Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered - The Preterist Archive

'Perfection of the Way' and 'zeal for the Law for the time of the Day of Vengeance'.
The militancy of this spirit will be unfamiliar to many readers although those with a knowledge of
militant Puritanism of seventeenth-century England - particularly under Cromwell - and thereafter in
America will recognize it. It is a militancy that is still very much part of the Islamic spirituality as
well. It is this kind of spirit which shines through the texts as we have them, a proposition which both
editors have been attempting to put forward in their separate analyses of Qumran materials. It is also
probably at the core of the movement behind Judas Maccabee's similar military endeavours, coming
down through the descendants of his nephew John Hyrcanus - his successors - to so-called 'Zealots' of
the war against Rome in the first century, and beyond. These, if you like, were the Holy Warriors of
their time. They are the cadre of those willing to live the regimen of extreme purity in preparation for
'the last times'. They are perhaps no more a sect than the Crusaders in the Middle Ages, or similar
groups in other times and cultures throughout history. It is difficult for those accustomed to a more
Gentile Christian overseas approach to conceive that this was the nature of Christianity at its
formative moment in Palestine.
Where dating and chronology generally are concerned, we have not relied on the methods of
paleography at all. These methods have in the past too often been employed illegitimately in Qumran
research to confuse the non-specialist. The paleographic sequences that were developed, while
helpful, are too uncertain to have any real relevance to such a narrow chronological period. In
addition, they depend on the faulty assumption of a 'rapid' and straight-line development of scripts at
this time, a proposition that is by no means capable of proof.
'Book' or scribal hands are notoriously stubborn, often lasting centuries beyond the point of their
initial creation; and informal or 'semi-cursive hands are just not datable in any precise way on the
basis of the kind of evidence we have before us. In other words the fact of accurately being able to
date the origin of a given scribal hand - a dubious proposition in any time or place - tells us nothing
about when a given individual within, for instance, a community such as that represented by the
literature at Qumran actually used that hand. It is the same for the equally popular subject in Qumran
research, coin data. Dropping a coin with a given date on it only tells us that the coin was not dropped
before it was minted, not how long afterwards. All the more so in paleography. Even if it were
possible to date a given handwriting style with any precision, we can only know that the handwriting
was not used before the date of its theoretical development, not how long after. The whole
construction is a tautological absurdity.
Similar problems obtain for AMS Carbon 14 dating techniques. Eisenman and Davies first proposed
the application of this technique in the 19 89 letter to the Israel Department of Antiquities referred to
above. But the process is still in its infancy, subject to multiple variables, and too uncertain to be
applied with precision to the kind of materials we have before us. Even the tests that were conducted
were neither extensive nor secure enough to be of any real use in making definitive determinations. As
always in this field, one is finally thrown back on the areas of literary criticism, textual analysis, and a
sure historical grasp - debatable enough quantities in any field - to make determinations of this kind.
Among the documents in the present collection are several of the most sublime and incredible beauty.
The Hymns and Mysteries in Chapter 7 are examples, as are the visionary recitals in Chapters 1, 2, 3