bewildering wealth of apocalyptic
ideas we find only certain specific ones in the New
Testament, for example in the twenty-fourth chapter
of St. Matthew. There it says as the acme of horror that
many false prophets shall arise and that unbelief shall
prevail before the inconceivable happens: "When ye
therefore shall see the abomination of desolation,
spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy

92
place (whoso readeth, let him understand), Then let
them which be in [udaea flee into the mountains.?"
If we refer to Daniel we read: "And arms shall stand
on his part, and they shall pollute the sanctuary of
strength and shall take away the daily sacrifice, and
they shall place the abomination of desolation that
maketh desolate.':"
The author of Daniel was a contemporary of the
Maccabees and obviously refers to a topical event,
which he sets in the future to make himself look like
a prophet. If we consult Maccabees, we find the exact
description of this "abornination.?" In those days,
about 180 B.C., King Antiochus IV, one of the Greek
Diadochi, had plundered the temple in Jerusalem and
desecrated it by installing a statue of Zeus. At the time
it was this abomination that drove the Chasidim, the
pious, out into the wilderness to await the end of the
world, for the very worst had happened to their
sanctuary.
Now Rabbi J. need not have referred to this partic-
ular example. In his day there were all kinds of expec-
tations of the end of the world, and Daniel was not one
of the prophets recognized by [udaism, If in spite of
that this specific example was introduced, combined
with the secretive wording of the parable-whoso read-
eth, let him understand, he that hath ears to hear, let
him hear-then there must have been a hidden meaning
behind the obvious one, a meaning which an Essene
understood at once. For the desecration of the temple
by Antiochus IV, which had led in the past to the
founding of the desert sect of Qumran, became once

93
again two hundred years later a coded warning to the
initiate, which was to come true in tragic fashion when
the temple was destroyed in the year 70 and the Jewish
people were scattered to the four winds.
The memory of the abomination of Antiochus was
a warning and a sign of the imminent coming of the
Messiah and God's kingdom, i.e., the God-given do-
minion of the Jews over the world that had hitherto
oppressed them. Babylonian captivity, dominion of the
Greeks, and occupation by the Romans-all that had to
be compensated for among the "chosen people" by
hope in this world, if Yahweh existed at all. The servant
of God, whom Isaiah in Babylon had dreamed of as a
liberator, became the savior, the Messiah of the present.
And the same kind of sacrilege that had once driven the
Essenes to withdraw into the caves by the Dead Sea,
would now two hundred years later be repeated by the
Romans. They, too, would desecrate the Temple and
Yahweh would not leave his people in the lurch this
time, any more than in the past when the Maccabees
triumphed briefly over the Greeks. What the people of
Qumran had hoped for two hundred years was
preached once again by Rabbi J. in his day and for
his day
Sermon on the Mount and Apocalypse, repentance
and baptism, communal property and poverty, Last
Supper and new covenant, can all be found again in
this constellation and form only in the Qumran scrolls.
What we have looked on as the teaching of Rabbi J.
for nearly two thousand years was written down before
his birth. Thus Frank Moore Cross, one of the scholars

94
who deciphered the scrolls, comes to the conclusion:
"At all events we are now in a position to use Qumran
discoveries to lend weight to the view that the Testa-
ments are indeed [udeo-Christian editions, in part re-
worked, of old Essene sources.':" "The direct use of
Essene or proto-Essene materials in Christian composi-
tions, and, indeed, the publication of Christian com-
pilations of Essene or proto-Essene sources can now
be documented impressively."?' "We must now affirm
that in the Essene communities we discover antecedents
of Christian forms and concepts."?"
And even in the passage in Luke where the angels
announce at Christmas: "Glory to God in the highest
and on earth peace to men of good will"19-even there
Qumran, the Essene settlement by the Dead Sea,
emerges again in the background. Over and over again
the sons and the men of good will are mentioned in the
Qumran scrolls-and nowhere else. They are the "poor
in spirit" in whom God is well pleased."
An unbroken chain of references to the Essene
community by the Dead Sea runs from Rabbi J.'s
baptism, on through his teaching, and down to the
Last Supper. That being so, how could people so mis-
understand J., the sectarian, as to make him the
founder of a new universal religion, when all he
wanted was to reconcile the chosen people, his people,
the Jews, with Yahweh, because the kingdom of God
was at hand? Who made an itinerant Jewish preacher
and prophet into the founder of a universal religion
that finally clashed with [udaism? What is the filter
that obscured everything?

95
 Nine
THE REASON
FOR THE SILENCE

F we read the New Testament without knowing the

accounts of [osephus, Philo, and the Dead Sea scrolls,
it would never occur to us that a sect like the Essenes
existed side by side with the Pharisees and Sadducees.
Comparison with the scrolls, which were older, first
showed the New Testament's dependence on Qumran,
and the Essene library first enabled us to decipher the
message which was deliberately concealed in the para-
bles: "By hearing ye shall hear and shall not under-
stand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive.
. . . But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your
ears, for they hear.":
In its zeal Christianity at once identified itself with
the disciples and claimed that it had correctly under-
stood and reproduced the message.
The error is understandable, for the gospels did
everything they could to obscure the historical con-
nections in L's life. For them Rabbi J. emerges from
anonymity, accepts his ministry at his baptism, teaches,
is persecuted and put to death. A comet that follows its
course and burns itself out.
The question is, Why did this obscuring process
take place? The mere fact that the Essenes had a secret
doctrine cannot be the reason for not even admi tting
their existence, for John the Baptist and the Rabbi ap-

97
peared publicly, and [osephus described the Essenes in
detail.
So it is difficult to see why the writers of the New
Testament kept their narratives about Rabbi J. so free
of points of reference, especially because at the end
they cannot explain how such a peace-loving and de-
vout man could be executed on a political charge, in
the company of thieves and murderers, by the Roman
occupying power. Admittedly the motive is mentioned
in the gospels, namely his claim to be the Messiah-the
religious and political savior of the people. But at no
point in the gospels is there any preparatory treatment
of this motive. There is no mention of political activity;
there is no call to rebellion. On the contrary, when the
Rabbi was asked the question about taxes, a question
intended to sound him about the possibility of opposi-
tion to the Roman occupying power, he answered dip-
lomatically: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things
which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are
God's.1I2
A statesmanlike answer that we find quite in order.
Consequently we do not ask how Herod's followers
ever came to ask the Rabbi this question, if he wan-
dered about the country so peacefully and had only the
spiritual welfare of his Jewish fellow citizens at heart.
Yet there must have been at least a suspicion that
Rabbi J. or his disciples had some connection with an
uprising against the Romans. The fact that he was
hailed by the masses on his entry into Jerusalem as the
Messiah and that he saw himself as Christ, the
anointed one, is described clearly and unambiguously by

98
the evangelists. So the Messianic role itself could
scarcely have been the reason for obscuring what had
happened and making it appear to have no historical
connections. Lastly, Rabbi J .'5 disciples called them-
selves Christians, i.e., Messianists, followers of the
Messiah.
But obviously there must have been something that
alerted the Romans and that the evangelists subse-
quently tried to hush up. Obviously Rabbi J. was more
than a mere prophet.
Since the administration of religious and civil jus-
tice was in the hands of the Jews, actual revolt and
resistance must have existed from the Romans' point
of view before they intervened. So let us assume that
Rabbi J. or his disciples had had some connection with
revolt against the Roman government.
We now know that there was such an organized
resistance among the Jews-the only thing is that we
cannot connect Rabbi J. with it from the Bible. Once
again it was [osephus who wrote about these resistance
fighters, the so-called Zealots, who went on fighting
even after the destruction of Jerusalem and defended
the mountain fortress of Massada on the Dead Sea
against the Romans for three years, until they killed
themselves just before its conquest rather than fall into
the hands of the hated enemy.
The Zealots are also mentioned several times in the
Bible, but the reader often finds them described in
terms which emphasize their piety and seem to lack
any political overtones-not without reason, it appears.
[oel Carmichael writes on this subject: "Today the

99
Zealots would be called diehards or irreconcilables.
They were extremists who refused to accept the rule of
Rome or her vassals. The word 'Zealot' itself applies to
one who was zealous for the Law; it was taken from a
celebrated passage in one of the Old Testament
Apocrypha, I Maeeabees 2:27-31: 'And Matthew cried
out in the city with a loud voice, saying "Whosoever
is zealous for the Law and maintains the covenant, let
him come forth after me." Then many that sought after
justice and judgment went down into the wilderness
to dwell there.' ,,3
This quotation from the First Book of Maccabees
is the founda tion charter, so to speak, of the Essenes.
It is this passage that tells us that the Chasidim, the
devout, went into the desert and lived in caves be-
cause they could no longer tolerate the godlessness of
their time (ef Chapter 5).
As so often in Israel's history the themes of faith
and politics were inseparably bound up. The fight for
the law of Moses also meant a fight against the foreign
occupiers and their sacrilegious religions. In the time
of the Maccabees it was the Greeks, around the birth
of Christ it was the Romans.
The man who was zealous in the faith was always
a Zealot against the foreigner, too, whom he actually
experienced in history as an occupying power. The
truly devout man was intrinsically also the true rebel,
whether he took up a sword or not. So it is not sur-
prising that one of the most important documents
discovered in the Qumran caves is the so-called War
Scroll, in which the War of the Sons of Light and the

100
Sons of Darkness is described in technical terms based
on Roman patterns of military organization that would
delight a military historian.
The idea that the Essenes were at least partly
Zealots, i.e., radical extremists, contradicts everything
that we know about them to date. [osephus and Philo
expressly describe the sect as peaceful and quite unin-
terested in politics, as would be natural with men liv-
ing in an uninhabited desert. It was precisely the
marked love of peace in those turbulent days that had
already aroused astonishment at the amazing similarity
between the Essenes' doctrine and the teaching of
Rabbi J. in the New Testament.
It is strange how sometimes discoveries can remain
as it were "in the family." The Jewish archeologist
Sukenik was one of the first to hear about the discov-
eries of the scrolls by the Dead Sea, and it was his son,
Yigael Yadin, when he was in the United States, who
managed to buy back for the Jewish people the same
Isaiah scroll that his father had almost acquired in
Jerusalem. It was the same Yigael Yadin who excavated
Massada, the last stronghold of the Zealots by the
Dead Sea, from 1963 to 1965 and found there, to his
astonishment, among the debris of two thousand years,
writings of the supposedly peaceful Essenes of
Qumran,
"I came across the lines 'Song of the sixth Sabbath
sacrifice on the ninth of the second month.' This and a
few other lines showed that the text tallied with a docu-
ment from Cave 4 at Qumran. In other words it was
the scroll of a sect, in which the 'Songs of the Sabbath

101
sacrifice' were written down in detail, with each Sab-
bath being given a date.
"But the sixth Sabbath could only fall on the ninth
of the second month if we assume that a particular sect,
namely the Qumran sect, was involved. In fact the
document we had found was written by that sect. In its
calendar the year was divided into 364 days ... the first
day of the first month, i.e., the month of Nisan, always
fell on a Wednesday, the day when the stars were
created, which entailed the division of time ...."5
The Essenes' solar calendar, according to which
Rabbi J. celebrated his Passover meal on a different day
from the other Jews, is the connecting link. Were the
Essenes Zealots, or the Zealots Essenes? Yigael Yadin
asks: "How did a scroll of this sect reach Massada? ...
It seems to me that the scroll proves the participation
of the Essenes in the revolt against the Romans.... In
addition, the works of [osephus contain a direct refer-
ence to Essene participation in the war. When he
enumerates the instigators of the revolt and names the
districts under their command, he writes that the com-
manding officer of the important central district was a
certain 'John the Essene.' Is it probable that only a sin-
gle Essene supported the revolt and at the same time
was appointed to an important command? That seems
quite out of the question. It is far more likely that a
large number of Essenes took part in the uprising and
withdrew with their comrades in arms to the last re-
maining stronghold of Massada.... That in my view is
the explanation of the find of the Qumran scroll at
Massada.:"

102
 The idea that the message of peace and love should
have originated among political resistance fighters is
unfamiliar to say the least. But why not? Fundamen-
tally the Zealots ended as they began-in battle against
the "heathen" and their religions. Yigael Yadin draws
the following conclusions: "For some reason or other
we have been handed down a distorted picture of the
Essenes that largely springs from Philo's account; for
scholars have tried to deduce from his description that
the Essenes were pacifists, in the modern sense of the
word. I find this thesis untenable. It was only in wars
that ran counter to their beliefs, i.e., wars not willed by
God, that they did not take part. But if we assume that
they were convinced that the great rebellion meant the
God-ordained war against the Romans, then there was
absolutely no reason for them to abstain from it. 1I1
When the Qumran monastery was excavated, arrow-
heads for defensive and offensive use were found.
But Rabbi J. died thirty years before the fall of Mas-
sada, and Christian sensibility can feel secure again. Of
course Yigael Yadin thinks that the discovery of the
Massada scroll will occupy scholars more than all the
other finds and be the subject of stormy arguments
among experts'-cbut years will pass before this arche-
ological achievement penetrates the consciousness of
the theologians, if indeed they ever feel interested, be-
cause inconvenient truths ought not to exist. Basically
the Massada find is only a confirmation of what is in
the New Testament in any case. It is simply not true
that Rabbi J. was surrounded by harmless devout dis-
ciples who were so naive that they did not even under-

103
stand the parables and tramped through the cornfields
with fluttering beards. There is every indication that at
least six of the twelve disciples were Zealots, that is to
say resistance fighters.
Luke's list of apostles openly introduces Simon as
"Simon called Zelotes," an appellation that in the past
sounded quite as harmless to us as that of the other dis-
ciple "Simon, named Peter." The second name of yet
another disciple is less harmless than was once as-
sumed, for what was previously taken as a place name
really means membership in a radical branch of the
Zealots, the Sicarii, or dagger-men. The Hebrew-Ara-
maic method of writing, which consists solely of con-
sonants and omits the vowels, wrote the Latin word as
Iskariot, or as we know the name: Iscariot. Even an
otherwise conservative biblical lexicon states that Judas
Iscariot, the betrayer, whose nickname should be trans-
lated as "dagger-man," was probably a member of the
party of Zealots.
Simon Peter, whose first act when the Rabbi was
taken prisoner was to seize a sword, may also have been
a Zealot. In Matthew the Rabbi calls him "Simon Bar-
jona."" which is normally translated "as "Simon, son of
Iona," for Bar means son. It is the passage where Rabbi
J. says to Peter: "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock
will I build my church"-and we are entitled to ask why
Peter is suddenly described as the son of Iona at this
crucial moment. But here the same thing has happened
as with Judas. What in the one case was misunderstood
as his place of origin (from Scariot) was misinterpreted
in Peter's case as denoting a relationship. Bar-jona is an

104
Aramaic word and can equally well be read as "open
land." Those who lived outside the city were, in the
plural form of Bar-jona, the Baryonim. [oel Carmichael
states: "Now, the famous proto-Zealot ... , Judas the
Galilean, is occasionally referred to as a 'man living on
the outside.' This curious phrase is clarified by another
remark, in the Talmud, about a nephew of the famous
Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai who was called the 'dag-
ger-man,' and was the head of the baryonim of Jeru-
salem.
"The word baryonim comes from an Aramaic word
meaning open country; they were those people living in
the open country outside the towns, that is, the out-
casts, outlaws, and extremists that the country was full
of. Paul himself was mistaken for such a daggerman by
a Roman captain of a cohort: 'Are you not the Egyp-
tian ... who recently stirred up a revolt and led the four
thousand daggermen out into the wilderness?' (Acts
21-38).
"It is plain from the context that the baryonim were
similar in all respects to the Zealots. 1I1 2
So Rabbi J. did not make some nondescript son of
[ona the "cornerstone" of the church, but one of the
Baryonim, a man who according to St. John was a dis-
ciple of John the Baptist by the Dead Sea, a militant Es-
sene from the desert in which the people of Qumran
awaited the fulfillment of the new covenant. On thee,
the outcast, will I build my church-would anyone say
that, or would it be attributed to him, unless he was a
Baryona himself?
Thus three disciples-Simon the Zealot, Simon Peter

105
the Baryona, and Judas the dagger-man-are clearly la-
beled. If we now read through the list of apostles again,
we find that two more disciples, [arnes and John, the
sons of Zebedee, were called "Boanerges," the sons of
thunder. Unless this was intended to describe their tur-
bulent natures, something that would have suited Peter
much better, it is very likely that their nickname too
had some connection with the Zealots. And strangely
enough [arnes was executed later, just like other rebels.
Lastly, as we read in the gospel according to St.
John, Simon Peter the Baryona had yet another brother
called Andrew, who was one of the Rabbi's first disci-
ples. How could Andrew have helped being a Zealot, if
his brother Simon Peter was one?
In other words, it is possible that half the disciples
were Zealots-grounds enough for the Roman occupa-
tion forces to take an interest in this group that had
formed around Rabbi J. The Rabbi answered the ques-
tion about tribute money loyally: render unto Caesar
the things that are Caesar's. He was either opposed to
some of his disciples or lying, or the saying was not his
at all. Mystery or falsification?
But who could have been interested in making the
movement seem harmless and misrepresenting Its
meaning? The archeologist Yigael Yadin has stated that
for some reason or other a distorted picture of the Es-
senes has been handed down. Who touched up the pic-
ture-and why?

106
 Ten
THE TOUCHING UP

HE title Christ is simply the Greek translation of

the Hebrew word Messiah and means "the anointed
one" in both languages. Kings were anointed; it was the
mark of their office.
In the Old Testament tradition, the Messiah was the
savior of the people of Israel. In those days that really
meant that the Messiah would be the liberator from
Roman rule and King of Israel. (That was why it was
important that he came from the royal house of David.)
That and that alone is the meaning of the inscrip-
tion on the cross, which was put there by the Romans:
HIe EST J.-REX JUDAEORUM-This is J., the King of the
Jews.'
This did not mean a religious kingship-the Romans
would not have taken any action against one-but ac-
tualsovereignty over the Jewish people. It makes no dif-
ference as regards his death sentence whether Rabbi J.
aspired to be king or not, whether he was a member of
the Zealot resistance against the Romans or not. The
fact remains that he was looked on as a political rebel
and executed by the Romans on that charge.
His disciples had had to come to terms with this
truth. The fact that they all fled after their master's ar-
rest or betrayed him, like Peter, shows that they knew
perfectly well how dangerous the situation was for

107
them. [ames, one of the sons of thunder, was later taken
prisoner and executed; Peter was imprisoned several
times and finally put to death in Rome, like Paul.
The disciples' position was difficult. They were un-
der suspicion and we can understand their trying their
hardest to save their own lives by toning down or cov-
ering up every factual or suspected rebellious activity.
How this was done during the first decades after
Rabbi L's death, we do not know. We have no firsthand
witnesses from that period. The first accounts of the
lives of Rabbi J. and his disciples were not written down
until after the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70.
So they are at least forty years distant from the events
at a time when the Jewish resistance was definitively
broken and Rome held undisputed sway over its empire
Longing for the coming of God's kingdom was still
alive, but must have seemed unreal after the destruction
of the temple and the dispersal of the Jews. A new earth
on heaven grew out of the kingdom of God on earth. The
apocalyptic expectation of the end had deceived; neither
Rabbi J. nor another Messiah had brought liberation.
People began to idealize Rabbi J.'s life and project
its actual effect into the future. The victorious "at some
time" grew out of the "now" that had failed. Hand in
hand with this process of idealization, which was in-
creasingly able to dispense with the historical back-
ground because the future, not the past, was important,
the filter began to obscure the scene.
It let through only those things that seemed oppor-
tune and right to the evangelists a generation after the
events. The gospels do not reproduce historical truth;

108
they are apologias conditioned by and dependent on
their time, a fact the theologians gloss over by talking
about the creative influence of the early church."
The gospels that we know today are not the first
written evidence, but edited versions of older docu-
ments, as Luke's narrative tells us: "Forasmuch as many
have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of
those things which are most surely believed among us,
Even as they delivered them unto us, which from the
beginning were eye-witnesses, and ministers of the
word; Itseemed good to me also, having perfect under-
standing of all things from the very first. ... 113
Thus three similar accounts, whose traditional au-
thors are Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the synoptic evan-
gelists, came from one original source that has not
reached us. The fourth, the gospel according to St. John,
on the other hand, obviously stems from a completely
different source and tradition. In spite of these different
original sources, the same filter effect, i.e., the same
tendency on the part of the authors, can be observed in
all four narratives. Everything that is Essene teaching
survives their editing more or less undamaged, although
its source is not acknowledged (every reference to the
Essenes themselves being cut out). It is the part of the
gospels which comes through the filter as "right" and
which is harmless for J.' s followers. Everything that
was or might appear politically dangerous, i.e., every-
thing that did not seem opportune at a time when the
Rabbi's adherents began to spread out through the Ro-
man Empire, had to be obscured and filtered out. The
process met with very little opposition because the ma-

109
jority of J.'s followers were no longer Jews. The political
importance of Jewish Messiahhood found no echo
among them and so could be replaced by the religious
aspect of Messiahhood. All superfluous references to a
rebel role would have been politically inept and unnec-
essary among the new Christians outside Judaism. They
could and had to be omitted.
However, the Jews' incredible and literally maniacal
fidelity to the written word saw to it that some of the
references were not filtered out. Thus, just as in Mark
and Matthew two contradictory versions of the feeding
of the four and five thousand are left standing side by
side, instead of one being rejected, the writers of the
gospels did not succeed in completely altering what had
once been written. They do not mention Zealots by
name, but they describe them. Nowhere do we find a
summons to revolt, but the passage where Rabbi J. says
that he has come not to send peace but a sword is re-
tained, because the sentence was placed in a context
that permitted another interpretation. And for centuries
people promptly understood the passage as saying that
the sword meant the discord that arises through the ac-
ceptance or rejection of Rabbi J.'s teaching.
Another sentence was also allowed to stand, em-
bedded in a prophecy: But now, he that hath a purse,
If

let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath
no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one.?"
Without directly suppressing them, the authors
were able to retain old sources by putting them into new
contexts. The fact that Peter cut off Malchus's ear with
a sword and so confirmed a factual state of resistance

110
against the Roman occupying power was not sup-
pressed, but combined with another event and so ren-
dered harmless. Rabbi J. performs a miracle and the ear
is sound again. The political offense becomes a mere
bagatelle; it is simply changed into the motive for an
impressive feat of healing.
Naturally enough, this technique of placing sen-
tences in altered contexts gave rise to a series of insolu-
ble contradictions. Obviously the synoptic evangelists
did not consider it opportune for Rabbi J. to have found
his first disciples so close to Qumran among those ex-
tremists, the Baryonim, as John tells it. They simply
transferred the story to the idyllic Lake Genesareth-
and the contradiction is as complete as J.'s epiphanies in
different places after his death are. Even the story of the
Passion is depicted quite inconsistently in the passages
that handle the relationship between Jews and Romans.
Matthew and Mark, the earliest authors, speak of
"Simon of Can a" in the list of apostles; Luke, the fur-
thest away in time from the events, can already permit
himself to introduce the same Simon of Cana as
"Simon, called Zelotes." Clearly in Luke's day the word
Zealot was no longer as dangerous as Simon of Cana,
which had the secret meaning of Zealot in Matthew
and Mark's day.
Matthew and Mark only admit the connection with
the extremists in a single passage, and it contains a les-
son for us. Naturally it had to be Judas, the Sicarian,
the dagger-man, who betrayed the Rabbi so disgrace-
fully. There was no better way of setting themselves
apart from the Zealots, and in another passage Luther

111
actually translates the word dagger-men by assassins.
The evangelists are interpreters, not biographers;
they did not illuminate events that had become dark
owing to the generation gap-if anything, they darkened
what still seemed too light. They did not write history;
they invented it. They did not want to tell a straight-
forward narrative, but to justify. But everything is dif-
ferent since Qumran. Since the discovery of the Dead
Sea scrolls, we know that what we thought of as an
unavoidable blind spot was nothing but an obscuring
filter whose method of operation we now understand.
Of course, once we have found a new angle from
which to investigate the strange history of Rabbi J., it is
easy to find more and more passages and "proofs" of
our thesis, but any attempt to produce a water-tight
case is bound to collapse. The whole thing is not a logi-
cal problem that works out with no remainder. Too
many people and too many unknown circumstances
have contributed to certain factors and facts being fil-
tered out and changed, and it would be foolish to expect
the story to work out like a game of patience, when it
cannot possibly work out.
The borderline between what one man looks on as
"proof" and another as stubborn adherence to wrong
ideas is fluid. Yet anyone who is ready to attempt an
explanation of Rabbi L's secret after reading the fore-
going will certainly find it in the retouching of the
evangelists.
The reason for the distorted picture of the Essenes
that has been handed down lies in the attempt to sepa-
rate the Jewish political components from the doctrine

112
and expectation of salvation of the Essenes and so make
the movement acceptable to the Romans. Since the dis-
coveries at Massada and Qumran we know that the pic-
ture of the Essenes given by [osephus writing in the
service of the Romans and Philo of Alexandria living in
the Roman Empire is not accurate.
Without these Dead Sea discoveries, there would
still be no point of departure or possibility of transform-
ing the vague feeling of a mystery into scientific knowl-
edge.
But what does the picture look like without the
retouching? Authors like Schonfield and Carmichael
oppose a blatantly and exclusively political interpreta-
tion to the spiritual and devout one of the West. They
work from the assumption that the gospels always
meant exactly the opposite of what they said. I feel that
salvation and rebellion are not the only possible alter-
natives. Human life is not so stereotyped as we some-
times like to pretend for simplicity's sake, especially
when the person concerned can no longer defend him-
self.
What is too simple about the Western picture of
Christ to be true applies vice versa to the opposite the-
sis. One side has selected the purely religious aspect
of a Jewish religious-cum-political phenomenon, the
other solely the political. To the former the Messiah
was the son of God, to the latter a failed politician. In
reality he was both.
But from the passages where the evangelists cau-
tiously concealed things and deliberately deviated from
reality, Western theologians in their ignorance made a

113
mystery that led further and further away from the
man J. to a theology to which the absurd seemed cred-
ible. Relation to reality became unimportant; doctrine
became the only vital criterion.
They did not ask where the doctrine came from, but
what it meant-in a vacuum, so to speak. In the process
they overlooked the fact that the significance of a doc-
trine depends entirely on the soil from which it grew.
In principle Western Christianity could manage with-
out the Old Testament and without [udaism, in spite
of protestations to the contrary. Palestine and the Jews
were simply the fortuitous historical background
chosen by God for his intervention, and formerly there
was no lack of German theologians who tried to show
that Rabbi J. was an Aryan.
The scholars who thought that they recognized the
"historical J." in the New Testament and, following the
slogan "the Bible is right after all," constantly found
their idea of him confirmed must begin to doubt
whether the Bible is really so right after the finds at
Qumran and Massada.
Now we know that the doctrine of Rabbi J. is not
just vaguely connected with the Jewish Apocalypse and
expectation of the end; we know exactly where it came
from and consequently what was really meant by it-
not what was read into it later. The link with Qumran
and the Essenes changes the meaning of Christian doc-
trine. It leads back from the breadth given it by St. Paul
against Rabbi L's intentions to the narrowness of Jew-
ish thought, and remains there, in defiance of all later
interpretations, as the only one meant by Rabbi J.

114
 Now we know that the Jew J. had no teaching of
his own, but propagated an already existing doctrine
exclusively to the Jews, a doctrine that is so deeply
rooted in the tradition of the Jewish people that any
shifting of emphasis away from Judaism automatically
implies a falsification of the original meaning.
Now we know that Rabbi J. did not have only
peaceful ideas; he also-voluntarily or compulsorily-
lived out the political aspect of Messiahship to its bitter
end and failure. Both his followers outside [udaism to
whom Jewish political Messianism meant nothing, and
his disappointed Jewish adherents, who did not call
themselves after Rabbi J. or his teaching, but "Chris-
tians" ("anointed ones") after his Messianic function
that had failed in reality, were understandably ready
to elevate reality into the ideal and make the suffering
Messiah out of the savior of the people of Israel. They
no longer saw Rabbi L's sufferings as the end of their
hope, but as the beginning; those who had suffered
themselves after the destruction of Jerusalem saw in
him the reflection of their own situation. Because they
were forced to reduce the dual meaning of Messiahship
to the purely religious aspect-partly because of the
Romans and partly because otherwise they could make
no sense out of the life and failure of Rabbi J.-they
began to put a new interpretation on the life of the Jew
J. and so to falsify it.
As we can confirm today, such a shift of emphasis
took place with the evangelists. They described a dif-
ferent Rabbi J. from the one who can now be identified
by historical reality. In his book It began with 1. of

115
Nazareth, Heinz Zahrnt points out the consequences of
this: " . . . if historical research could prove that an irrec-
oncilable antithesis existed between the historical J.
and Christ as preached, and therefore that belief in J.
has no support in J. himself, that would not only be
absolutely fatal theologically, as N. A. Dahl says, but
would also mean the end of all Christology. Yet I am
convinced that even then we theologians would be able
to find a way out-was there ever a time when we
couldn't?-but we are either lying now or would be
lying then.?"
I have an answer to that quotation. But so far I have
only tried to penetrate the first of the two filters that
obscured the actual life of Rabbi J. I have not yet scru-
tinized the second filter that further distorted this
darkened and mystery-enshrouded life.

116
 Eleven
THE SECOND FILTER

HE first filter that obscured Rabbi J.'s life was

used to ensure that the growing membership of the
Essene Christians continued into the second generation
without political taint after the catastrophical events of
the year 70. It was a deliberate defense measure in order
to conceal historical connections. The secret doctrine of
the Essenes and the connection with Zealotism and
political Messianism looked on as fatal after the year
70 made it necessary-and in the fourth gospel the
filter even went so far as to blame the Jews themselves
for the death of the Jew J., and not the Romans.
Since the Dead Sea finds, we have the corrective
filter with which we can reilluminate the actual point
of departure for Rabbi L's doctrine and life. We know
now the religious background Rabbi J. came from and
what the original-and therefore the real-meaning of
his teaching was.
With this corrective filter we can solve all those
mysteries in Rabbi J.'s life that characterize his spiritual
origin, his teaching, and his conduct. Comparison of
two-thousand-year-old documents enables us to state
with considerable certainty that the teaching and claims
of Rabbi J. were stamped by the Qumran Essenes-re-
gardless of whether he was an Essene monk or had
some form of close contact with the Qumran sect over
a long period.

117
 If this connection is as clear as I believe, one may
naturally wonder why theological scholars did not see
and admit it long ago. After all, no one can claim that
"modern" theology shows any particular restraint
when it comes to demolishing old, long-accepted ideas.
On the contrary, it has a growing tendency to reduce
everything either to myths explicable on a religious or
psychological basis or to plain historical facts, not to
mention the theory (formerly applied to every famous
man, including Shakespeare) that J. did not exist at all.'
So we should have expected theology to be only too
glad to anchor the phenomenon of Rabbi J. in the ex-
plicable, thankful to have reached a safe haven in the
flood of allegorical and symbolical interpretations.
Strangely enough the opposite is the case. Since the
Enlightenment, which in its time certainly made a lot
of dull and stupid statements, but also made many true
predictions, theology has continually striven to argue
from a plane that disregarded the state of contemporary
knowledge. For example, the Herder Verlag's Prak-
tisches Bibellexicon still claims, twenty-two years after
the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls, "that a significant
comparison of the Qumran scriptures with the New
Testament cannot be carried out until Qumran scholar-
ship is more advanced."? What are we still wr-iting for
after twenty-two years? Theology is a valid target for
Edmund Wilson's reproach that a scholar in the service
of the church is hindered by his religious mission from
drawing the logical conclusions from the Dead Sea
scrolls.'
There is a good deal of truth in that, for no one likes

118
to see himself doubted, especially when the Bible itself
offers him suitable counterarguments. Thus, to name
only one of many examples, the Christian-Jewish en-
cyclopaedia The Bible and its World 4 writes in its chap-
ter on Qumran and Christianity: "Both in Qumran and
the New Testament the prophetical concept of a new
covenant fertilized the theological self-awareness of the
community. Nevertheless, even here there is a funda-
mental difference. In the Qumran new covenant the
Law of Sinai remains the basis of the relationship with
God ... in the New Testament version a covenant was
concluded through the blood of Jesus that frees from
the law and fulfils the promises of God that were given
even before the law."
That is right and at the same time it is wrong. It is
right because that does appear in the New Testament,
but it is wrong because two stages of development have
been equated and compared. Naturally we find "funda-
mental differences" between Qumran and present-day
Christianity if we ignore the fact that Rabbi J.'s teach-
ing was further developed even during the first century
of its existence. 50 the question is simply whether or
not this further development took place in line with
Rabbi J.'s original ideas or not. If we go by the words
traditionally handed down as Rabbi J.'s, he did not
want to alter the Law of Sinai by one jot or tittle, but
on the contrary to strengthen it as a prerequisite for the
new covenan t.
Pauline Christianity, on the other hand, freed itself
from the Jewish Mosaic law and preached the conquest
of the law and redemption through Christ. Even though

119
we have become accustomed to consider the New Testa-
ment as a compilation of twenty-seven scriptures on the
same theme, Paul's teaching marks a break. Theology
has known this for a long time, and comparing Pauline
Christianity with Qumran is an even less admissible
procedure for that reason.
Between the traditional material of the gospels and
the teaching of St. Paul lies the tragic death of the
Messiah J. (which the disciples did not understand),
the destruction of Jerusalem and with it the collapse
of all hopes for the imminently awaited coming of the
kingdom of God on earth. What lies between the death
of the Jew J. and the epistles of St. Paul is the second
filter, which began to work simultaneously with, but
independently of, the first filter.
The second filter was not used to conceal, but rather
to try to understand and explain Rabbi J.'slife after his
death. One filter obscured historical and biographical
references; the other, working from a specific angle,
began to enlarge J.'slife, which was still visible but had
lost its connections with time and place.
The first filter was like a dark glass through which
we no longer perceive shadings and subtleties, but only
the vividly painted parts of the picture, without being
able to realize the connection between the visible parts.
The second filter worked on a different principle. It
was not a color filter like the first one, but a polarized
magnifying glass. But enlargement is not a filter per se.
Enlargement simply has the effect of making the object
observed become larger the farther away from it one

120
holds the glass, but from a certain point onward mak-
ing it vaguer, and finally turning it upside down. The
actual filter effect consists in the polarization, Le. in the
fact that there are glasses which only let the light
through from one particular direction and suppress all
other rays, without obscuring the picture. If you look
at a shop window with polarized glasses you only per-
ceive what lies behind it. You can no longer see the
shop window and what is reflected in it. Polarization
filters are invisible blinkers because they do not seem
to narrow the field of vision, although you only see a
fraction of what you would see normally. Any motorist
who has used glasses with polarized lenses against
dazzle can confirm this.
50 if we assume that the apostle Paul used such
polarized magnifying glasses-unlike the evangelists
who only wore sunglasses tinted with one color-then
we must prove it or at least make it probable. We must
show where the break between the first and the second
system lies, why it occurred, and what the consequences
were.
First the actual break. I could make things easy for
myself and refer to the vast literature about "Pauline
theology," which a theological lexicon has summed up
in one sentence: "His preaching is not just a recapitula-
tion of I.'s words; basically it grapples with an inter-
pretation of the death and resurrection of Christ in
conceptual terms that are often hard to understand... ."5
But this does nothing to explain the meaning and effect
of the filter, even if it shows how the theme was nar-

121
rowed down. Yet why was the Pharisee Saul, who later
became the apostle Paul, so interested in this part of
Rabbi J.'s life?
We often find the key to a man's ideas, theories of
life, and convictions in his biography, but here the
traditional material fails us exactly as in Rabbi J.'s case.
We know nothing about Paul's motives. Just as Rabbi
J. first emerges from obscurity in the four gospels when
he is baptized and receives his ministry, so Saul the
persecutor of Christians first takes shape for us when
he experiences his conversion outside Damascus-prob-
ably in the throes of an epileptic fit:
11 And Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and
slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto
the high priest, And desired of him letters to Damascus
to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way,
whether they were men or women, he might bring them
bound unto Jerusalem. And as he journeyed, he came
near Damascus: and suddenly there shined around him
a light from heaven: And he fell to the earth, and heard
a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest
thou me? And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the
Lord said, I am J. whom thou persecutest: it is hard for
thee to kick against the pricks. And he trembling and
astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?
And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the city,
and it shall be told thee what thou must do.?"
That happened about A.D. 36, a few years after the
death of the Rabbi, whose followers, the Nazarenes,
Saul, as a Pharisaic scribe, fought with all the means at

122
his disposal. He was an official witness when Stephen,
the new sect's first martyr, was stoned to death outside
the gates of Jerusalem. Saul was about thirty years old
then. Because of his rabid behavior the high priests
considered him the right man to stop the sect spreading
in Syria and commissioned him to travel to Damascus.
Before he arrived there, he experienced his conversion.
We do not know what led to this "Damascus."
The Acts of the Apostles represent it as divine inter-
vention and as part of the story of salvation; Christian
interpretation likes to think that he was won over by
the example of the first Christians; psychologists sus-
pect that unconscious guilt feelings and an inner crisis
led to the abrupt change.
The early Christians came to the most reasonable
conclusion, although it was quite wrong. They thought
that Saul's religious conversion was unreliable and sus-
pected for years that he wanted to infiltrate their ranks
as a spy pretending to be a Christian. But Saul, who
then called himself Paul-the little one-had undergone
a genuine conversion.
The Acts of the Apostles tell us that after his con-
version a disciple sought him out and that then the
scales fell from Saul's eyes and he was baptized.'
The Pharisee "Saul" became a Christian. He joined
the Nazarenes.' But how did the followers of Rabbi J.
reach Damascus, which was hundreds of miles from
Jerusalem, only a few years after his death? One naive
suggestion is that some of the early Christians had ac-
tually moved there and founded a church, although

123
only the church in Jerusalem is ever mentioned. This
cannot be proved or disproved, and in any case we
cannot assume that it is the truth. But there is another
possibili ty.
If Saul vigorously persecuted the Essenes connected
with the Zealots, who are lumped together in the Acts
of the Apostles under the generic name "Christians,"
then we might suspect that Essenes who were not
eyewitnesses of Rabbi J. had lived in Damascus long
before J. came on the scene. We know that this was
actually so from the Damascus Document, and Saul's
baptism confirms it. Just as John the Baptist summoned
people to baptism as confirmation of their change of
mind, Saul had himself baptized after his experience at
Damascus. A ring was closed. If Rabbi J. preached the
doctrine of the Essenes, Saul's conversion could logi-
cally mean only that he was converted to the teaching
of the Essenes.
But then the unforeseeable happened. The move-
ment's biggest enemy suddenly took over the role of
propagandist. He now began to propagate the sect with
the same intensity with which he had once persecuted
it. The original church in Jerusalem treated him with
suspicion. There were disputes; Paul had to justify him-
self; he had his failures, but in the end he alone was
the victor.
The Acts of the Apostles only hint cautiously at the
disputes and write the history of the early church from
Paul's point of view, for history is always written by
the victor. In Acts the very things that were not logical
consequences were described as if they were. Paul and

124
Acts make a divine event out of the break, and fulfill-
ment out of repudiation of the past.
For Paul preached two things in the name of Rabbi
J., whom he had never seen, that contradict the very
basis of his teaching. The man who said of himself,
"If any other man thinketh that he hath whereof he
might trust in the flesh, I more: Circumsized the eighth
day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an
Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Phari-
see/" justifies his conversion with a sentence in which
he not only separates himself from his past, but also
from the Essenes' strict adherence to the law and the
teaching of Rabbi J.: " ... not having mine own righ-
teousness, which is of the law, but that which is through
the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God
by faith. II1 O
In his search for a merciful God he rejects the law
and with it his Pharisaic past, and we might suspect
that everything he does and writes only serves to domi-
nate his past, that his whole life as a "servant of Christ"
is no more than a life that stands under the shadow of
a past unknown to us, that he only used the "case" of
Rabbi J. to solve the "case" of Paul.
The second difference is that he is still alive and
the teaching of Rabbi J. does not interest him at all. He
mentions none, absolutely none of the meager facts
supplied in the gospels."
The only thing which Paul considers important is
the Jew L's ignominious death, which destroyed all
hopes of liberation by a Messiah. He makes the victori-
ous Christ out of the failed Jewish Messiah, the living

125
out of the dead, the son of God out of the son of man.
Everything that must have been anathema to an
orthodox Jew like Rabbi J. becomes the gospel message
in Paul. The suffering Messiah of faith replaces the
conquering Messiah of the Jewish people; the transfer-
ence of a man to heaven, which can only have come
from Greek mythological ideas, replaces the "servant
of God" on earth, as Isaiah still understood the Mes-
siah; Paul preaches that God-Yahweh is not the one
and only God, a concept inconceivable in the Jewish
religion. He professes a triune God, a trinity that is yet
one. Paul and the evangelist John thus create a syn-
cretism out of monotheism, and Heinz Zahrnt remarks:
"Paul especially-John is usually looked on a little more
favorably-becomes the 'corrupter of the gospel of
Jesus.' "

126
 Twelve
FROM SCAPEGOAT
TO LAMB OF GOD

N his book about the historical J., Heinz Zahmt

writes: "Nowadays J. and Paul are placed so far apart
by many theologians that scarcely any historical con-
tinuity seems to exist between them. William Wrede
writes: 'J. knows nothing about the one and only thing
that matters to Paul.' And of Paul he says, vice versa:
'In comparison with J. he is a new phenomenon, as new
as it is possible, given a broad common background.
He is far more distant from J. than J. himself was from
the noblest creations of Jewish piety.' But this simply
means that with Paul Christianity had begun for the
second time. Wrede says as much, too. He calls Paul
'the second founder of Christianity.' For Paul intro-
duced into Christianity the ideas that were to prove the
most powerful and influential in its history. Conse-
quently the discontinuity between the historical J. and
the Christ of the church became so great that any unity
between the two is scarcely recognizable.":
Wrede, too, supported by a large number of inde-
pendent experts, thinks that Paul only used the reports
about Rabbi J. as an excuse for propagating his own
ideas. He writes: "This picture of Christ did not spring
from the impression J.'s personality made on Paul.
Scholars have often claimed that it did, but have never
proved it. There is only one explanation left. Paul al-
ready believed in such a heavenly being, in a divine

127
Christ, before he believed in J.... And is this belief,
for Paul the essence of religion, the framework for the
edifice of his piety, without which it would collapse,
supposed to be the continuation or modification of J.'s
gospel? What is left now of the gospel that Paul is sup-
posed to have understoodr'"
This question must be asked and answered, if we
look at Christianity from its beginning, and not from
its end. Lexicon phrases such as "the mixture of the
christocentric message of salvation with the demands
of the law was a great danger for the early Christian
Church.:" turn the fact upside down, like a magnifying
glass held too far away. It was not the christocentric
message of salvation that was mixed with the demands
of the law, but the other way round. The crisis in the
early Christian church came when Paul confronted the
loyalty to the law demanded by Rabbi J. with the order
to free themselves from belief in the father and so from
the law.
What Paul proclaimed as "Christianity" was sheer
heresy which could not be based on the Jewish or Essene
faith, or on the teaching of Rabbi J. But, as Schonfield
says: "The Pauline heresy became the foundation of
Christian orthodoxy and the legitimate church was dis-
owned as heretical.?"
Yet how could a heresy convince even the men who
had known Rabbi J. personally and who must have seen
that Paul taught something quite different from their
Messiah?
Traditional theology naturally denies the possibility
of a deliberate reinterpretation of the original and

128
speaks instead of a purely logical development of Rabbi
J.'s teaching by Paul.
The argument that Paul would scarcely have suc-
ceeded if he had really taught something different from
what the early church believed actually has a good deal
in its favor. Here it is possible to quote sentences such
as this from a biblical lexicon: "Since the discovery of
the Qumran scrolls scholars have repeatedly referred
to the striking parallels in language and content be-
tween the Pauline epistles and the Qumran literature.?"
or this from the Viennese [udaist Kurt Schubert: "The
most obvious similarity between Paul's theology and
the Qumran texts is the deep consciousness of sin
common to both of them ... the dualism of light and
darkness which plays a large part in the scriptures of
St. John is also characteristic of Paul's theology .. .
116_

sentences, in other words, that start from the mutual

dependence of Rabbi J. and Paul on Qumran, and guar-
antee the continuity of the tradition in the field of
incontrovertible philological analysis, proving a con-
nection rather than a break.
But it would not be the first time that someone took
over an ideology and a terminology in order to turn it
into something different. Rabbi J.'s disciples had
reached rock bottom. The hope that one of their group
would be the Messiah, the savior of the people and King
of Israel, was past. Their master's death remained a
mystery to them, and the gospel according to St. Mark,
the oldest New Testament after St. Paul's epistles, con-
tains no expression of joy at the resurrection, only
despair and horror: "And they went out quickly, and

129
fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were
amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for
they were afraid. m
Certainly they went on hoping, just as the Jews had
hoped for the Messiah for centuries and had always
been disappointed. They waited for the end of the
world that the apocalyptic visions promised, but
nothing happened.
Paul arrives in the midst of this situation of dis-
appointed hopes with a message that gives them re-
newed hope. He explains the very thing that the
members of the sect could not explain. He speaks of
the master's death. No hope can be linked with the
Rabbi's life, for he is dead. That is why it does not
interest Paul. He preaches the idea of the suffering
Messiah, which is completely alien to [udaism, by mak-
ing the servant of God mentioned in Isaiah refer to
Rabbi J., who "took our sins upon him."
A strange mixture of Jewish and Greek ideas leads
to Paul's Christology. "The Lamb of God, that taketh
away the sins of the world," reminds us of the literal
scapegoat that was sacrificed for the sins of the people
on the highest Jewish holy day, the Day of Atonement,
and whose blood was scattered on the Atonement Plate
so as to symbolize the absolution of people and priests.
The high priests then laid their hands on a second
scapegoat which thus assumed all the sins of the people,
intentional or unintentional. Then the goat, which now
bore the sins of the people, was chased into the desert.
This vicarious expiation of sin by sacrifice is trans-
ferred by Paul to Rabbi J., the "Lamb of God" that

130
taketh away the sins of the world, although human
sacrifice only occurred in Israel in the earliest times.
But now he gets into difficulties. If Rabbi J. is the son
of God-whatever we understand by that-God has to
make atonement with himself, an idea that is also alien
to [udaism. The controversial idea that God had to
make atonement with "his" blood, with himself, that
God in other words had to sacrifice himself, would
never occur to a Jew. Yahweh, God the Father, pos-
sessed every quality ranging from rage and revenge to
atonement, but for the Ineffable to sacrifice himself so
as to be reconciled with his creation lies outside the
bounds of credibility. God had already made his cove-
nant with the people of Israel.
A quite different kind of God emerges here, a God
who has an adversary, a God who reconquers the fallen
world of Satan. This is not the God of the Jews, even
though in the Book of Job God makes a bet with Satan
about Job-an age-old reminiscence of Lucifer, who
seduced Eve as the snake. Paul thinks dualistically and
so makes contact with one aspect of Essene thinking.
The Essenes, too, were familiar with the primeval dual
principle, which they paraphrased with light and dark-
ness, and which showed the influence of Persian
religions.
The idea of resurrection is also a Gentile one. The
Bible is familiar with reincarnation. Thus John the Bap-
tist is looked on as the reincarnation of Elijah" and
Rabbi J. as the reincarnation of the dead Baptist," but
in neither case is it a resurrection from the dead.
The New Testament itself twice points out that the

131
supposedly physically resurrected Rabbi J. did not have
the same appearance as the living one. On Easter Mon-
day Mary Magdalene took him for a gardener, and the
disciples at Ernmaus" walked with him for hours, ate
with him! and only recognized him by the Essene ges-
ture of breaking bread. Here too everything remains
within the framework of Jewish thinking. A man could
be reborn "of water and the splrlt,?" but this rebirth
was a mystery! just as Paul, too, died and was resur-
rected in Christ, but that did not mean a resurrection
from the dead, which was announced for the end of
time.
These ideas of resurrection and reincarnation are
now carried a stage further by Paul, who links them
with the Greek idea of deification. True, Elijah rose up
to heaven in a fiery chariot; we read it in the Old Testa-
ment. But no Jew around the time of Christ's birth
would have dared to think that God took a eo-regent
in heaven. That would have been sheer heresy! and the
only reason we do not recognize it as such is that we
have become accustomed as "Christians" not to see
the "Trinity" of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost as poly-
theism, although it must appear so to every Jew.
This syncretic mixture of Jewish tradition and Greek
ideas-admitted by all theologians-obviously appeared
acceptable to the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem, for
otherwise they would have been left without an ex-
planation of Rabbi J.!s death. With Paul's aid, they
were able to transfer their lost hope in Rabbi J. to hope
in Christ, the spiritual Messiah. Rabbi J.'s life was re-
placed by the teaching of Christ. The failure of a life

132
was transformed into the success of a divine plan for
salvation.
As the proverb says, one may as well be hung for a
sheep as a lamb. Once the Jewish Christians had ac-
cepted these monstrosities, they could equally well
accept Paul's next claim, that redemption was no longer
dependent on observing the Mosaic law.
After a tussle Paul managed to convince the repre-
sentatives of the new sect in Jerusalem that even circum-
cision which corresponded to baptism in the Christian
church, was no longer necessary for salvation." Cir-
cumcision, the symbol of [udaism, was abolished by
Paul. The decisive step from Jewish sect to universal
religion was taken. Albert Schweitzer writes in his book
The Mystique of the Apostle Paul: "Paul's achievement
is that he thought his way through from the evangelical
and early Christian belief in salvation through Christ
and the coming kingdom to belief in J. as the future
Messiah in such a way that he removed its temporal
limitation and arrived at a version in which it is valid
for all tirne.?"
That is undoubtedly true. The Jew J.'s teaching be-
came universal and timeless through Paul and only
through Paul. By a brilliant revaluation of all values
that are sacred to a Jew, Paul, the former opponent,
"redeemed" the teaching of a sect from the arrogant
narrowness of a chosen religion and a chosen people
who awaited the coming of the Lord in the wilderness.
But I should add that he did it not because he was im-
pressed by Rabbi L's teaching, but because he sought
a way out of his personal experiences with [udaism as

133
a Pharisee and because of his own guilt complex, to
which observance of the law did not seem to provide
a solution.
Paul did something that Rabbi J. never did and re-
fused to do. He extended God's promise of salvation to
the Gentiles; he abolished the law of Moses, and he
prevented direct access to God by introducing an
in termediary.
Of course anyone can point out that the gospel ac-
cording to St. John already puts forward this claim:
"No man cometh unto the Father, but by me," but the
word "already" is wrong. The earliest texts of the New
Testament that have come down to us are the epistle of
St. Paul, which were written between the years 50 and
60 B.C., although only half of them are recognized as
genuine by scholars. All New Testament scholars agree
that the gospels were not definitively edited until after
70 B.C. Thus they already presume the victory of
Pauline theology; they see Rabbi J.'s life from the point
of view of Pauline "fulfillment"; they interpret the
man's life according to the meaning of his death. So all
the subsequently introduced references to lithe Passion"
of Rabbi J. and prophecies of the destruction of the
temple, which took place in 70 B.C., can be explained as
predictions based on hindsight.
After 70 B.C. St. Paul had won the day against the
Jewish Christians with his universal gospel because he
had more members abroad in Gentile countries than
the church in Jerusalem. History was, as always, the
story of the majority to which the past had to adapt
itself.

134
 And that, in my opinion, is the second filter. The
obscured fate of Rabbi J. is reflected and distorted in
the life of Paul of Tarsus. The exemplary death of
Rabbi J. is so important to him that he is prepared to
depart completely from reality and the Jewish faith in
order to end his search for redemption in it. He has
arrived at faith in "the Savior" and made his faith
triumph-but at the cost of separation from Rabbi J.
"We are a universe away from J" "writes the Orien-
talist Joel Carmichael.
"If Jesus came 'only to fulfil' the Law and the
Prophets;
"If he thought that 'not an iota, not a dot' would
'pass from the Law,' that the cardinal commandment
was 'Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord is one,'
and that 'no one was good but God';
"If he actually considered himself 'sent only to the
lost sheep of the House of Israel,' and thought it wrong
'to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs'r. ..
"If his undertaking was frustrated and he was
executed as a rebel against the state;
"What would he have thought of Paul's handi-
workl?"

135
 Thirteen
THE FLY
IN THE AMBER

RESUMABLY Christianity as we know it would not

have existed without Paul. The original basis was so
fundamentally altered by him that its meaning was
completely reversed. What interests him about the
itinerant preacher's life is his death, not his teaching.
He does not ask what led to L's death; he only sees
what it means to him personally. He turns a man who
summoned people to reconciliation with God into the
savior. He turns an orthodox Jewish movement into a
universal religion which ultimately clashed with
[udaism.
In the course of this transference from the Jew-
ish to the Graeco-Roman cultural sphere, a further
alienation took place, in addition to Paul's work. True,
Palestine had long been influenced and stamped by
Hellenism. The theology of the Jew Paul shows that.
There were Greek cities and Greek as well as Aramaic
was spoken in Palestine. Paul wrote his epistles in
Greek, and the New Testament has come down to us
only in a Greek version.
But there is a difference between a Jew reading the
gospels and the epistles of St. Paul and a Greek reading
them. To a Jew the Greek words retain their Jewish
meaning. If he reads the Greek word Christos, he
knows that it is the translation of the word Messiah
and also that the literal meaning"anointed one" refers

137
to kings who were anointed. 50 the word Messiah to a
Jew is a synonym for the word king.' It is not to a
Greek, because in his range of experience kings were
not anointed.
To him the word Christos is the shell of a word
without associations, a cipher that has to be endowed
with conten t.
It also makes a difference whether a Jew or a non-
Jew reads the concept "son of God." Admittedly both
understand at once what is said. It is a clear description
of a relationship; one immediately associates something
with it. But that is just where the misunderstanding
comes in, for each of them understands something dif-
ferent by "the son of God." In their civilization the
Greeks, who were used to the idea of the gods of Olym-
pus mating with the children of earth and begetting
children, had no difficulty in incorporating the concept
into their world. Even a Roman, whose rulers were
worshiped as divinities, could make something of the
idea. And because they could incorporate the idea into
their worlds they did not ask about its original mean-
ing in the original language.
50 the concept of "the son of God" led to a mis-
understanding which had undreamed-of consequences.
Anyone with only a superficial knowledge of the East
knows that the Orientals like picturesque speech. For
them the photographer is the 'father of the picture.'
The impersonal relationship between producer and
product is reproduced in a flowery image; abstract
relations are represented by paraphrases. A simple liar
is a son of lies, and anyone who can go one better be-

138
comes a father of lies. The phrase "son of God" is on
the very same level of speech and thought.
In Semitic linguistic usage this description says
nothing more than that a bond exists between a man
and God. A Jew would never even dream of thinking
that the son of God meant a genuine relationship be-
tween a father and a son. A son of God is a blessed
man, a chosen vessel, a man who does what God wants.
Any attempt to take this image literally and so deduce
the divinity of the son contradicts the facts.
The Old Testament gives many examples of how the
concept of the son of God was understood. For exam-
ple, it was the normal coronation formula for kings,
intended to show that the Messiah, the anointed king,
was "begotten" in the name of God., i.e., that he was
appointed by Yahweh. As it says in the psalm:
Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.
I will declare the decree the Lord hath said unto me.
Thou art my son; this day I have begotten thee."

When David was promised that his descendants

would become kings, too, it was paraphrased in the
Bible as follows: "And when thy days shall be fulfilled,
and thou shalt sleep with thy fathers, I will set up thy
seed after thee, which shall proceed out of thy bowels,
and I will establish his kingdom....
And in another psalm it says of David:
I have found David my servant; with my holy oil have I
anointed him.... He shall cry unto me, Thou art my father,
my God, and the rock of my salvation.
Also I will make him my first-born, higher than the kings
of the earth."

139
 According to the Jewish way of thinking, "the son
of God" can also apply to a whole people. Thus Moses
is told to say to Pharaoh: "Thus saith the Lord, Israel
is my son, even my firstborn. And I say unto thee, let
my son go that he may serve me "5 Or again in

Jeremiah: "For thus saith the Lord I am a father to

Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn.?"
[oel Carmichael sums it up as follows: "Most
Christians take this concept of Jesus as the Son of God
for granted as having been implicit in Jesus' view of
himself. But a moment's glance at the Gospels will
show how it provided a matrix for the whole process of
magnification.... The title 'son of God' was of course
entirely familiar to Jews in Jesus' life-time and indeed
for centuries before; all Jews were sons of God; this
was in fact what distinguished them from other people.
. . . More specifically the phrase was applied to eminent
personages generally, and especially to kings, celestial
emissaries, and so forth.... During the postexilic pe-
riod in Jewish history the word was further applied to
any particularly pious man; ultimately it became com-
mon in reference to the Righteous Man and the Prince.
"In all these cases of Jewish usage, the phrase was
plainly a metaphor to emphasize a particularly close
connection between individual virtue and divine au-
thority. The concept of any man's actually having been
biographically engendered by the disembodied majesty
of Yahweh, God of the Universe, would not only have
been a grotesque extravagance in a Jewish milieu; it
would actually have been unintelligible.?"

140
 But at the moment when early Christianity moved
on to other linguistic patterns and modes of thought,
and began to free itself from its Jewish origins, the
impossible became possible. Rabbi J. could only be
turned into the son of God outside [udaism, because
people took the metaphor literally as "the inspired
word of God" and no longer knew or wanted to know
its real meaning. For even to mention the "only begot-
ten," i.e., the only son of God, contradicts the various
firstborn sons in the Old Testament. (However, the
only place in the whole Bible where the actual phrase
"only begotten son" occurs is in St. John, whose gospel
is considered to be the one most strongly influenced by
Hellenism.)
The church did not take the easy way out; it only
made the divine nature of Christ dogma and included
the doctrine of the Trinity in the Creed after lengthy
disputes. This decision was the result of theological
thinking and speculation, but not a reflection of what
stood in the New Testament.
Theology began to make itself independent. Ad-
mittedly its thesis is that it was oriented solely toward
the Bible and nothing else. But actually even the first
centuries of the church's existence saw the beginning of
a process which has continued to this day-the process
of the ideologization of the faith, which, working on the
slogan that inconvenient truths ought not to exist, goes
back to the sources and makes whatever it wants out
of them. Schonfield's harsh words, "The formula of
the Trinity, 'God, the Father, God the Son, and God

141
the Holy Ghost,' is an unjustifiable distortion by Paul-
ine religious dogma.:" were put rather more elegantly
by Goethe in his Westostlichen Divan:
J.... though t secretly
about the one and only God;
whoever made him [I.] a God
offended against God's holy will.
The transformation of the Jew J. into a God is not
the only alienation that took place during the passage
from one cultural sphere to another. The miracles, too,
are additions from a foreign culture that sees proof
of the extraordinary in the extraordinary deeds per-
formed by its heroes. It is quite common in religious
history to read about founders of religions who were
supposed to have been born of a virgin, whose death
was accompanied by an earthquake at least, and who
were taken up into heaven after death. But none of
that is Jewish. And what is even more important, none
of that has any connection with Rabbi J., after whose
title his followers called themselves Christians.
It would be easy to quote still more examples show-
ing that the change from Jewish sect to universal re-
ligion distorted and falsified many ideas, beginning
with the symbolical "overloading" of the phrase "son
of man," which comes from the apocalyptic vision in
the Book of Daniel and is connected with Qumran,
down to the misunderstanding of a normal Passover
meal, which, divorced from its ordinary context, be-
came the sacrament of the Last Supper. The idea of the
son of God is only one example of how the second
filter worked.

142
 In my opinion, it can do no harm if we take one
more general look at the way in which the two filters
worked, for everything is different after Qumran. Even
if the theologians were able to say in the past that the
influences of Hellenism and the Christian tradition
could be established as alterations of what was origi-
nally meant, but no one knew what was originally
meant, this simply is not true today.
It makes no difference how closely we connect
Rabbi J. with the Essene community at Qumran. The
fact that he was influenced by it in his actions and even
in individual words he used can no longer be denied,
unless we deny all the principles of scholarly compari-
sons, analysis, and methods.
Rabbi J. had certainly carefully considered all the
different religious ideas of his day; like Paul, he was a
man who sought the truth where it was to be found; and
the truth men seek is not to be found in a single place,
not even when the place is called Qumran. But he did
find the cardinal point of his truth and his teaching
among the Essenes; comparison of the Dead Sea scrolls
and the New Testament proves it. That is his point of
departure, his spiritual and intellectual home.
I have tried to show that there were reasons for
concealing his connection with Qumran. The circle of
his disciples was responsible for this. They were actual
eyewitnesses and fellow combatants, who were in awe
of the mystery and afraid of persecution, and so did
their best to explain the continuity of a sect in the
person of Rabbi J. by his uniqueness.
They obscured J.'s life until only disconnected re-

143
flections of his life and teaching remained. Since the
Dead Sea finds, we can throw light on these dark pas-
sages again.
His death remained unexplained and inexplicable
to the disciples. In this situation Paul arrived and gave
the despairing group their hope back. The important
thing was not the life of Rabbi J., which was obscured
anyhow, but his death. It was no longer the end of a
life, but the beginning of the life.
As if with a magnifying glass Paul enlarged a stage
of life that confronts every man-death-and inter-
preted it as an act of atonement by God that benefited
everybody. He saw the life of a man as if through a
polarization filter and eliminated all the reflections and
rays that might prejudice this exaltation of a stage in
life. He set aside everything about Rabbi J. that made
him a Jew. His Christ no longer has any earthly Jewish
characteristics, he has become the savior of all mankind.
Halfway between [udaism and Hellenistic influ-
ences, Paul drew a picture of Rabbi J. that could be an
abstract painting. Everyone who saw it rediscovered
his own thoughts and impressions in it; everyone in-
terpreted it according to his own experience of life;
everyone was free to give the picture a name. Even
if it was hung upside down, it was still a picture that
made an impression on people. The Pauline problem
picture became a universal religion, and for two thou-
sand years people have been trying to interpret and
understand it, to overpaint and restore it.
The historical Rabbi J. is hardly mentioned any
more. The clique of theologians and churches who are

144
considered the trustees of his heritage is not interested
in his faith, but in faith in him. But what they look on
as the living heritage is not the original one. What they
expound as true Christianity is something quite differ-
ent. "The triumph of Paul meant the definitive oblitera-
tion of the historical Jesus. The historical Jesus has
reached us embedded in Christianity like a fly in
amber.:" (Carmichael.)

145
 Fourteen
RABBI J.'S ANSWERS

E must bear in mind that every institution, as

I said at the beginning, has an innate tendency to settle
down and become complacent, and tries to give itself a
value per se. Institutions tend to become monopolies.
Just as the trade unions once fought for the workers'
right to strike, yet later took the right away from the
workers and gave the institution of the trade union a
monopoly on striking, the institution of the church has
not escaped this monopolization. What was once God's
mercy, available to anyone who desired it, became a
means of grace offered by the church, available only to
those who belonged to it and lived according to its
rules. And as institutions develop their own laws which
ensure their ability to function even when their original
function has disappeared, they all need periodic re-
visions, the purpose of which is to check whether the
"functionaries" are really doing what they ought, and
not what they want, to do.
In its outward form the church, too, is nothing more
than an institution-indeed it is one of the oldest. It has
needed revisions and reinterpretations just like other
organizations. It is not sacrosanct or untouchable. And
so down the ages it has had to accept reinterpretations
or reject them whether it was willing to or not. All
these reinterpretations were based on the assumption

147
that the church was no longer fulfilling the mission with
which it had been entrusted in the New Testament.
People continually measured the present against
Rabbi J.'s original mission and often only the accident
of a historical constellation or the power game-fre-
quently political-has decided whether the church
recognized its critics as reformers or condemned them
as heretics. For what was really Rabbi J.' s original mis-
sion was not established so long as people considered
the New Testament as a whole and did not know which
texts or passages came closest in content to his
teaching.
Since the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls, we
possess, for the first time in nearly two thousand years,
documents for comparison which lie outside the ecclesi-
astical system and outside the Bible itself, and are
historicaUy older than the twenty-seven canonical scrip-
tures of the New Testament. We are not fobbed off
with suppositions about Rabbi J.'s spiritual and intel-
lectual background. We can compare his supposed
background with the facts.
To repeat a quotation: "Ifhistorical research has suc-
ceeded in proving that an irreconcilable antithesis ex-
isted between the historical J. and Christ as preached
and thus that faith in J. had no basis in J. himself ...
it would mean the end of aU Christology. But I am
convinced that even then we theologians would find a
way out-but either we would be lying then or we are
lying now."'
I had an answer ready to this quotation from Heinz
Zahrnt when I first used it at the end of the account of

148
the effect and operation of the first filter (cf. Chapter
10), but first I wanted to write about the second filter
that had altered the picture again and even more funda-
mentally. I know that it would be possible to write
massive tomes about the second filter alone and still
more examples, but an answer can be given now, for
the man who is not prepared to draw the logical con-
clusions from the foregoing would not do so even if he
were given more facts!
I am convinced that the answer is that an irrecon-
cilable antithesis between the historical J. and Christ
as preached actually does exist. The Christ whom the
church preaches has nothing in common with the his-
torical Rabbi J., not even his name.
If Church and theologians are really concerned with
the historical Rabbi J., then they ought to leave out the
heathen miracle stories and speak soberly and realis-
tically about a man whose search for God led him to
a strictly orthodox and ascetic desert sect, who, in ex-
pectation of God's intervention, altered his way of
thinking and had himself baptized; who then traveled
through the country, proclaiming the call to repentance
to his fellow countrymen-and no one else; whose dis-
ciples looked on him as the God-designated liberator
from the Romans and coming King of Israel, the Mes-
siah, and were themselves persecuted as Zealots. They
ought to relate that this mission of political liberation,
which could only come about if the people obeyed
God's Law, failed with the arrest and execution of
Rabbi J. by the Romans, and that his disciples fled in
despair.

149
 If church and theologians are really concerned with
the historical Rabbi J., then they ought to speak of a
man who called for the complete abandonment of pos-
sessions so that the law of Moses could be kept more
strictly; they should depict him as a man who was an
out-and-out Jew and understood the coming of the
kingdom of God not as a spiritual event, but as the
independence of the chosen Jewish people brought
about by piety; who addressed Yahweh as father be-
cause according to the actual Bible stories God had
described himself as the father of Israel, but who as a
Jew would never have dreamt of looking on himself
as the physical son of God or appearing as mediator
between man and God.
If church and theologians were really concerned
with the historical Jew J 0' then they should have spoken
of an exceptional man who fascinated other men and
undoubtedly possessed unusual faculties and-like the
Essenes-understood something of the art of healing.
They should have told the world about a man who
spoke differently and more convincingly about Yahweh,
the invisible and only God and his relation to man.
If church and theologians were really concerned
with the historical J., they should have said more about
God and less about Rabbi J. For they ought to think and
perceive things in the Jewish way before they speak as
Christians.
Instead they "preach" an obscured and distorted
"Christ" originated by history and tradition, in whom
Rabbi J. would recognize himself with astonishment
and horror, if at all. They speak of the Savior and the

150
resurrected J., they call him the Son of God, who takes
our sins upon him, the mediator, redeemer, and Lord;
today in the Creed they still profess that he was born
of a virgin and went up to heaven, where he sits at the
right hand of God-in not a single word of which would
Rabbi J. recognize himself and say: Yes, that is I.
They talk of the Last Supper and the New Testa-
ment, of love and redemption, of Our Father and the
Sermon on the Mount-and each time Rabbi J. would
stand up and say: Yes, but it wasn't like that at all.
They talk of God in Christ, of his uniqueness and
the exemplary sin-free life he led-and each time Rabbi
J. would take a step backward and say: I was a devout
Jew like other Jews. I sought God and I do not know
whether I found him-my God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?
When church and theologians speak about him,
they either do so like Luther four hundred and fifty
years ago and say: "l believe that J. Christ, the true
God born of the Father in eternity and also true man
born of the Virgin Mary, is my Lord, who hath re-
deemed me a lost and condemned man.?" or they talk
with "admittedly, ... buts" about the dangerous com-
parison with reality and use the community of the
faithful as historical proof: "When the New Testament
speaks of J. Christ, it means the J. of faith, admittedly
J. himself, but in the form in which the New Testament
makes him known to us: J. as Lord and 'object' of the
Christian Faith.:" Or the same thing, this time as
phrased by a progressive Catholic: "If we want to ex-
press anything religiously and theologically meaningful

151
about J. Christ himself today, we cannot do it without
also describing the nature of the faith itself as action,
which sees J. as the Christ."s
But they do not have the courage to admit that their
Christ is possibly someone quite different from Rabbi
J. and that the historical Rabbi J. differs fundamentally
from the one in whom people believe.
Sometimes they even turn the sequence of events
around and argue from the end instead of the begin-
ning which establishes the criterion. Thus, according
to Bonhoeffer, the attempt "to separate a synoptic J.
from a Pauline Christ is historically and dogmatically
doomed to failure. From the dogmatic point of view,
if this separation of J. from Christ were possible, the
church's message would become an illusion.:" What if
it did? Where does it say that the church's message is
right and must be preserved? Does the search for his-
torical truth come to a halt when the existence of an
institution is endangered?
Here Bonhoeffer, who otherwise has said a good
deal that is worthy of reflection about a "Christianity
without religion," is completely caught in the ideologi-
cal screen according to which inconvenient truths ought
not to exist. If the historical J. were not also the J. who
is preached, he writes, "the substance would be taken
away from the Church.?"
Consequently he claims that "the present Christ ...
is the historical Christ.?" That is simply a statement of
faith, with which to calm angry Christians and bolster
up the institution. It has nothing to do with reality.
Nevertheless, I am convinced that church and

152
theologians look upon themselves as the legitimate heirs
and trustees of Rabbi J.' s heritage and will not recog-
nize a single argument that might call into question
their existence or their convictions, for here the wonder-
ful function of perpetual excuses (mentioned by
Zahrnt) begins to operate and constantly produces
arguments based on the wrong plane. Presumably the
church and its theologians will still rely on their idee
fixe about the Enlightenment and say that all reproaches
and arguments were met in the last century. Using this
defense they once again shelve a decision, which has
long since confronted the vast majority of Christians,
who consider the church and Christianity to be un-
trustworthy and dishonest.
I have a certain sympathy with the church's atti-
tude, for what institution likes to see the justification
for its existence argued away, if it can prevent it with
the counterargument that its existence and faith have
lasted for two thousand years. But in that case the
theologians are not only lying now, but they would be
lying then. For they are not in the least concerned with
historical "truth," but only with their prestige and their
existence. They use Rabbi J. as an excuse for an entirely
different faith.
No one should assume that churches ever dissolve
themselves because of error, even given good reason.
That would be an illusion, however justified the disso-
lution might be. But I say that they should be honest
and either admit that they have to think things out
again or that they are freeing themselves by a new
"creed" from the misleading conception that they still

153
represent the true and original goals and intentions of
the man after whom they call themselves. That would
be an honorable decision, and consequently what the
churches would still describe as religion even then
would have to be honest.
Then religion would be nothing but man's sub-
sequent reflections about J.'s origin, life, death, and
meaning, without such personal reflection being arbi-
trarily withdrawn from the discussion as "revelation"
or rejected as error.
Even then the churches would still call themselves
"Christian" for they can no more escape from two
thousand years of history than the individual can. But
then the founder of their religion would be Paul of
Tarsus and not Rabbi J., who has even had his Jewish
name Joshua taken away from him."

154
 NOTES

CHAPTER ONE

1. Letter from Lentulus, who was, according to ancient sources,

an official senior to Pilate.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. John 2:1-2.
5. Das Neue Testament fur Menschen unserer Zeit: translated by
H. Riethmiiller, Quell Verlag, 1964.
6. NT 68, Wurttemberg Bible Institute, 1967.
7. Shalom Ben Chorin, Jesus-Bruder Jesus-Der Nazarener in
judischer Sicht, List Verlag, 1967, pp. 84-85.
8. Matthew 13:10-13, 16.
9. Matthew 13:18, 19.
10. Matthew 7:28-29.

CHAPTER TWO

1. [osephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XX, 9, 1, para. 200.

2. Tacitus, Annals, XV, 44 (written between 115 and 117 H.C.

Another profane source that tells us about a "Messianic

movement" in Rome is Suetonius, who never mentions
Christians or Jesus by name, although he is referring to
Christians.)
3. Matthew 10:34
4. Macmillan, 1962.
5. Luke 22 :35-36.

155
6. Carmichael, The Death of Jesus, Macmillan, New York, 1962,
p.152.
7. Ibid., p. 157.
8. Ibid., p. 89-90.
9. Ibid., p. 90.

CHAPTER THREE

1. Flavius [osephus, The Jewish War, quoted here in GA. Wil-

liamson's translation, Penguin Classics, 1970, Ch. 7, pp.
125-30. Flavius [osephus was born in Jerusalem in 37 s.c,
He was a Jewish commander in Galilee during the Jewish
rebellion against the Romans, 66-8 D.C., went over to the
Romans, and died in Rome in 100 D.C.

2. From Edmund Wilson, The Scrolls from the Dead Sea, New
York, Oxford University Press, 1955.
3. Luke 9 :3-6.
4. John 12:6.
5. John 3 :25. The difference between the single "baptism" in the
Jordan and the repeated ritual washing at Qumran postu-
lated by many theologians is not convincing. Both were
symbolic of purification and signified rejection of evil, as
it says in the Manual of Discipline: "No one is to go into
water in order to obtain the purity of holy men. For men
cannot be purified except they repent of their evil" (Man-
ual of Discipline, 5 :13, 14). The only difference is that the
men of Qumran performed this "purification" daily, where-
as according to the NT baptism as a sign of conversion
took place only once. One does not exclude the other.
6. Matthew 5 :37.
7. Philo, Quod omnis probus liber sit, Ch. 12. Philo of Alex-
andria, Jewish Hellenistic philosopher, was born in Alex-
andria some thirty to twenty years D.C.

156
 8. For further details see Albert Schweitzer, Geschichte de Leben-
[esu-Forschung, Siebenstern-Taschenbuch, 1966, Vol. I,
pp. 79 H.
9. Ibid., p. 191.
10. Ibid., p. 195.
11. Pliny, Naturalis Hisioria V, XVII, 73. Pliny the Elder, born c.
A.D. 23, died during the eruption of Vesuvius that de-
stroyed Pompeii.

CHAPTER FIVE

1. 1 Maccabees 1 :12.
2.1 Maccabees 1:56; 2:27-31.
3. Kurt Schubert, Die Gemeinde vom Toten Meer, Munich, 1956,
pp. 20 H.
4. War Scroll 1 :1-5 (quoted from Theodor H. Gaster, The Dead
Sea Scriptures, Doubleday, New York, 1956, p. 281).
5. Manual of Discipline 1:9-11 (see Note 4).
6. Ibid., 3 :19.
7. Ibid., 3:15.
8. John 1:1-5.
9. Mark 1:5.
10. John 1:28.
11. John 1:35-39.
12. Mark 1 :12, 13.

CHAPTER SIX

1. Malachi 3 :23.
2. Matthew 3:1-3.
3. A cantilena is a kind of melody akin to plainsong. The Maso-
retic text means the critical glosses on the Hebrew text of
the Old Testament made by the Masoretes, Jewish scribes
of the seventh to tenth centuries.

157
 4. Shalom Ben Chorin, Jesus, bruder Jesus-der Nazarener in
iicdiecher sicht, List Verlag, 1967, p. 45.
5. Luke 3:4.
6. Manual of Discipline 8:13,14.
7. Millar Burrows, Die Schriftrollen vam Toten Meer, Verlag
C. H. Beck, Munich, 1958, Vol. I, p. 271.
8. Burrows, Vol. I, p. 272 (see Note 7).
9. Kurt Schubert, Die Schriftrollen vom Toten Meer, p. 110.
10. Luke 1 :80.
11. josephus, Jewish War, 11.

CHAPTER SEVEN

1. John M. Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls, Penguin, 1956.

2. A part of the Essene library had, in fact, been found even
earlier. At the beginning of the third century, Origenes
wrote that he had found a translation of the Psalms and
other Greek and Hebrew books in an earthenware vessel
near Jericho. Nearly six hundred years later the Patriarch
of Seleukia said that he knew books of the Old Testament
and other scriptures 'that were discovered in a cave near
Jericho' (The Shrine of the Book and its Scrolls, published
by the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1966, p. 1).
3. Manual of Discipline 1 :14 ff.
4. Book of Jubilees 6:36-38, and the Book of Enoch. The figure
364 is the product of multiplying the days of the week by
the weeks in a year (7 times 52). Although this does not
tally exactly with the solar year of 365.25 days, it never-
theless ensures the regular return of the days of the week,
including the Sabbath, and can easily be corrected by a
leap year. The lunar year, on the other hand, consisting of
twelve revolutions of the moon, has 354 days and is eleven
days shorter than the solar year. But since the Passover

158
 feast, dependent on the Spring moon, is always celebrated
on the 15th day of the month of Nisan, it is only possible to
keep the date constant by a complicated system of addi-
tional days and even additional months. As a result feast
days are constantly moved about. Thus according to the
lunar calendar the 15th of Nisan, for example, does not
always fall on the same day of the week. According to the
solar calendar, as used by the Essenes, the Sabbath and the
Passover Feast always fell on Tuesday-Wednesday.
5. War Scroll 11, 1 ff.
6. Kurt Schubert, Die Gemeinde vom Toten Meer, Munich, 1956,
p.53.
7. According to the Qumran Manual of Discipline, it was even
forbidden to relieve oneself on the Sabbath. The Damascus
scroll on the other hand, which also forms part of the
Essene library, modifies the strictness of the Qumran rules
on various points, for example the prohibition of swearing,
divorce and the rules for the Sabbath. In Ch. 10, 15 ff.,
unlike Qumran, only the normally current Sabbath rules
are stressed. Thus in the compilation of the Essene scrip-
tures we must assume different stages of development and
starting points, as well as the possibility of a different
interpretation by members of the sect.
8. Matthew 12:1-8, Mark 2:23-28, and Luke 6:1.
9. Millar Burrows, p. 71.
10. Shalom Ben Chorin, ]., Bruder l., pp. 160-61. Re the calendar
question of also Thierry Maertens, Heidnisch-iiidische
Wurzeln der Christlichen Feste, Griinewald Verlag, Mainz,
1965, pp. 86-95.
Maertens writes as follows about the date of the Last Sup-
per: "In the year of Jesus's Last Supper the Passover feast
of the 15th Nisan according to the permanent (i.e., solar)

159
 calendar fell on a Tuesday as prescribed; but according to
the lunar calendar used by the Temple the Passover feast
fell on the following Friday. Christ celebrated the Passover
meal with his apostles on Tuesday evening ..." (p. 91).
The reason why some authors give the date of the Passover
feast as the 14th Nisan and others as the 15th Nisan and
similarly make either Tuesday or Wednesday the first day
of the week in the solar calendar may be because accord-
ing to our calendar system days in the east are reckoned
from evening to evening and so have two dates.
Details of the various calendar systems and conversion
formulas can be found in Der Kalender by WaIter F. Wis-
licenus, Verlag Teubner, Leipzig, 1905.
11. Mark 14:13-15.
12. Ben Chorin (Note 10, p. 161).
13. Manual of Discipline 6 :3-13.
14. Manual of Discipline 6:8, 9.
15. Luke 20 :24.
16. John 13:14-16.
17. For further details see Ben Chorin (Note 10, pp. 162-66).

CHAPTER EIGHT

1. Matthew 5 :13
2. Mark 9:49.
3. Matthew 5:3, in Luther's translation.
4. The New Testament, translated by Franz Sigge, Fischer Bilch-
erei,1958.
S. The New English Bible, Oxford/Cambridge University Press,
1961.
6. NT 68, Wurttembergische Bibelanstalt, Stuttgart, 1967.
7. Quell Verlag, Stuttgart, 1964, translator Helmut Riethmiiller.
8. Das Neue Testament, by [org Zink, Krauz Verlag, 1965.

160
 9. Shalom Ben Chorin, 1., Bruder 1., der Nazarener in judischer
Sicht, List Verlag, 1967, pp. 70-71.
10. Kurt Schubert, The Dead Sea Community: Its Origins and Its
Teachings, Humanities, 1958.
11. Millar Burrows: More Light on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Viking,
New York, 1958, p. 95.
12. Matthew 6:9-13.
13. Matthew 24 :15, 16.
14. Danieln :31.
15. 1 Maccabees 1 ff.
16. Frank Moore Cross, The Ancient Library of Qumran and
Modern Btblical Studies, New York, 1961, p. 159.
17. Ibid., p. 200.
18. Ibid., p. 204.
19. Luke 2:14.
20. The usual objectives to a comparison of these related passages
are as follows:
1. That owing to the strict Qumran rules neither John the
Baptist (Ch. 6) nor J. (if we assume that both of them were
Essenes) could have addressed himself to outsiders because
that would have meant defilement, and besides, it was a
duty to hate the Sons of Darkness:
2. That the crucial "Christian" message of loving one's
enemies in the eighth chapter of the gospel according to
St. Matthew is not recorded in the Qumran texts.
Re Point 1, note the following quotations from the Manual
of Discipline which are not restricted to a monastic com-
munity:
"To act truthfully and righteously and justly on earth,"
(1 :5).
"To bring into a bond of mutual love all who have declared
their willingness to carry out the statutes of God" (1 :7).

161
 "This is the way those spirits operate in the world. The
enlightenment of man's heart, the making straight before
him all the ways of righteousness and truth ..." (4:2).
"These are the things that come to man in this world
through communion with the spirit of truth." (4:6).
"No one is to engage in discussion or disputation with
men of ill repute. . . . With those, however, that have
chosen the right path everyone is indeed to discuss mat-
ters pertaining to the apprehension of God's truth and of
His righteous judgments. . . ." These passages make it
clear that the actual rules of the Qumran order provided
for a certain missionary and propaganda activity, on
roughly the same lines as that carried out by John the
Baptist and Jesus. And words in the Manual of Discipline
such as " to show how faithfulness may be maintained
on earth how, by active performance of justice ... in-
iquity may be cleared, and how one can walk with all men
with the quality of truth and in conduct appropriate to
every occasion ..." (7:3,4), sound just like the mission
that John and Jesus sought to fulfill.
The summons to join the Essenes is issued to everybody:
"If any man in Israel wish to be affiliated to the formal
congregation of the community ..." (6:13), he is to be
examined. The Qumran Manual of Discipline even pro-
vides for members of the order meeting outside the com-
munity. Such cases were regulated according to recognized
Jewish law: "Wherever there be ten men who have been
formally enrolled in the community, one who is a priest is
not to depart from them." (6:3, also Damascus Document
13:2.)

Lastly the Manual of Discipline also provides for its mem-

bers practicing a profession. If a man had a year's novitiate

162
behind him and was admitted by a majority, he had to
"bring with him all his property and the tools of his
profession. These are to be committed to the custody of the
community's 'minister of works.'" (6:19.) In other words,
the Essenes of Qumran could obviously practice a pro-
fession outside the monastery, just as some of Jesus'
disciples were and remained fishermen.
Re Point 2: The passage in Matthew 5:43-44 ("You have
heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neigh-
bour and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your
enemies") is usually considered a counterargument by
theologians because the Manual of Discipline expressly
prescribes its members to hate the "Sons of Darkness."
The Sons of Darkness were understood to mean nearly all
non-Qumran members. But such a generalization is not
admissible according to the Manual of Discipline. The
passages quoted under Point 1 show a marked differen-
tiation between the "froward men" (who were to be found
in the Temple at Jerusalem) and the others.
But even if hate is demanded in one (the only!) passage in
the Manual of Discipline, this should not be made too
much of. Even in the New Testament there are some hair-
raising passages to set against the commandment to love
ones enemies. Jesus curses whole cities, he says he comes
to bring a sword and there is not a single example in the
New Testament of Jesus himself practicing loving his ene-
mies, apart from tlre one (the only!) remark in Matthew.
The Qumran scrolls are not as uniform as we should like;
they are not more uniform than the New Testament itself.
Like the Testament scriptures they were not written by
one hand at one time, but originated at different stages of
development. Consequently there are contradictory say-
ings in the scrolls, which are still further intensified by the

163
 Damascus Document. This meant that there was consid-
erable latitude in the texts for the Essenes to choose from.
Jesus knew this, too, and had to make up his mind about
them. For his command to love one's enemies Jesus could
appeal to the Manual of Discipline: "1 will requite no one
with evil, I will pursue men with good, for in God is the
judgment over everything that lives...." (10:17,18; cf. x,
10:23, 11 :1-3.)
That agrees with the "passionateness of human love" that
Philo of Alexandria attributed to the Essenes and which
would also invalidate another counterargument that is
usually produced in this connection, namely that Jesus
could not possibly have consorted with publicans (agents
of the Roman occupying power), beggars, and whores if
he had been an Essene. Apart from the question whether
these were not precisely the people who might "wish to
be affiliated to the formal congregation of the community"
[i.e., the Essenes)-the publican Zacchaeus, who climbed
a tree in Jericho in order to see Jesus, even gave half his
goods away to the poor-apart from that, the Damascus
Document contains the specific injunction "to love each
man his neighbour like himself; to grasp the hand of the
poor, the needy and the stranger; to seek each man the
welfare of his fellow." (Damascus Document 6 :21.)
As not all the scrolls have come down to us-some were
destroyed and others are only fragments-we should be
careful about the exclusions we make. If something can-
not be pointed to in the scrolls, it is not necessarily against
or outside Essene doctrine if it is in the New Testament.
Negative proof cannot be furnished from both sides. Still,
we prove the relationship between twins by their visible
(manifest) similarity and not by their potential (latent) but
not demonstrable differences.

164
 CHAPTER NINE

1. Matthew 13:16.
2. Matthew 22:21.
3. Carrnichael, p. 125.
4.1 Maccabees 2:27-31.
5. Yigael Yadin, Masada, Hoffmann und Campe, 1967, p. 173.
6. Ibid., p. 174.
7. Ibid., p. 174.
8. Ibid., p. 174.
9. Luke 6:12-16, Matthew 10:1-4, Mark 3:13-19.
10. Friedrich Samuel Rothenberg (ed.), Manner und Frauen des
Neuen Testaments, Verlag Brockhaus, 1966, p. 55.
11. Matthew 16:17.
12. Cannichael, p. 129-30.

CHAPTER TEN

1. Matthew 27:37.
The initials INRI (Jesus Nazarenus Rex [udaeorum) come
from John 19:19 and indicate a later development because
of the insertion of Nazarenus. Albert Schweitzer has this
to say in his Leben-leeu-Torschung: "The origin of the
title can be traced. In the post-Pauline period the Chris-
tians were split into factions that were for or against the
ascetic way of life. The supporters of asceticism were called
after the old Jewish Nazarites (Amos 2:11-12). The refer-
ence to the Messianic passage, Isaiah 11 :1, which mentions
a branch (nezer), may also have had an influence on the
choice of this title. Nazareans and Nazarenes are etymo-
logically identical with Nazarites. In any case neither of
the first two expressions had anything to do with the town
of Nazareth originally; if they had, the word would have
been Nazarethenes or something similar. As the ascetic
group naturally claimed that Jesus was a Nazarite, he was

165
 given that epithet. This stage is recorded in the Acts of the
Apostles (German version). It describes Christians as
Nazareans (Acts 24:5) and also describes Jesus as "a Naza-
rean" (Acts 2:22; 3:6; 4:10; 6:14; 22:8; 26:9.).
Later the anti-ascetic groups tried hard to paralyze the
Nazarite movement inside Christianity. For this purpose
they created a "new quasi-historical basis" for the expres-
sion and made Jesus come from the town of Nazareth. The
proof of this is in the Gospel according to St. Mark which
consistently talks of "Nazarenes" ... and avoids the word
"Nazarean." (Siebenstern-Taschenbuch, Vol. n. p. 470.)
2. Thus Heinz Zahmdt: "The historical power that we meet first
in the tradition is always the Church. At first we see the
picture of the historical figure solely in its mirror. And
this picture is decided by the belief that Jesus is the Christ
and it is drawn to represent this belief and show it as true.
In the process the Church created the story of Jesus as we
know it for the first time. It has put words into his mouth
that he never spoke and related deeds that he never did."
(Es begann mit Jesus von Nazareth, Kreuz Verlag, 2d ed.,
1960, p. 84.)
The Praktische Bibellexikon (Herder Verlag, 1969, col.
389) says, "the Christian church had a creative influence
on the formation and extension of the original Jesus tra-
dition owing to its post-crucifixion outlook."
Thus Herbert Braun: "The sources tell us about Jesus in
such a way that they assert his importance a priori, that
they instruct us in the Christian sense and try to act the
missionary ... the individual evangelists also have clearly
outlined theological aims and objects in view which they
impress on the oral or written material handed down to
them. This means that they make J. talk in a way that con-
forms to their theological conviction." (J.-der Mannaus

166
 Nazareth und seine Zeit, Kreuz VerIag, 1969, pp. 30,32.)
3. Luke 1:1-3.
4. Matthew 10:34.
5. Luke 22 :36.
6. Kreuz VerIag, Stuttgart, 2d ed., 1960, p. 112.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

1. Hermann Raschke has recently tried to prove the unhistorical-

ness of J. (in ]esusbilder in theologischer Sichi, edited by
KarIheinz Deschner, List VerIag, 1966). The result is not
so original as the method. Raschke starts with the ambig-
uity of Hebrew words, which are written without vowels
and which, given different vowels, have another meaning.
Now Raschke thinks that the writers of the NT deliber-
ately used this method to describe a secret doctrine intel-
ligible only to initiates, which he links with Qumran.
Accordingly proper names and whole events were only bear-
ers of a special meaning which vocalized conventionally
sounds quite harmless (and corresponds to the text of the
NT as translated today). Although Raschke may have gone
much too far in his conclusions, he once again draws our
attention, in way that deserves our thanks, to the too often
disregarded process of the symbolization of individual let-
ters and combinations of letters that lies absolutely in
Jewish thinking and that we find again for example in
Revelation.
2. Prakiisches Bibellexikon, a collaboration between Catholic and
Evangelical theologians, edited by A. Grabner-Haider,
Herder VerIag, Freiberg, 1969, under Qumran, Col. 908.
3. Edmund Wilson, The Scrolls from the Dead Sea, New York,
Oxford University Press, 1955, quoted by Millar Burrows,
Mehr Klarheii iiber die Schriftrollen, C. H. Beck, Munich,
1958, p. 33.

167
 4. Die Bibel und ihre Welt, eine EnzYKlopiidie zur heiligen
Schrift, edited by Gaalyahu Cornfeld (Tel Aviv) and [o-
hannes Botterweck (Bonn), Liibbe Verlag, 1969, Vol. 2,
column 1238.
5. Praktisches Bibellexicon, Col. 854.
6. Acts 9:1-6.
7. Acts 9:18, 19.
8. Acts 24:5. In the original Greek text J. is also described as a
"Nazarene" in Acts 2:28; 3:6; 4:10; 6:14; 22:8, 26. Al-
though the grammatical form "Jesus the Nazarean" is un-
equivocal, the revised Lutheran edition of 1964 translates
the same passage in the text as "Jesus of Nazareth." The
so-called [erusalem Bible correctly translates "Jesus, the
Nazarean."
The Nazareans were an ascetic branch of Jewish Christ-
tianily that is also known under the concept of Ebionites
and probably had a gospel related to Matthew's that orig-
inated in Syria.
The translation of the revised Lutheran edition, as well as
other translations such as the New English Bible of 1961,
simply have the effect of strengthening the faith (cf.
Raschke, Ch. 10).
9. Philippians 3 :4-5.
10. Philippians 3 :9.
11. The only biographical details of Jesus given by Paul are:
a) Jesus was a Jew, "made of a woman, made under the
law" (!) (Calatians 3:16; 4:4).
b) He was descended from David (Romans 1:3).
c) He preached only to Israel (!) "to confirm the promises
made unto the fathers" (Romans 15 :8).
d) He was obedient to God even unto the death of the cross
(Philippians 2:8).
e) He appointed apostles (Galatians1:17, 19).

168
 f) He was reviled and crucified (Romans 15:3; 1 Corin-
thians 15:3; Galatians 2:19-20; 3:13).
g) His crucifixion was due to Jewish infamy (1 ThessaIo-
nians 2:15).
h) He rose again on the third day (1 Corinthians 15:4).
i) He appeared to Peter, the apostles, and the others, and,
in a vision, to Paul (1 Corinthians 15:5-8).
k) He instituted the Last Supper (1 Corinthians 11 :23).
I) And sits on the right hand of God (Romans 8:34).
(After Ioel Carmichael, p. 44).
12. Heinz Zahrnt, Es begann mit ]. von Nazareth, Kreuz Verlag,
Stuttgart, 1960, p. 64.
CHAPTER TWELVE
1. Heinz Zahrnt, Es begann mit ]. von Nazareth-die Frage nach
dem historischen 1., Kreuz Verlag, Stuttgart, 1960, pp. 64,
65. (The Wrede quotations come from his book Paul,
Religionsgeschichtliche Volksbiicher I, 5, 6, Tubingen,
1904.)
2. William Wrede, Paul, quoted by W. G. Kiimmel, Das Neue
Testament, Geschichte der Erforschung seiner Probleme.
Freiburg/Munich, 1958, pp. 377-82.
3. Manner und Frauen des Neuen Testamenie-Biblisches Ta-
schenlexikon, ed. by Friedrich Samuel Rothenberg, Verlag
Brockhaus, 1966, p. 72.
4. Hugh J. SchonfieId, Unerhbrt, diese Christen-Geburt und
Verwandlung der Urkirche, MoIden, 1969, p. 81.
S. Die Bibel und ihre Welt-sine Enzyklopedie zur Heilegen
Schrift, ed. by Gaalyahu Cornfield (Tel Aviv) and [o-
hannes Botterweck (Bonn), Liibbe Verlag, 1969, under
Paul, Col. 1154.
6. Kurt Schubert, Die Gemeinde vom Toian Meer-ihre Eniste-
hung und ihre Lehren, Reinhardt Verlag, Munich, 1958,
pp. 134 and 135.

169
 7. Mark 16:8 (verses 9-20 are a later addition).
8. Matthew 11:14j Matthew 17:12.
9. Mark 6:16.
10. Luke 14:13-31.
11. John 3.
12. Acts 15:22-29.
13. Albert Schweitzer, The Mystique of the Apostle Paul, Sea-
bury, New York, 1954.
14. Carmichael, p. 216.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

1. See Inter alia Exodus 24:6, r, 1 Samuel v.Ie , 1 Samuel 16.

2. Psalm 2:6, 7.
3. 2 Samuel 7 :12,14.
4. Psalm 89 :21,27, 28.
5. Exodus 4:22.
6. Jeremiah 31:7, 9.
7. Carmichael, p. 203-4.
8. Schonfield, p. 286.
9. CarmichaeI, p. 219.

CHAPTER fOURTEEN

1. Heinz Zahrnt, Es begann mit Jesus von Nazareth, Kreuz Ver-

lag, 1960, p. 112.
2. An annotated bibliography on this subject can be found in
Shalom Ben Chorin, Jesus, Bruder J.-der Nazarener in
iicdischer Sicht, List Verlag, 1967.
3. Martin Luther, explanation of the second article of the Creed.
4. Ernst Fuchs in Theolgie fur Nichttheologen-ABC protestant-
ischen Denkens, ed. by H. J. Schultz, Kreuz VerIag, 1964,
under J. Christ.

170
5. Karl Rahner in Das Glaubensbekenntnis-Aspekte fur ein
neues Verstiindnis, ed. by Gerhard Rein, Kreuz Verlag,
p.20.
6. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wer ist und wer war Christus?-seine
Geschichte und sein Geheimnis, Furche Verlag, 1962, p. 60.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. "Jesus" is the Greek form of the name Joshua, which was pro-
nounced [ehoshua or Ieshua around the birth of Christ.
Joshua means "Yahweh helps" and is explained as follows
in Matthew 1:21: " ... thou shalt call his name JESUS: for
he shall save his people from their sins." At that time it
was one of the common Jewish names.

171
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

OLD TESTAMENT

COOLS, P. J., editor, German edition: Theodor Schegler, OSB,

Geschichte und Religion des Alien Testaments, WaIter,
Olten, 1965.
CORNFELD, GAALYAHU (Tel Aviv), and BOTTERWECK, G.
JOHANNES (Bonn), editors, Die Bibel und ihre Welt-
Eine Enzyklopiidie zur H eiligen Schrift, 2 vols., Gustav
Liibbe Verlag, 1969.
EICHROTH, WALTER, Religionsgeschichte lsraels, Prancke Ver-
lag, Berne and Munich, 1969.
MAYER, REINHOLD, Der Babylonische Talmud, selected and
translated by Reinhold Mayer, Goldmann Verlag, Munich,
1965.

QUMRAN AND THE ESSENES

ALLEGRO, JOHN M., The Dead Sea Scrolls-Penguin, 1956.

BRAUN, HERBERT, Qumran und das Neue Testament, 2 vols.,
C. B. Mohr, Tiiblngen, 1969.
BURROWS, MILLAR, More Light on the Dead Sea Scrolls,
Viking, New York, 1958.
CROSS, FRANK MOORE, JR., The Ancient Library of Qumran
and Modern Biblical Studies, Anchor Books, New York,
1961.

DANIELOU, JEAN, Qumran und der Llrserung des Chrisientums,

Matthias Griinewald Verlag, Mainz, 1959.

173
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JESUS AND HIS AGE

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JESUS AND HIS LIFE

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in jiidischer Sicht, List Verlag, Munich, 1967.
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BRAUN, HERBERT, Iesus-Der Mann aus Nazareth und seine
Zeit, Kreuz VerIag, Stuttgart, 1969.
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Francke VerIag, Berne, Dalp Taschenbuch, 1957.
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nach dem historischen Jesus, Kreuz VerIag, Stuttgart, 1960.

THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY

BEN CHORIN, SHALOM, Paulus-Der Volkerapostel in jiidi-

scher Sichi, List VerIag, Munich, 1970.
REIN, GERHARD, editor, Das Glaubensbekenntnis-Aspekte fur
ein neues Verstiindnis, Kreuz VerIag, Stuttgart, 1967.
SCHONFIELD, HUGH J., The Passover Plot, Geis, New York,
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griffe, Kreuz VerIag, Stuttgart, 1967.

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 THE CHURCH AND JUDAISM

ISAAC, JULES, Genesis des Antisemitismus ver und nach Chris-

tus: Europa Verlag, Vienna, 1969.
RENGSTROF, HEINRICH, and KORTZFLEISCH, SIEGFRIED,
editors, Kirche und Synagoge-Handbuch zur Geschichte
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SCHULTZ, HANS JURGEN, ]uden-Christen-Deutsche, Kreuz
Verlag, Stuttgart, 1961.

176
Printed page 134 - 'B.C.' should read 'A.D.'