WHO WROTE THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS? The Wall Street Journal has an essay by a lawyer named Jordana Horn, evidently inspired by the new exhibition at the New York Jewish Museum. Excerpt:

There are two competing theories about the scrolls. The first is that they belonged to a single religious sect living nearby the caves, most likely the Essenes. The second theory is that the scrolls are a random collection of texts reflecting the beliefs of many Jewish groups of the period; the caves, under this theory, are a repository for sacred texts from various Jewish communities fleeing the Romans during the Jewish revolt of A.D. 68.

The issue is whether these fragments of parchment tell the story of the religious activity of a particular, arguably proto-Christian, denomination or, alternatively, the story of a wider swath of the Jewish people. In other words, are the scrolls a lens affording an unparalleled view of Jews at a crucial, pre-Diasporan moment or, rather, an in-depth account of a single sect's intellectual development?

Susan Braunstein, the Jewish Museum's curator of archaeology and Judaica, is reluctant to express support for either school of thought. And the exhibit cites scholars on both sides. On one wall there is a quote from Israeli archaeologists Yitzhak Magan and Yuval Peleg, stating that the scrolls belonged to refugees who fled during the Jewish revolt. Just a few feet away are words from E.P. Sanders, a historian of early Judaism and Christianity, stating that many of the scrolls are from the monastic celibate Essene community of Qumran.

In an interview, Norman Golb, a professor of Jewish history and civilization at the University of Chicago and a leading proponent of the second theory, expressed deep concerns about the nature of previous Dead Sea Scrolls exhibitions in America. "I think all of them have been in the nature of efforts to brainwash the public about the significance of the scrolls," Mr. Golb said. While he noted the Jewish Museum's attempts at even-handedness, he was concerned that the lectures running in tandem with the exhibit are being given only by scholars who subscribe to variants of the single-sect theory.

This theory -- that the scrolls represented an intellectual precursor to Christianity -- actually came first and was even propounded by the man who discovered the caves and their scrolls, the Rev. Roland de Vaux, a French biblical scholar, archaeologist and monk. After reading the scrolls, he announced with pride that they had been authored by an Essene sect and asserted that the sect was the forebear of his own Dominican movement.

My own working hypothesis is that the Scrolls are a collection of (Essene?) sectarian libraries from various places in Judea, brought together at the time of the war with Rome, which I think combines the best of both views.

I think the treatment here of the Essenes as "proto-Christian" or "an intellectual precursor to Christianity" is overdone. The Scrolls do provide some interesting background to early Christianity, but the view that Christianity descends directly from the Essene/Qumran sectarian movement is decidedly a fringe one.

If one accepts the Essene hypothesis and the (not quite inevitably following) corollary that Qumran was an Essene settlement, there is a case to be made that the Essene social structure is somehow ancestral to the structure of the Christian monastic movement several centuries later. This has sometimes been assumed, but I don't know of anyone actually arguing the case in any sustained way. I may have missed it though. I don't pretend to keep up with all the secondary literature on Qumran and it's not a question I'm particularly interested in.

UPDATE (2 October): Last Friday Stephen Goranson wrote to challenge some of the comments about De Vaux in the article:

The article claims of de Vaux that "After reading the scrolls, he announced with pride that they had been authored by an Essene sect and asserted that the sect was the forebear of his own Dominican movement." Oh, when and where was such an putative announcement? Let's quote, not myth and hearsay, but de Vaux in NTS 1966 (p. 99 n.1 [cf RB 1966 p.229]) review of G. R. Driver's Scrolls zealot-theory book: "...Driver often speaks of the 'monastery' of Qumran: thus in 'quotes'. I am keeping the 'quotes', because I have never used the word when when writing about the excavations of Qumran...."

De Vaux concluded an Essene connection after some excavation and communal evidence; he was actually a relative late-commer to the Essene identity, years after Sukenik, after Sowmy, after Brownlee, after Dupont-Sommer and others. In RB 1959 p, 300 he cautioned *against* Bagatti's view that Dominus Flevit ossuary inscriptions were Christian. Most Christian historians think Christian monasticism started later, though scholarly discussion would need to include debates about Eusebius' comments on Philo's De Vita Contemplativa, which includes the two earliest known uses of the Greek word monasterion 25, 30).

He also reports that the Raleigh exhibit discusses the theories of Yuval Peleg.

For more on Golb, Magen and Peleg, etc., see here and follow the links.

UPDATE: David Stacey e-mails:

De Vaux may not have used the term 'monastery' but his early conviction that Qumran was a sectarian community ['Qumran is not a village or a group of houses; it is the establishment of a community…. for the carrying on of certain communal activities’ (de Vaux 1973: 10)] appears to have influenced some of the scientific analyses carried out at the site.

[...]

De Vaux, R., (1973), Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls (OUP).

Beyond that, I'm not going to turn this post into a forum for debate on the topic. Those interested can follow the links, where most of the views are covered.