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THE ANGEL SCROLL Does
the Angel Scroll Reveal that Jesus was Member of the Dead Sea Sect? A
November 7, 1999 article in the Sunday-Times (London - MIDDLE EAST
section) by Matthew Kalman (Jerusalem) continues to increase the
speculation and mystery surrounding the so-called "Angel Scroll." The
Angel Scroll is said to belong to the famous Dead Sea Scrolls family. The
most recent tidbit thrown to the media reveals that the scroll names Jesus as
sect member. Since
their discovery almost half a century ago, the Dead Sea scrolls have fascinated
biblical scholars. The mystery surrounding them has deepened, however, with
claims that a hitherto unknown scroll, which threatens to challenge the
originality of Christian theology, was spirited out of the Holy Land and ended
up in the hands of Benedictine monks, who tried to suppress its contents.
According to a bizarre tale that has unfolded over the past few weeks in Israel,
the so-called Angel scroll was found by a Bedouin tribesman in Jordan in the
late 1960s on the eastern shore opposite the Qumran caves, where the Dead Sea
scrolls made famous by the late Professor Yigael Yadin were discovered in
ancient pottery jars several years earlier. The Bedouin is then said to have
sold it to an antiquities dealer in the Jordanian capital, Amman. As
news of the find circulated, scholars began frantic talks to buy the scroll
through an intermediary, an international arms dealer identified only as Ziyad
H. It was then that a German Benedictine monk - named as Matheus Gunther,
which is believed to be a pseudonym - became involved. Armed with huge sums
of Benedictine money, he allegedly negotiated for a year and was finally
allowed a 3mm fragment of the scroll. Finally, in 1981, the deal was completed
and the scroll, bearing 1,000 lines of mixed text, was smuggled out of Jordan to
a Benedictine monastery somewhere near the German-Austrian border, to be studied
by a team of monks who had taken a vow of silence. Gunther
died in 1996, but is said to have bequeathed his notes and a copy of the text to
an Israeli friend known as Steve Daniels. For the past three years, Daniels has
been allegedly preparing it for publication, together with two other Israelis
who knew the monk. According to the two Israelis - one of whom spoke to The
Sunday Times on condition of anonymity - the text contradicts the official
origins of Christianity and is so explosive that church authorities decided to
suppress it. Gunther could not bear to see it left mouldering in the vaults,
they claimed, and he decided that his vow of silence should be broken after his
death. "I
saw in this scroll the crowning achievement of my scholarly work and of my
religious mission," the monk wrote in his notes, some of which were shown
to the Jerusalem Report, a leading Israeli news magazine. "I promised that
I would not carry to my grave the secrets of this remarkable scroll." The
text, said to have been carbon-dated to the 1st century, supposedly describes a
religious vision experienced at Ein Elgatain, a desert encampment
on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, by Yeshua ben Padiah, who was taken
by an angel, Panameia, through the gates of a palace and into the heavens. Yeshua
is Hebrew for Jesus. It
is said to mirror the teachings of Jesus to such an extent that it calls their
originality into question.
Many of the ideas described in the scroll imply that Jesus was heavily
influenced by, or even a member of, the Essenes sect widely credited with
writing the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scholars who have studied excerpts from a
computerised transcript are divided over the text's authenticity, however, to
give a definitive answer, they say they must first see the original - or at
least a photograph. "If
it is the real thing, we'll be talking about something phenomenally important to
understanding the background of Christianity and Jewish mysticism,"
said Professor Stephen Pfann of the University of the Holy Land,
an expert on the scrolls. "I haven't yet seen anything that discredits it
in such a way that I would put it outside the realms of possibility." Pfann,
who has translated some of the text into English, said that Yeshua's vision
contained many concepts similar to the other Dead Sea scrolls. It is dated some
100 years later, however, indicating it was written during, or shortly after,
Jesus's lifetime. Many
scholars are still unconvinced. "The text itself is very queer. There is
Hebrew with Aramaic words," said Magen Broshi, former curator of the
Jerusalem museum that holds the Dead Sea scrolls. "The whole thing is so
strange and I think, if I were about to commit a forgery, this is what I would
have done." Another
problem authenticating the story has been tracing Gunther's origins. Father
Bargil Pixner, a Benedictine monk and scholar in Israel, said he never knew of
any such monk and was "very sceptical" about the story. In
favour of the monk's account, however, is the supposed content of the Angel
Scroll. The text is said to contain embalming recipes for resurrection and
the use of herbs and stones for healing, practices attributed to the Essenes
by the Jewish historian Josephus. Other phrases often associated with the
mystic sect recur in the scroll, such as the "children of light", a
term used by the Essenes for those endowed with the power of God, and the
contrasting "children of darkness". It
also uses the word "EL" for God, and Pfann has said grammar and
spellings throughout the text are similar to those in the acknowledged Dead Sea
scrolls. He said he had even found a complete phrase in the Angel scroll that he
had been trying to reconstruct for years from other documents. "This new
discovery may well prove to be an important witness or missing link to the
connection between Qumran, early Christianity and early Judaism during the 1st
century," Pfann concluded. Keep
your eyes and ears open for more information about the Angel Scroll. Get ready
to make another monumental BS adjustment if it turns out to be authentic. It
would demand that both Christian and Jewish history be rewritten once again -
even though the ink on the current version is still wet.
DTB
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