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Message Subject Dead Sea Scrolls: A "legend on a legend..."
Poster Handle Sara-Ka-El
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According to a view commonly held until the 1990s, the documents were written and hidden by a community of Essenes who lived in the Qumran area. Another theory, which has been gaining acceptance, is that the community was led by Zadokite priests (Sadducees), who were ousted from the Temple by the Maccabeans (Hasmoneans).

A Spanish Jesuit, José O'Callaghan, has argued that the fragment 7Q5 from Cave 7 is a New Testament text from the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 6, verses 52-53. In recent years this controversial assertion has been taked up again by German scholar Carsten Peter Thiede. A successful identification of this fragment as a passage from Mark would make it the earliest extant New Testament document, dating somewhere between 30 and 60 CE.

In 1963 Karl Heinrich Rengstorf of the University of Münster put forth the theory that the Dead Sea scrolls originated at the library of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. This theory was rejected by most scholars during the 1960s, who maintained that the scrolls were written at Qumran rather than transported from another location. However, the theory was revived by Norman Golb and other scholars during the 1990s, who added that the scrolls probably also originated from several other libraries in addition to the Temple library.

Allegations that the Vatican suppressed the publication of the scrolls were published in the 1990s, notably by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, whose book The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception contains a popularized version of speculations by Robert Eisenman that some scrolls actually describe the early Christian community, characterized as more fundamentalist and rigid than the one portrayed by the New Testament, and that the life of Jesus was deliberately mythicized by Paul, possibly a Roman agent who faked his "conversion" from Saul in order to undermine the influence of anti-Roman messianic cults in the region.

Eisenman's own theories, themselves not always convincing, merely attempt to relate the career of James the Just and Paul to some of these documents. Baigent and Leigh allege that several key scrolls were deliberately kept under wraps for decades to prevent alternative theories to the prevailing "consensus" that the scrolls had nothing to do with Christianity from arising.

Because they are frequently described as important to the history of the Bible, the scrolls are surrounded by a wide range of conspiracy theories.
 
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