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The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls changed the way modern scholars view Judaism in the time of Jesus. John Bergsma, author of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Revealing the Jewish Roots of Christianity, joins us to explain some of the ways the scrolls shed light on the gospels.
Cy Kellett:
Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett your host. One of the things we have to defend our Catholic faith against is the idea that modern scholarship debunks the Gospels, or somehow shows them not to be legitimate and helpful and accurate historical documents. The truth is nothing could be farther from the truth. Modern archeology, modern discoveries of ancient documents, modern studies of ancient languages and ancient practices have shed a lot of light on just how really stunningly historically accurate and helpful the Gospels are, and just how well situated they are in their time. They are clearly documents of the first century.
The Dead Sea Scrolls play an important role in that, discovered only about 70 years ago in the deserts of the Holy Land. The Dead Sea Scrolls, it turns out, shine a great deal of light on the environment, the cultural environment, the religious environment in which Jesus, our Lord, ministered. And one of the people who’s doing a great work in helping us uncover the light that’s being shown on the Gospels by the Dead Sea Scrolls is Dr. John Bergsma. He’s a professor at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio. And he’s got a book, in 2019 just came out, Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Revealing the Jewish Roots of Christianity. It’s a exciting read for a Christian who wants to see what the world was like when the Lord walked here upon the earth. Here’s Dr. John Bergsma.
Dr. John Bergsma, thanks very much for being with us.
Dr. John Bergsma:
It’s great to be with you.
Cy Kellett:
Talk about the Dead Sea Scrolls. I just loved your book on the Dead Sea Scrolls and I came away with it with a sense that this Dead Sea Scrolls thing is a big deal. Like that there’s almost that like a period of Bible scholarship, of New Testament scholarship in particular, that comes before it. But that many things that needed clarification have been clarified by the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Dr. John Bergsma:
Yeah, I would agree with that. They give us a lot of cultural background to the Gospels and the epistles. They flush in that Jewish culture of the first century. And we realize how the New Testament documents really are situated in the time that they claim for themselves. It’s very much rooted there. And so a lot of the more eccentric theories that were placing the Gospel of John in the 200s and this kind of stuff, all that got rained in when the scrolls were found. And it’s just been fascinating. It’s really has been a sea change, I would say, in biblical scholarship with the finding of the scrolls.
Cy Kellett:
So found in the late 1940s, maybe you could tell us just a bit about the scrolls. Who put them there, where they were found and how they came to be found?
Dr. John Bergsma:
Yeah, absolutely. So the situation is during about the 200 years before the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70. So we’re talking the century before our Lord and then during His lifetime ministry and that of the apostles. So in that period, there was a Jewish monastery on the shores of the Dead Sea. That was part of the movement that they called the Essenes. This was a holiness group among Jews alone among the Jewish sects. They practiced celibacy and monasticism and one of their foundations was there on the Northwest corner of the Dead Sea.
So we surmised from the archeological record that when they saw the Roman army is coming to destroy them, sometime near the year 70 about when the city of Jerusalem was destroyed, they placed their library in jars in caves for safekeeping not knowing what would happen to them.
They were wiped out and the library remained there for 2000 years. And then in 1947, some Bedouin shepherds are coming by, threw a rock into a cave, heard pottery smashing. Came back a couple of days later, investigated and pulled out the first three of these scrolls. Eventually they went way into the hands of scholars who recognized that they were of great antiquity going back into the third century BC, that’s the 200s BC. Amazing stuff, complete copy of the book of Isaiah in Hebrew from about 250 BC, that was the prize find among the scrolls. And the discovery was on.
Cy Kellett:
So just to take Isaiah for example, 250 BC Isaiah in Hebrew. Before the Dead Sea Scrolls, what would have been the earliest manuscript of Isaiah?
Dr. John Bergsma:
Only about 1000 AD.
Cy Kellett:
So 1,250 years we got pushed back in one find.
Dr. John Bergsma:
In one find. Yeah. You know, that never happens.
Cy Kellett:
So the person who might say, “Look, 1,250 years, this document has undergone a lot of editing, a lot of changes. There’s no way you could know that this is what the ancient Hebrews wrote.” How faithful was the 1,250 year old Isaiah to the Isaiah we know now.
Dr. John Bergsma:
There weren’t substantial differences, essentially. None that would interest non-scholars. Okay? So it was the same text, over 1200 years, in fact the scholars would say what we had before that the Jews had preserved up to the year 1000, it’s actually better than the old one.
Cy Kellett:
Really?
Dr. John Bergsma:
So it attests the fidelity of the transmission of the biblical text among the Jewish people for all that time.
Cy Kellett:
It’s also the case, I suppose, probably you could help me with this, maybe? Around the destruction of the temple, there’s really a destruction of Jewish society in a way. So this is a restoration of many things that were destroyed by the Romans. We wouldn’t know them, we wouldn’t know these things at all had these… Men, probably right? Put them in these caves.
Dr. John Bergsma:
Yes. For a large part that’s true. Although the Jewish historian Josephus was fascinated with this group of the Essenes and their monasticism and he wrote pretty extensively about them in his histories, but that was the only sign that we had of them. We didn’t have any of their own writings and some people went so far to say, “Oh, Josephus is just making that up. They didn’t really exist,” and so on.
So when these scrolls were found, it was quickly realized that, “Oh, hey. Their ideas sound a lot like what Josephus says about the Essenes.” And within a few years that was put together and some have tried to dispute that. But I think it’s pretty much a consensus that this was an Essene monastery.
Cy Kellett:
So part of what the job of modern biblical scholarship has been, among its many jobs, tasks that it has assigned itself is to situate the Gospels in their time.
Dr. John Bergsma:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
And this is a great aid to us in situating the Gospels in their time.
Dr. John Bergsma:
Oh, just amazing. Because before the find of the scrolls to take the Gospel of John, as an example, you had German scholars that were saying, “Oh, it’s being written in the 200s,” because these odd phrases that we only find in the gospel of John, out of all the New Testament books, these odd phrases clearly show the influence of a later development of Greek philosophy. And so that was the standard explanation for some of the oddities of John’s language.
Then we dig up the scrolls and lo and behold, these phrases are in the scrolls in documents that we can carbon date to the lifetime and career of Jesus. And you get things like sons of light, sons of darkness, spirit of truth, spirit of darkness, and a whole bunch of other different phraseology just in the scrolls and in the gospel of John. And it just situates the gospel in Jewish life in the first century. Just amazing.
Cy Kellett:
So where the German scholars of the 19th century would have said, “Forget the idea that John is a real Jew who knew Jesus.”
Dr. John Bergsma:
Exactly.
Cy Kellett:
Now we can go, “Hey, it looks like John was a real Jew who knew Jesus.”
Dr. John Bergsma:
Yeah, absolutely. And so it’s much more mainstream to say, “Hey look, whatever you think of the gospel of John, it’s clearly a first century Jewish text and this guy overlapped in his lifetime with Jesus of Nazareth.”
Cy Kellett:
Have they finished looking, are we still looking? Because it’d be nice to find more of these things. Is there any chance, or have we searched every cave now?
Dr. John Bergsma:
They have searched everywhere. I mean, there’s a fine tooth comb over the whole area. Recently, I think two years ago they found a 12th cave… And to give a little background. 11 caves bearing scrolls were found. And then last year, or two years ago, they found a 12th cave, unfortunately empty. So a big wa, wa, wa. [crosstalk 00:09:07] Yeah, “We found a cave with nothing in it.” But they’re always looking because this was the archeological jackpot of the 20th century.
Cy Kellett:
A lot of times you hear Christian people assert things about the ancient Jewish people of Jesus’s time by saying a Jew would never do that. And one of them that you point out in your book, “Well Jews would never embrace celibacy,” because certainly that’s not the case with modern Judaism.
Dr. John Bergsma:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
But one of the things that the scrolls does is gives a sense of a multifaceted Judaism, not a monolithic Judaism.
Dr. John Bergsma:
Absolutely. That’s a great way of putting it. So there was a lot of variety among the Jews of our Lord’s day and a lot of our Lord’s teaching and a lot of the practices of the early church actually are much more similar to this wing of Judaism that was called Essenism. And it was destroyed in the year 70 and did not continue.
The only group that survived the destruction of Jerusalem were the Pharisees. And so their tradition developed into what we call modern or rabbinic Judaism and left us the Talmud and those great works. But you know, what was lost to everyone’s memory was these other forms of Judaism like the Essenes, whose practices are so intriguing because they did as it were anticipate the sacraments. They had sacred washings, a sacred meal, a hierarchical structure that looks like Bishop, Priest and Deacon. Just fascinating stuff.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So we’re going to get to the five ways, today, that these scrolls give us light, illuminate the Gospels for us. But I want to give you a skeptical argument just to get your response. Because, lots of people who are not Christian will listen to this and some might say, “Well, if all this what Dr. Bergsma is saying is true, why not just say Jesus was one of these Essenes? He learned from them and this whole Christianity thing is really just some Essene preacher that was out there.”
Dr. John Bergsma:
Right. Well, first of all, there’s important differences between our Lord’s teachings and the Essene’s as well. For example, our Lord says, “If your animal would fall into a pit on the Sabbath would you not pull it out?” Now, the Essenes wouldn’t.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So the answer’s no, for them.
Dr. John Bergsma:
For them it was like, “No. I’m not going to pull my animal out.” So there’s actually a line in the Dead Sea Scrolls about you’re not even supposed to pull an animal out. So they were really rigorous about that. And our Lord had a very different understanding of the Sabbath day. So there’s a number of things where our Lord was different from the Essenes.
But the difference is, He worked miracles and He bestowed the Holy spirit, and He Rose from the dead. They were waiting for the Messiah. And our Lord answered to their expectations. They were waiting for a Messiah that would free people from bondage to Satan and from the debt of their sins. And I argue in the book that the gospel of Luke is written partly to present the gospel to these Essenes. That’s what they were looking for and you only get four or five chapters into the gospel of Luke and already Jesus is exercising people, that means liberating them from to Satan, and he’s forgiving their sins. This is what they were expecting the Messiah to do. So it’s like Jesus meets what they were hoping for, He fulfills what they were looking for.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Right. It’s funny because Luke you think of as the most Gentile of the gospels.
Dr. John Bergsma:
You do.
Cy Kellett:
And that’s what most… But he is addressing the Jewish aspect, particularly the Essene’s expectation for the Messiah.
Dr. John Bergsma:
Yeah. I don’t know if that was his only goal, but as you know, you’ve probably seen it in the book but I began researching the scrolls with this view of Luke that, “Oh, he writes to the educated Greeks.” But as I got into comparing him with the scrolls, I realized, Oh my goodness, if you’re an Essene and you pick up the gospel of Luke, this seems like set up to persuade you that Jesus is the Messiah that we’ve been looking for and would never have seen it without the scrolls.
Cy Kellett:
All right. So how about we get into some of the ways that the scrolls eliminate the Gospels for us? We’ll do five ways.
Dr. John Bergsma:
Absolutely, five ways. Okay. So there’s five little issues in the Gospels that are like, “What do you do with them?” Let’s start with John the Baptist eating bugs and honey. Like, what is that all about? I mean, for those of us that were raised Christians, we just get used to that. But, there’s a story about that.
Josephus, the historian of this time, writes of another figure who was also out there by the name of [inaudible 00:13:41] who was eating bark and grass. So John the Baptist wasn’t the only one out in the wilderness trying to eat off the land. What is going on with this?
Well, Josephus tells us and the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves confirm this, that when monks joined that monastery in the shores of the Dead Sea, one of the things they had to do was swear an oath not to eat food prepared anywhere else for the rest of their life.
So they were committed to the monastic food. And that also was part of the discipline of the community because if they misbehave then their rations were reduced. And of course that wouldn’t be effective as a discipline if they are free to go eat somewhere else. So the problem though was if somebody got ex-communicated, expelled, kicked out of the monastery they were bound by the secret oath, which Jews took very seriously, chose not to eat anywhere else. And so this is why I surmised John the Baptist, I think, was raised in this community probably, and then kicked out. He’s eating off the land. Josephus tells of another guy who’s eating off the land. But this explains the odd diet.
Cy Kellett:
Ah, yeah. So, if this is the case with John the Baptist, he can’t go to the local taco shop or-
Dr. John Bergsma:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
I’m sure they didn’t have that, but… So he can only eat unprepared food.
Dr. John Bergsma:
He can only eat unprepared food. Right. Because that was the wording. It’s a loophole in the way that the vow was or the oath was, “Not to eat food prepared.” But if it’s unprepared food, hey, if it’s just like lying around in the natural environment he wouldn’t violate his oath, but of course it really constricts your diet.
Cy Kellett:
All right. So John the Baptist’s diet illuminated by… What else is illuminated by the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Dr. John Bergsma:
Okay. Another thing about John the Baptist, there’s this odd comment at the end of the first chapter of Luke. It’s Luke 1:80, says, “Oh, by the way, he was out into the desert until he began his public career,” essentially it says about John the Baptist. It makes it sound like John was sent out into the wilderness at age five by Zachariah like, “See ya.”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right, it does.
Dr. John Bergsma:
“I hear the bugs are good eating.”
Cy Kellett:
“Enjoy the locusts and honey, Dear.”
Dr. John Bergsma:
“Make sure to write.” What is going on with that? Doesn’t make any sense at all. Why would Luke talk about this? But then, okay… Again, getting back to our historian friend, Josephus, he tells us that the Essenes lived out in the desert and they took in orphans and raise them. Or just young men from the larger community of Israel. Just like monasteries did in Europe during the middle ages. You know, when people had extra kids, a mouth that they couldn’t feed, send the kid up to the monastery maybe he’ll end up as a monk, whatever.
So, suddenly you have a scenario that makes a lot of sense. Zachariah and Elizabeth, we know that they’re getting older. Maybe they predeceased? Maybe they didn’t feel like they were able to raise a young kid at their advanced age? Whatever.
So they send him out to get a great theological education, a great formation at what had to have been a fantastic center of learning at this time, because it had a library of a thousand volumes. Just amazing for the time period. So it was like an Ivy League school for Jews in this time so send your son out there. And that would explain why he’s out in the desert. He’s being formed out there, being raised there, then gets kicked out for some reason. Goes off on his own, starts ministering on his own, that’s why he’s got the odd diet. It kind of fits.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, it does. So just out of curiosity, why do you think he was kicked out? Do you think it’s because his view of the Messiah was different than their view of the Messiah?
Dr. John Bergsma:
Yeah. I have a pretty strongly held view why I think he got kicked out. When you look at what John’s preaching, he’s got a lot of similarities with the Essenes. The Essenes baptized every day, every day at about 11 in the morning they got in white robes and they dunked themselves for the forgiveness of their sins. Now I see a lot of similarities to John the Baptist, although it’s not a daily thing, with him it’s this mark of conversion is to get dunked, to get baptized.
You see John the Baptist talking about the Holy Spirit. The monks talk about the Holy Spirit in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Nobody else is, Pharisees aren’t, Sadducees aren’t. It’s a real important connection. So Holy spirit, washing, imminent coming of the Messiah, a lot of connections that we got going on here. What’s different? What’s different is this, they would not preach outside the monastic walls.
Cy Kellett:
I see.
Dr. John Bergsma:
In fact they explicitly say you’re not supposed to spread the message except to the insiders who joined the group. But you look at the prophet Isaiah, who was very important for John the Baptist, he really identifies himself with Isaiah. Isaiah 40 verse 3, “I’m the voice of one crying in the wilderness to prepare the way of the Lord.” Isaiah is all about salvation coming to the nations.
So John leaves, he goes up to the fjords of the Jordan across from Jericho where all the world is crossing by. It’s like O’Hare airport. You know, everybody’s got a connection there that they’ve got to go from East to West and from West to East and so on. So, the whole world’s passing by [inaudible 00:18:46] from one part of the empire to the other. He just has to stand there and he can preach to the world.
And that’s what he’s doing, he’s preaching that the Messiah’s coming. He’s doing what Isaiah said. He’s bringing salvation to the nations. He’s preaching to Jews but he’s preaching to Roman soldiers too, and everybody who’s coming by. This is a big nexus, a big crossing point up there.
Cy Kellett:
All right. So in addition to John the Baptist, what else? What other aspects of the Gospels are illuminated by the Dead Sea Scrolls?
Dr. John Bergsma:
Yeah. So there is a weird passage of Mark that has become one of my favorite parts of the Gospels. Mark 14:51 and 52 says that there is a young guy tagging along behind the apostles who was wearing nothing but a linen garment and he got caught up in the arrest scene with the soldiers and Jesus and stuff. And they tried to get him too and grabbed his garment and he got out of his clothes and ran away naked.
Cy Kellett:
Right? That’s that weird thing.
Dr. John Bergsma:
That’s that weird thing. Only Mark mentions this, Luke and Matthew don’t repeat that. It’s just this weird, sort of like, “What was that all about?” We don’t hear about this guy before? We never hear him about after, why even mentioned him? Well, tradition says this is actually Mark, the author of the gospel, and he’s painting himself into his own picture. And I think that’s actually right, I’m convinced of it.
But the thing is, he mentions he was a young man wearing nothing but a single linen garment. Now that’s very weird, to wear nothing but a linen garment. Because, first of all, linen was the clothing of the wealthy. It’s highly expensive. We have only a little bit of linen left archeologically, most people wore wool. But Linen is great because it’s a wicking fabric, takes the moisture away. It’s great in a hot climate, but it was very expensive. So the poor put up with wool, the rich wore linen. So if he’s got linen he’s wealthy, but then he’s only wearing a single garment, which is a sign of poverty. So this is like a guy walking down the street wearing Giorgio Armani pants and nothing else.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Dr. John Bergsma:
So what are [inaudible 00:20:47] like, “Dude, if you afford…”
Cy Kellett:
Afford the pants maybe you could pay…
Dr. John Bergsma:
That’s a $500 pair of pants, can you get yourself a shirt? So if you could afford a linen garment like, “Could you get yourself some more clothing? What’s going on?” But here’s where the scrolls come in. Because Linen was associated with the priesthood, the Essenes only wore linen because they regard themselves as a priestly people. But also, as a spiritual discipline they were very sparse in their clothing and they would wear a single garment until it wore out before they would change it.
So there you go. So a guy wearing nothing but a single linen garment, this has got to be an Essenan in first century Judaism. So it doesn’t say Essene it doesn’t scream at you, but if you understand their cultural practices you say, “That guy was an Essene.”
Cy Kellett:
Wow. Yeah.
Dr. John Bergsma:
And then there’s more too. Because if that was John Mark, as tradition says, later in Acts we find out that John Mark’s mother owned the upper room. Then if you go to the site of the upper room, which the traditional site has a pretty good claim to be the site, or at least very close to it… You find out archeologically, it’s very close to what was once the Essene gate. The entrance to the neighborhood of Jerusalem where the Essenes lived. So you come full circle around. And then there’s other things that play into that as well. But it’s fascinating, without the scrolls, without knowing about the Essenes, we’d have no explanation for why anybody would be wearing nothing but a single linen cloth.
Cy Kellett:
It’s so cool too, because the knowledge of that is lost for 2000 years. I mean, a medieval scholar, they could study everything that they had available to them, never could understand that what that’s about.
Dr. John Bergsma:
Even later in the first century nobody would have even known to make that up.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right.
Dr. John Bergsma:
Because once Jerusalem was destroyed that whole culture and that whole way of life was forgotten.
Cy Kellett:
All right. What else?
Dr. John Bergsma:
Okay. So, all right. As long as we’re talking about the Last Supper and the events there of, there’s been this longstanding problem in the Gospels where there seems to be like a four day discrepancy or something about the actual celebration of the Passover. So in Mark 14, for example, we read that our Lord came into Jerusalem and the anointing at Bethany takes place two days before Passover. But in John 12, the same event takes place six days before Passover. So there is a four day discrepancy between these two accounts. And then later when we get to the crucifixion, John says that the crucifixion takes place on the day before, apparently, Passover. Says it’s the day of preparation for the Passover.
Whereas the other Gospels, of course, describe our Lord celebrating the Passover earlier in the week, what we think of as Holy Thursday. And then our Lord is actually crucified… Or it seems to be in the other Gospels, it doesn’t say this explicitly, but appears to be crucified then later. So that’d be after Passover, however you do that chronology or on the day of Passover proper.
So what does one make of this? And there’s been a lot of efforts and there are some possible solutions. What I’m about to propose is not the only possible explanation.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Dr. John Bergsma:
But, from the scrolls, we find out that the Essenes observed a different liturgical calendar and their Passover was always on a Wednesday and the meal was celebrated on a Tuesday evening. Now, to cut to the chase, I think what’s actually going on is that Mark, who was written by John Mark, he was an Essene if he’s the young guy that ran away, okay? He’s dating the events of Passion Week by the liturgical calendar he used.
Cy Kellett:
The Essenes.
Dr. John Bergsma:
Which would have been the Essene calendar. Although, it’s not correct to call it the Essene calendar. It was actually an older liturgical calendar that the Essenes stuck with. And some other Jews stuck with it too, just like the extraordinary form, you know? Some still want to operate by the old liturgical calendar. So the Essenes kept the old calendar, the rest of Jews had switched to a new one about 100 years before, and that was what was observed by the temple. And so if you have a Saturday Passover, which is what John seems to describe, with a Tuesday pass over, which seems like what Mark and then Matthew and Luke following him if Mark writes first… But there’s discussion about that. But anyway, that gives you an explanation of that four day gap that we see in John 12 and Mark 14.
Cy Kellett:
I don’t know what number we’re on. Are we on number four because that-
Dr. John Bergsma:
That was four.
Cy Kellett:
That was four. So we’ve still got more.
Dr. John Bergsma:
I do.
Cy Kellett:
And there are many more in the book, Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls. But go ahead, let’s illuminate some more scripture.
Dr. John Bergsma:
Okay. So one last thing, as long as we’re talking about Last Supper, and now let’s shift to how the Last Supper is perpetuated in the Eucharist. There’s a funny line in our Lord’s Eucharistic prayer that gives people trouble. He says, “This is poured out for the forgiveness of sins of many,” or in Latin, [foreign language 00:25:54], you know? And it’s like, “Why does our Lord say poured out for many? Why doesn’t He say for all?” In fact, I remember having a discussion with a priest a couple of years ago. I was like, “Ah, this is bad. It should say for all.”
But this is the thing. When we read the Dead Sea Scrolls, they have several terms for their community. Okay. So they were a monastic community. They were waiting for the Messiah. They had a three year initiation process, very much like postulancy, a novitiate and so on, then you swore final vows and then you entered into the community. So what did they call their community? One of the terms that they called, it was the [inaudible 00:26:32] that means in Hebrew “the community.”
Cy Kellett:
That makes sense.
Dr. John Bergsma:
Yep. That’s their usual term. But occasionally they also called themselves the [qahal 00:26:42] which translates “church,” interestingly. In Greek, it’s [foreign language 00:26:48] and then in English it would be church. So they actually call themselves a church. And then another thing that they refer to themselves is they call themselves “the many.” “The many” of Israel. And the [foreign language 00:27:04], many times you find this in the scroll, and this is just the multitude, this idea, the crowd. However you want to think of it. That would be a self reference to their community.
So A ha! This explains a lot of things. In Matthew 16 our Lord says, “You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my ecclesia,” my church. Now, since it’s the only place in Matthew that church is used… Well, there’s one more in 18. Scholars said, “Oh, that looks odd. This must not be authentic to Matthew it’s later Christian authors a century later writing the church back into the life of the historical Jesus.”
But then in light of the scrolls, realize, “Oh, no, there were Jews that were talking about end-times communities that gathered together to wait for the Messiah and they would call themselves a [qahal 00:27:50], a church. And isn’t that what we are to this day, aren’t we an end-times community waiting for The Messiah.
Cy Kellett:
Exactly, yeah.
Dr. John Bergsma:
So we’re the [qahal 00:27:57], the church. So it explains this. But then also it explains our Lord talking about this is poured out [foreign language 00:28:09] for many, it’s a reference to the community that he’s from. It’s His reference to the church.
Cy Kellett:
Wow. So just real curious, how did you come to the Dead Sea Scrolls? Someone must have in the course of your studies said, “Hey, you should take a look at these things that they found out there in the desert.”
Dr. John Bergsma:
Yeah. I was fortunate enough to be accepted into the doctoral program at the University of Notre Dame back in the 90s. And unbeknownst to me at the time, the University of Notre Dame was one of the world’s top research centers for the Dead Sea Scrolls. And when I got there, I suddenly realized that like, “Oh my gosh, this place is one of the top researcher places in the world for the scrolls.”
Cy Kellett:
Wow.
Dr. John Bergsma:
“I guess I better study me some scrolls.” So, took some classes in them. I had no choice, that’s what the guys were teaching in the semesters that I was there. So it took several courses in the scrolls. And at first I was like, “I don’t know what to do with these things. I don’t know why they’re relevant.” Because I was an Old Testament, and the only relevance that the scrolls have for Old Testament… And this is a little bit simplified, but it’s mostly about the texts, things like that big Isaiah scroll. So that’s a relevance for that.
But the really, really theologically interesting stuff is the light they’ve shed on the new, and I didn’t see all those connections till I left my graduate program, started teaching at Franciscan University. I was teaching both Old and New, started teaching New Testament. And as I’m teaching along through the New Testament I’m like, “Oh my gosh. There’s that. There’s this.” I’m like, “Oh my gosh, this could make a book.”
Cy Kellett:
And it made a great book. You have a whole section on how this enlightens Christ’s teaching on marriage, Christ’s teaching on the priesthood, both kinds of priesthood, the ministerial and the common priesthood. But I also have to say, I really appreciated… You were quite gentle about this, but you did some correcting of Dan Brown and Bart Ehrman in the book.
Dr. John Bergsma:
Just a little bit.
Cy Kellett:
So a very good book. Dr. John Bergsma, thank you so much for doing this work.
Dr. John Bergsma:
Absolutely.
Cy Kellett:
Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Revealing the Jewish Roots of Christianity is the name of Dr. John Bergsma’s latest book. We can hope that there will be many more from Dr. Bergsma. And it’s amazing to think how many people, even 70 years after the discovery of the scrolls, right after the end of the second World War, how many people are not aware of how modern archeology and these wonderful discoveries, all these many, many things that we’re learning about the ancient world are really shedding light on the Gospels. Reaffirming that those who believe in the Gospels, not just as fantasies, but as historical documents, their faith is well-placed. Our faith is well-placed when we believe in the historicity of the Gospels. And more and more archeology and these wonderful discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the studies of people like Dr. John Bergsma are helping us to have that confidence and live in faith that Jesus the Lord is the Messiah.
He did walk in a particular time and place right here among us and He loves us so much. It’s good to have things that give us that confidence in these very strange times that we live in. Hey, we’d love to hear from you. Our email address is focus@catholic.com. If you can support us financially, maybe you’ve got 5 or 10 bucks you can give this month, if you wouldn’t mind going to givecatholic.com and your gift goes to a good cause.
You know, as I said, many people… Many people, even 70 years after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls are not aware how much modern scholarship is shedding light on the person of Jesus. New discoveries, in a weird way, we’re even closer to Jesus in some ways than the people all those intervening years were where we can go all the way back to within 40 years of Jesus with the Dead Sea Scrolls. So their discovery, they’re coming to light again, it’s a great gift that God has given us. We want to share those things. Your financial support helps. Go to givecatholic.com and leave us a note about why you are supporting Catholic Answers Focus. I’m Cy Kellett your host. We’ll see you next time right here at Catholic Answers Focus.