In this article, I continue my mini-series on statements about the Dead Sea Scrolls and Christian origins being presented to the public at the Discovery Center in New York.
My specific topic in this entry will be University of Chicago professor Norman Golb’s discussion, in his latest Oriental Institute article on Scroll exhibition ethics, of the Center’s false and misleading claims concerning the origins of Christianity.
Focusing on the “myth of the charismatic archaeologist and bible investigator who, armed with a spade and bucket, sets out to reveal, from the hidden recesses of history, the wonders of our spiritual origins,” Dr. Golb points out that
the catalogue of the Discovery Center exhibit asserts that the scrolls included “the oldest existing copies of the Hebrew Bible, written when Judaism and Christianity were just taking form.”
[The catalogue was written by the exhibit’s curator, Dr. Risa Levitt Kohn of the religious studies department at San Diego State University.]
And he comments:
It is a basic historical reality, however, that Christianity did not take form until many years after the Scrolls (and all the more so the books of the Hebrew Bible) were written. By suggesting the contrary, the current exhibitors are misleading the public.
Turning to the Center’s false claim that “by the end of the fourth century, after Emperor Constantine’s adoption of Christianity (313 CE) … the region of Israel had become predominantly Christian,” Golb states:
The misrepresentation involved here… goes far beyond a mere question of chronology: the exhibitors inappropriately present the Christianization of Palestine as a natural religious process, while refraining from mentioning the violent persecutions of Jews sanctioned and encouraged by Constantine and various (but not all) later Byzantine emperors.
Golb indicates that the
persecutors included the fanatical monk Bar Sauma who (during the fifth century) complained of the predominant Jewish population in Palestine and marauded around the land with his cohorts assaulting synagogues,
and again he comments:
Not only have the exhibitors failed to mention the persecutions; they have also failed to describe the tenacity of the Jewish population, and of rabbinical culture, in the face of repeated acts of violence.
[Note: the bold emphasis in these quotations is my own.]
In the final paragraphs of his essay, Golb describes the Discovery Center exhibition as an “insidious example” of the effects that “faith-based” scholarship can have. He suggests that a desire to profit financially from the pubic’s fascination with “spiritual origins" has led to the Center’s “remarkable claims that the Jews of Palestine were ‘barely literate’ and that Judaism and Christianity both emerged simultaneously from a claimed ‘Israelite’ past." And he concludes:
In their Times Square appearance, the Dead Sea Scrolls come to play second fiddle to a presentation of “Life and Faith in Biblical Times” (the exhibit’s subtitle) in which the salient thrust is to the effect that Second Temple Judaism, i.e., the Judaism of intertestamental times, was actually just part of a nebulous and undefined pre-Judaism.
The picture emerging here is very different from the peculiar, evangelically tinged publicity for the Discovery Center exhibit we’ve been seeing in all sort of publications. If the exhibit is indeed dishing out false information about Christian origins, then all sorts of questions can, and should, be raised about how this happened—and about why the mainstream media have greeted such an exhibition with enthusiasm, without investigating the truth of the claims being made, and without even a murmur of protest.
I hope to be able to shed some light on a few of these questions when I examine some of the unfortunate (and indeed quite sordid) academic politics that seem to be concealed under the shiny veneer of the Discovery Center display.