Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered - The Preterist Archive

entire corpus of pictures completely ourselves and depended on no one else's work to do this. We
made all the selections and arrangements of plates ourselves, including the identification of overlaps
and joins. The process only took about six weeks. Contrariwise, the information contained in these
two letters should have been available thirty years ago and much misunderstanding in Qumran studies
would have been avoided.
The same is true for the last column of the Damascus Document with which we close Chapter 6. This
was the subject of the separate requests for access Eisenman and Davies addressed to John Strugnell,
then Head of the International Team, and the Israel Antiquities Department - in the spring of 1989 -
only to be peremptorily dismissed. It was after these 'official' requests for access to this document that
this access issue boiled over into the international press.
What difference could having access to a single unknown column of the Damascus Document make?
The reader need only look at our interpretation of this column below to decide. It makes all the
difference. Before translating every line and having all the materials at our disposal, we could never
have imagined what a difference it actually could make. As it turns out, analysed in terms of the rest
of the corpus and compared with certain key passages in the New Testament, we have the basis for
understanding Paul's incipient theological approach to the death of Christ, which in turn stands as the
basis of the Christian theological understanding of it thereafter.
From the few crumbs the International Team was willing to throw to scholars from time to time, we
knew that there was a reference of some kind in this text to an important convocation of the
Community at Pentecost - much as we heard rumours about bits from other unpublished texts - but
never having been shown it, we did not know that the text was an excommunication text or that the
Damascus Document ended in such an orgy of nationalistic 'cursing'. This makes a substantial
difference.
Certain theological constructions which Paul makes with regard to 'cursing' and the meaning of the
crucifixion of Christ are now brought into focus. With them, notions of the redemptive nature of the
death of Christ as set forth in Isa. 5 3 that a majority of mankind still considers fundamental - are
clarified (the reader should see our further discussion of these matters at the end of Chapter 6). This is
the difference having all of the documents at one's disposal can make.
So what in effect do we have in these manuscripts? Probably nothing less than a picture of the
movement from which Christianity sprang in Palestine. But there is more - if we take into
consideration the Messianic nature of the texts as we delineate it in this book, and allied concepts such
as 'Righteousness', 'Piety', 'justification', 'works', 'the Poor', 'Mysteries', what we have is a picture of
what Christianity actually was in Palestine. The reader, however, probably will not be able to
recognize it because it will seem virtually the opposite of the Christianity with which he or she is
familiar. This is particularly the case in documents such as the two Letters on Works Righteousness
above, and others in Chapter 6 which detail the legal minutiae reckoned as Righteousness or 'works
that will justify you'.
The reason again for this is simple. We cannot really speak of a 'Christianity' per se in Palestine in the
first century. The word was only coined, as Acts 11:2 6 makes clear, to describe a situation in Antioch