My mother's 80th birthday celebration included a museum expedition to see the Dead Sea Scrolls - I believe the exhibit is only being shown in two places in the U.S. It was an amazing experience! Only the Holy Spirit could have created, preserved, uncovered and given patience to those who restored them. Of course there were only a few fragments on display, so much of the exhibit focussed on the history of the Essenes at Qumran, the controversies over the true nature of the site and how the scrolls came to be there. At the time they were discovered, cello-tape had just been invented (what we now call Scotch tape) and it seemed ideal for taping the scroll fragments to glass plates. Fifty years on it became obvious that both tape and glass were damaging, so the preservation has had to be done over with modern techniques - another painstaking endeavor. The exhibited scroll fragments were shown in a carefully climate-controlled room and the dim light enhanced their sacred aura. The last room of the exhibit displayed some beautiful codex Bibles created over the centuries. The most recent was the King James Bible designed and illustrated by Barry Moser, published in 1999. You can read a wonderful article about this Bible at http://www.crosscurrents.org/madsenmoser.htm. Moser wanted his engravings to show people we can relate to in the present day, so there are no halos or other elements typical of many past religious artworks. The engravings are stark and beautiful.
Just one more comment on stewardship: a few weeks ago Fr Dan came to see The Cornerstone, the supportive housing residence I'm involved with in Newburgh. I'm pretty lax about putting money in the parking meters there - I'm usually rushing and, besides, haven't we done an amazing job of renovating the building and cleaning up the area? But Fr Dan put a coin in both his meter and mine and I have been careful to follow his example since. It's kind of like the broken window syndrome - the city needs our respect if its going to become what we want and believe it can be.
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Harvard sometimes offers an on-line course on the Dead Sea Scrolls, which I took a few years ago. Professor Cohen was careful not to favor a particular interpretation of the community (although he pooh-poohed some of the more outlandish theories) and he seemed to favor the idea that the books belonged to the community rather than having merely been deposited in the caves from Jerusalem during the Roman invasion in 65 CE (about the time the community ceased to exist). So I was interested to come across an article last week about Hannukah written by Professor Cohen. In it he theorizes that the Qumram community consisted of the most conservative and religious Jews, who left Jerusalem in 160 BCE, at the time of the revolt that led to Hannukah because they thought that Judas Maccabee ("The Hammer") was too liberal. That would make the comunity closer to what were called the Sadducees in Jesus time than to the Essenes.
One of the first serious articles I read as a child was about the Dead Sea Scrolls--fifty years ago--and they have remained a fascination. It must have been exciting to see them. The article pushed the theory that the community were early Christians, although the conventional dates for most of the documents are now before Jesus' birth. Still, the Scrolls illustrate the ferment in Judaism also evident in the Gospels.
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