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Jesus the Man: New Interpretations from the Dead Sea Scrolls is a book written by the Australian biblical scholar and theologian Barbara Thiering. It was first published by Doubleday in 1992 with the title, Jesus & The Riddle of The Dead Sea Scrolls: Unlocking The Secrets of His Life Story.

Using a Hebraic technique called "pesher", a theory of scriptural interpretation, previously partly known, but now fully defined showing how scripture was written in two levels of text: the surface text for ordinary readers with limited knowledge, the concealed sub-text for trained initiates with deeper knowledge. Thiering evidences very systematically, with unprecedented cross-referencing, that the Gospels contain a precise religious and political history of Jesus's mission within the Essene community. The "surface meaning" of the Gospels is "for 'babes'", in contrast to the hidden story accessible by knowing the symbolic meanings, linguistic games, and second and third names of key persons and religious titles and names of places. Using this system very methodically, completed by scrutinizing the Dead Sea Scrolls, Thiering proves, among other things, that Jesus was a member of the Essene community and sheds immense light into the details of Judaism and of Essene practices and beliefs. In his 2007 Easter Address and in his book Jesus of Nazareth Pope Benedict XVI confirmed the probability that Jesus was an Essene. This view was a profound shock to scholars who had previously sought to entirely discount Theiring's research results.

Thiering's book was a bestseller, and has been several times reprinted. Its argument has been widely rejected by the scholarly community.

Content

The central thesis of the book is that Jesus was one of three leaders of a major sect that of Essene priests who seceded in the 2nd century BCE from Zadokite priests, religiously ascetic, with monasteries and nunneries, separate from the other sects, the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The Essenes were active in the Western Mission led by Jesus as the Priest-King to convert gentiles and they were intimately connected to the Herodian kings. He was not of virgin birth except insofar as his Mother Mary was leader of the Order of the Virgins. He did not die on the Cross. He married for dynastic and religious reasons Mary Magdalene, fathered two sons, and later divorced after the crucifixion when Mary Magdelene sided with the East or Orthodox wing of the Essenes led by Jesus's brother James who did not believe in the right of converted gentiles to rise in the Essene priesthood above the rank of village priests. Jesus subsequently remarried and had a daughter, according to Thiering's analysis. In her decoding of the sub-texts in the Books of the New Testament led her to posit that Jesus personally supervised the writing of two of the Books of the New Testament and that when he died it was after the Paul's death in Rome and that he had travelled with Paul to Rome via Malta. After the crucifixion Thiering maintains that Jesus is referred to in the New Testament as "The Word", and probably died sometime after AD 64" possibly on a Herodian estate. From the New Testament gospels and Dead Sea Scrolls, Thiering constructs a new history of early Christianity which she contends was hidden in pesher coding. Thiering finds that the biography of Jesus hidden in the New Testament shows him to have been born in Qumran in March, 7 BC, and that his father was The David or King Priest of the Essenes who had been a Zealot sympathizer or leader until abhorring the use of violence. Qumran was the Essenes' principal religious centre called New Jerusalem beside the Dead Sea close to where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947. Robert E. Van Voorst disparagingly summarizes Thiering's account of the life of Jesus as follows:

He was born out of wedlock to a woman of Qumran's royal-priestly line, befriended outcasts, and performed no miracles. He was crucified with Simon Magus and Judas Iscariot at Qumran, but survived by snake venom that rendered him unconscious. Jesus then married twice, to Mary Magdalene and Lydia of Philippi, fathering three children. After wandering the Mediterranean, he died in obscurity in Rome.

Van Voorst, in common with many other critics, cannot have read Theiring's research carefully or he would have known that Thiering shows very convincingly extensive evidence that Jesus was married to Mary Magdelene long before the crucifixion. Jesus's distinctive ideas arose from the Essenes. In March, 17 AD, he was initiated at the age of 23, and took a political stance in favour of his spiritual "father" in the hierarchy, Jonathan Annas the chief priest or Pope (after the excommunication (symbolic beheading) of John the Baptist) "who taught peace with Rome and the promotion of Gentiles". He was rebaptized by John the Baptist in March, 29 AD. Thiering says that John is identical to the Essene Teacher of Righteousness, praised in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Jesus soon split from John, becoming one of the leaders of a party "called the Twelve Apostles", some of whom (including Judas Iscariot and Simon Magus) were zealots and others (including Jesus), pacifists. Because of opposition by John The Baptist who favoured James because Jesus was born before the formal requirement of a second marriage of Joseph and Mary, the first being the betrothal. Strict adherence to rules was essential. Because of this dispute over legitimacy, Jesus is referred to the Dead Sea Scrolls as the Wicked Priest. The faithful adherence and obsession with rules and calendrical days and hours of each day, and reproducing past religiously significant events is a most fascinating aspect of Theiring's numerous discoveries of the period. Thiering discovers in the books of the New Testament, including most especially and most analytically brilliantly in the Book of Revelations, a precise history of events in time sequence. She also examines each of the miracles in the New Testament and finds in them sacred events, moral lessons, and important religious symbolic meanings, but not inexplicable or magical miracles, but rather events marking turning points in the history of "the Fig Tree", as the movement was called. Thiering sees Jesus as a prominent member of the Essene movement. His prominence derived from his descent from the Davidic kingship, as well as the efforts of his great grandfather, said to have been Hillel the Great, and his grandfather, Heli, to establish schools of religious instruction for Jews of the Diaspora. Unlike Simon Magus, the second most important figure in the New Testament according to Thiering, Jesus was a pacifist. He opposed the zealots, calling for a reform and renewal of religion. This would lead to a Jewish empire which would overrule the Roman Empire by its appeal to reason and morality.

Scholarly reception

Thiering's thesis has received skepticism, often emotional and excoriating in tome, from religious scholars, while the academic community has remained largely silent. The difficulty for most Christian scholars is not merely the profound upset to central tenets, but the systematic completeness of Thiering's analyses and vast number of findings that make almost all other studies look highly speculative and hypothetical at best, while her work is presented authoritatively as proven and demonstratively, most laboriously, cross-correlated textual facts. For example, a detailed discussion of Thiering's writings, is given by N.T. Wright, a prominent figure in the historical Jesus debate. Wright debated Thiering in a BBC program in 1992. In his book Who was Jesus? Wright notes that Thiering objected that her claims about Jesus' personal life were sensationalized by the media and by her publishers introductory chapters to her books. He, however, argued rhetorically that they are the only significantly original aspect of the book. Thiering had already asserted many new findings in both major and minor details, one of the least controversial being that John the Baptist is identical with the Teacher of Righteousness and that the Gospels were written in pesher code in earlier works or versions. In 1990. she had made a documentary for the Discovery Channel entitled "The Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls", in which these views were convincingly aired. Van Voorst describes it as "especially controversial" at the time. Wright notes that Thiering's new ideas about Jesus's family life after being broadcast in 1990 on Australian TV on Palm Sunday, and that the resulting furore "attracted the attention of eager publishers" who persuaded her to incorporate her earlier theories "in a manner more accessible to the non-scholarly reader". The implications is that the resulting books were sensationalized and simplifications. But, any readers of Thiering's books, of the chapters after the introductory chapters, which she did not write, would find that the scholarship is not much diluted and that the cross-referencing or internal proofs of the pesher technique are suitably replete and academically rigorous.

Wright argues that Thiering is correct to emphasise the humanity of Jesus and to place him in the context of expectations of dramatic divine intervention in history. Wright agrees with Thiering that Jesus offered "a new way of working out what it meant to be the loyal people of God—a way, specifically that avoided the violence that was so endemic in their society". However, he concludes that her way of "redressing the balance" in accounts of Jesus is "totally absurd":

It is safe to say that no serious scholar has given this elaborate and fantastic theory any credence whatsoever. It is nearly ten years since it was published; the scholarly world has been able to take a good look at it: and the results are totally negative. The only scholar who takes Thiering seriously is Thiering herself."

Several writers, picking up on this refrain, have consequently compared the book to fantasy fiction. If indeed it was a work of fantasy, scholars, would have to conclude that it is the most brilliant fantasy every conceived. Arguably, what Thiering has done is to show that it is possible to analyse the Gospels with immense academic rigour using a text-based scientific method, and this alone must be upsetting to all and any scholars who have not worked any thing like as hard, as incisively, or as encyclopedically as Thiering has. The number of critiques that avoid discussion of detail and instead offer only general condemnation is legion, but unsurprising given the tectonic difficulties that Thiering's researches present to all who wish to hold onto only the surface texts of the Gospels and refusal to countenance the history revealed in the sub-texts by Thiering or that Christianity has its origins in the Essene Community, or that we have much to learn from the Dead Sea Scrolls, something Pope Benedict for one has no problem with?

Thiering's work has been reacted to as if deadly to Christian beliefs, when this has not been her purpose or arguably necessarily the outcome of her exhaustive findings. Ancient Historian and New Testament scholar C.B. Forbes concludes that "Her books cannot be described as history. They are extraordinary fantasy, and have been dismissed as such by historians around the world." C. Stephen Evans says the book "clearly borders on fantasy". Florentino García Martínez, the editorial secretary of the Revue de Qumran, has called her work "science fiction", disconnected from all historical and literary reality.

Edna Ullman-Margalit, a former professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote "As an example consider the case of Barbara Thiering. She claims that the scrolls are the product of rivalry between the supporters of John the Baptist, identified with the scrolls’ “Teacher of Righteousness,” and Jesus, identified with the “Man of the Lie.” For my purposes this theory must be considered altogether initially outlandish, given the scientifically definitive dating (based mostly on paleographical and on radiocarbon techniques) of the scrolls to a period well before the birth of Christianity (Thiering, 1992). Thiering’s theory, by the way, is a good example of a fringe theory that is popular with the media."

The scholarly nature of Thiering's books is obvious to any open-minded readers as works reliant only on intensive research and not "imaginings" or baseless assumptions or simple assertions, neither inventions nor fantasy, and should therefore survive any critique that fails to get equally involved in the immense minutiae before concluding about the most sensational of her findings.

See also

• Historicity of Jesus

References

1. O'Collins, Gerald, and Daniel Kendall. 1996. Focus on Jesus: essays in christology and soteriology. Leominster, Herefordshire: Gracewing. Page 172.
2. Symon, Peter; Andrews, Jules (2006-10-25). "The Da Vinci Code Science and Christian dogma". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 2007-09-04. Retrieved 2007-12-22.
3. ^ Van Voorst, Robert E., Jesus outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence, W.B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI, 2000, p.80
4. p. 400
5. p. 400
6. ^ Evans, C. Stephen, The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith: The Incarnational Narrative as History, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, p.40.
7. ^ Wright, N. T. 1993. Who was Jesus? Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans. Pages 23; 19–23.
8. Review of Jesus the Man by C.B. Forbes
9. O'Collins, Gerald, and Daniel Kendall. 1996. Focus on Jesus: essays in christology and soteriology. Leominster, Herefordshire: Gracewing. Page 172.
10. Ullman-Margalit, Edna (May 2006). Out of the Cave: A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Dead Sea Scrolls Research. Harvard University Press. p. 20. ISBN 9780674022232.

External links

• Pesher Technique website of Dr. Barbara Thiering
• A Review of Jesus the Man by C.B. Forbes, Macquarie University

• Jesus and history
• Books critical of Christianity
• Perspectives on Jesus