A Role Model for Jesus

In the Dead Sea Scrolls, a scholar sees new messianic precedent

By JEFF SHARLET

The latest craze in evangelistic Christianity is a set of initials stitched onto baseball caps, inked into notebooks, scrawled across T-shirts, and engraved on bracelets: W.W.J.D., which stand for What Would Jesus Do?

For Christians, Jesus Christ may have been the first role model. But new

ALSO SEE: Colloquy Live: Join a live, online discussion with Israel Knohl about his controversial new book, The Messiah Before Jesus: The Suffering Servant of the Dead Sea Scrolls, on Wednesday, October 25, at noon, U.S. Eastern time.

evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls suggests that he himself may have asked something like W.W.M.D. -- What Would Menahem Do? Or, more to the point, What did Menahem -- a Jewish leader who the scrolls suggest may have been a self-styled messiah after whom Jesus consciously modeled himself -- do? And how can I do it better?

That's the argument of Israel Knohl in his new book, The Messiah Before Jesus: The Suffering Servant of the Dead Sea Scrolls (University of California Press; translated from Hebrew by David Maisel). Mr. Knohl, a Bible scholar at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, bases his case on a fragment of the scrolls that Emanuel Tov, editor in chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls Publication Project and a colleague at the university, presented to him about two years ago, when the parchment scraps had first been pieced together.

"I remember when Mr. Tov brought me the new information," says Mr. Knohl, speaking from his home in Jerusalem. "It was on Hanukkah, and my wife and my children were home. I was jumping up and down, it was such a great surprise. My wife said, 'Be careful, you'll fall down the stairs.' But I kept jumping."

The two fragments, both versions of something scholars call the "Self-Glorification Hymn," are written in the first person. "Who is like me among the angels?" the hymn asks. "I am the beloved of the king, a companion of the holy ones." Elsewhere the passages say, "Who has been despised like me?"

"That combination of divine status and suffering is unknown in the history of the messianic idea prior to these hymns," Mr. Knohl writes.

Some scholars believe that the speaker in the hymns was only an imaginary messiah, a literary conceit cooked up to convey a theological point. But Mr. Knohl argues that literary clues in the scrolls, as well as a careful examination of the historical moment in which they were written, strongly suggest that their author was writing from personal conviction, not intellectual contemplation.

If he's right, it's time for a major revision in the history of Christianity.

Scholars of the historical Jesus have believed for more than a century that the seemingly unprecedented combination of his messianism and his suffering as a means of redemption for his followers was an afterthought of his disciples, introduced into the New Testament as a way to explain his death. More than any other aspect of Jesus' teachings, scholars say, it was his role as a suffering servant that marked his philosophy as a departure from the Judaism of the time.

The hymns, says Mr. Knohl, dispel that myth. "Even if readers don't go with me further into my argument, even if they don't accept that it is a real person speaking in the hymns, it does not matter, because the old scholarship we all can see now was wrong." The ideas supposed to have been attributed to Jesus in retrospect already existed in the hymns -- regardless of their authorship -- even before he was born.

Which is not to say that they were commonplace.

"In the Old Testament, sure, we see messianic figures," says Mr. Knohl. "Divine, et cetera, et cetera." In the Book of Isaiah, the character of a "suffering servant" appears. "But never a messiah and suffering. In the eyes of the Old Testament, a suffering messiah is a contradiction."

The upheaval of Menahem's time was ripe for such paradoxes. After the murder of Julius Caesar, Caesar's adopted son, Octavian, was forced, essentially, to split the Roman Empire in two with Mark Antony. In Jerusalem, King Herod had turned the old order upside down, appealing for his power base to a previously scorned group of Jews known as the Qumran sect.

Their leader, Mr. Knohl argues, was Menahem, and the new freedoms they enjoyed under Herod led them to believe that the era of messianic redemption had come. But after Herod died, in 4 B.C.E., a revolt broke out in which Menahem was killed by Roman soldiers. His death marked an apocalyptic turn in the thinking of his followers, who, seeking an explanation for this apparent obstacle on their path to redemption, created "an ideology of catastrophe."

Mr. Knohl believes that such an ideology is reflected in the prophecy of Hystaspes, which was probably written after Menahem's death but was attributed at the time to a mythical Persian king who many believe had actually reigned hundreds of years earlier. The Persian identity, writes Mr. Knohl, "disguises the fact that the apocalyptic work was written by a Jew about the Jewish people and Jerusalem" -- a self-fulfilling prophecy created by Menahem's followers to explain his death.

In Mr. Knohl's reading, the prophecy is thinly veiled political history. He argues that it not only prefigures the Book of Revelation, but also describes, move for move, the Roman wars of the period, Menahem's death, and, most crucially, his resurrection three days later.

Jesus may well have been aware of this story, Mr. Knohl points out. Many scholars believe that John the Baptist was a member of the Qumran sect years before he began following Jesus. And Jesus, at one point, is said to have promised his disciples another "Paraclete" who would follow him. According to Mr. Knohl, Paraclete, usually assumed to mean "Holy Spirit," actually meant Menahem, who had set the standard for messianism.

"It's a brilliant argument," says Frank Moore Cross, an emeritus scholar of ancient languages at Harvard University. "It's daring. It's fair to say that the Dead Sea Scrolls in general continue to bring our views of Judaism and Christianity closer together. There are, of course, conservative Christians and conservative Jews who don't like to embrace one another. They will make this book controversial."

On what grounds? "The business of identifying folks in the Dead Sea Scrolls is not easy," says Mr. Cross. "There are a great many 'Righteous Teachers' -- one of the names of the leader of the sect that produced the scrolls -- one can pin one's hopes on."

"What Israel and I are doing is writing a story without a name. One's about as good as the other," says Michael O. Wise, a professor of ancient languages at Northwestern College, in Minnesota, who published a book last year called The First Messiah (Harper San Francisco), in which he names the title figure Judah. But Mr. Knohl has taken the thesis they share -- that the Dead Sea Scrolls prove the existence of an earlier messiah -- several steps further. "Israel is being more specific than I felt I could be," says Mr. Wise, who had a hand in translating the scroll fragments that Mr. Knohl relies on, but who wrote his book before their publication. "I call it 'The Hymn of the Exalted One,' and though there are other, even more significant differences in our work, what's really interesting is that Israel and I came to these conclusions at about the same time, working independently. That tends to give some strength to the ideas we're working on. As we learn more about the world in which Christianity was conceived, I think we're all seeing more and more that Christianity was not so original. The first messiah had done a good job of bringing together various redeemer figures and rolling them into one. And that one predisposed people to be receptive to the second messiah, Jesus."

Neither Mr. Knohl nor Mr. Wise believes that Jesus' importance is belittled by their discoveries. "The strength of Jesus was the rare combination in his personality of things that existed separately in Judaism at the time," says Mr. Knohl, who sees the Galilee miracle workers, the moral parables of the rabbi Hillel, and the apocalypticism of the Qumran sect reflected in Jesus' teachings.

Mr. Knohl calls himself a "postdenominational observant Jew." Although he agrees with Mr. Wise that in many respects their research might buttress the claim of fundamentalists that the New Testament is an accurate historical document, he says it also may ease some of the friction between Judaism and Christianity. Menahem, he writes, "provides the missing link in our understanding of the way Christianity emerged from Judaism."

Mr. Wise is a practicing member of the Free Church of America, a denomination similar to Lutheranism. "The first messiah doesn't shake my faith at all," he says. "Just because someone had said sort of the same thing doesn't mean Jesus wasn't the real thing."

"Michael is right about that much," says Martin Abegg, a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar who has collaborated with Mr. Wise. But as for an earlier messiah, he says, both Mr. Wise and Mr. Knohl -- whose arguments he knows only in outline -- are telling "pink elephant stories." Mr. Abegg, a professor of religious studies at Trinity Western University, in British Columbia, holds firm to the conventional wisdom: that Christ's combination of messianism and suffering "is one of the uniquenesses of Christianity." Explaining the origin of that blend is a mystery not so easily solved, he says. "It seems like Israel wants to fill the gap" between Judaism and Christianity "with a house of cards."

"There's certainly something very interesting in these hymns," Mr. Abegg says. "But where does it say, 'This is your messiah speaking'? Only between the lines."

He concedes that his views are strictly in line with the status quo. But despite his commitment to convention, and his own Christian faith, he says, he would be glad to believe in a first messiah if more-convincing clues come forth in fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls that have still not been made public.

"It is certainly a very exciting idea, that Christianity was so fully foreshadowed by this Jewish community, that Christianity wasn't just a total left turn," he says. But for him, the first messiah is "one step beyond the evidence."

Whether other scholars agree remains to be seen. "This will take people some time to think about," says Mr. Wise. "This is not just another new idea."

Nor should it be read, like the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, as theology, insists Mr. Knohl. "This is not a sermon I am presenting. This does not tell us, 'Here, we should do this differently or that differently because of what has been found.'

"This is not about what to do. It is about what was done."

Easy-to-print version

E-mail this article