Dead Sea Scrolls Mystery Solved?
Ker Than
Published July 27, 2010
Sections of the Dead Sea Scrolls on display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 2008.Photograprh by Baz Ratner, Reuters展出中的死海古卷部分，2008年在耶路撒冷以色列國家博物館。 照片由巴茲拉特納，路透社
The recent decoding of a cryptic cup, the excavation of ancient Jerusalem tunnels, and other archaeological detective work may help solve one of the great biblical mysteries: Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?
最近解碼的一個隱祕的杯，古耶路撒冷隧道的挖掘和其它考古偵察工作，可能幫助解決一個偉大聖經之謎：是誰寫死海古卷？
The new clues hint that the scrolls, which include some of the oldest known biblical documents, may have been the textual treasures of several groups, hidden away during wartime—and may even be "the great treasure from the Jerusalem Temple," which held the Ark of the Covenant, according to the Bible.
新的線索暗示，書卷其中包括一些已知的最古老聖經文件，可能已是幾組人的文字寶藏，在戰時被收藏起來 - 和甚至可能是“耶路撒冷聖殿的大寶藏”，那握有約櫃的，根據聖經。
The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered more than 60 years ago in seaside caves near an ancient settlement called Qumran. The conventional wisdom is that a breakaway Jewish sect called the Essenes—thought to have occupied Qumran during the first centuries B.C. and A.D.—wrote all the parchment and papyrus scrolls.
死海古卷被發現於超過 60年前，在海邊的洞穴近一古代的徙置區稱為昆蘭。傳統的智慧是，一個分離的猶太宗派稱為愛色尼 - 被認為在公元前後的第一個世紀已佔領昆蘭 - 寫所有羊皮紙和紙莎草的書捲軸。
But new research suggests many of the Dead Sea Scrolls originated elsewhere and were written by multiple Jewish groups, some fleeing the circa-A.D. 70 Roman siege that destroyed the legendary Temple in Jerusalem.
但新的研究提出，許多死海古卷源自其它地方和由多個猶太團體所寫，他們一些是逃離大概在公元70年的羅馬人圍困，那摧毀 有傳奇色彩的耶路撒冷聖殿。
"Jews wrote the Scrolls, but it may not have been just one specific group. It could have been groups of different Jews," said Robert Cargill, an archaeologist who appears in the documentary Writing the Dead Sea Scrolls, which airs Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET/PT on the National Geographic Channel. (The National Geographic Channel is part-owned by the National Geographic Society, which owns National Geographic News.)
“猶太人寫出捲軸，但它可能已不衹是一個特定群體，它可能是不同群體的猶太人，”一位出現在紀錄片寫出死海古卷的考古學家羅伯特嘉吉說。
The new view is by no means the consensus, however, among Dead Sea Scrolls scholars.
新的觀點絕不是一致的共識，但是，在死海古卷的學者中。
"I have a feeling it's going to be very disputed," said Lawrence Schiffman, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University (NYU).
“我有一種感覺它會是非常爭論的，”紐約大學(NYU)希伯來語和猶太研究的一位教授勞倫斯希夫曼說。
Dead Sea Scrolls Written by Ritual Bathers?
死海古卷由禮泳客寫的？
In 1953, a French archaeologist and Catholic priest named Roland de Vaux led an international team to study the mostly Hebrew scrolls, which a Bedouin shepherd had discovered in 1947.
De Vaux concluded that the scrolls' authors had lived in Qumran, because the 11 scroll caves are close to the site.
Ancient Jewish historians had noted the presence of Essenes in the Dead Sea region, and de Vaux argued Qumran was one of their communities after his team uncovered numerous remains of pools that he believed to be Jewish ritual baths.
His theory appeared to be supported by the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, some of which contained guidelines for communal living that matched ancient descriptions of Essene customs.
"The scrolls describe communal dining and ritual bathing instructions consistent with Qumran's archaeology," explained Cargill, of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
死海古卷：“聖殿來的大寶藏”？
Dead Sea Scrolls: "Great Treasure From the Temple"?
Recent findings by Yuval Peleg, an archaeologist who has excavated Qumran for 16 years, are challenging long-held notions of who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Artifacts discovered by Peleg's team during their excavations suggest Qumran once served as an ancient pottery factory. The supposed baths may have actually been pools to capture and separate clay.
And on Jerusalem's Mount Zion, archaeologists recently discovered and deciphered a two-thousand-year-old cup with the phrase "Lord, I have returned" inscribed on its sides in a cryptic code similar to one used in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
To some experts, the code suggests that religious leaders from Jerusalem authored at least some of the scrolls.
"Priests may have used cryptic texts to encode certain texts from nonpriestly readers," Cargill told National Geographic News.
According to an emerging theory, the Essenes may have actually been Jerusalem Temple priests who went into self-imposed exile in the second century B.C., after kings unlawfully assumed the role of high priest.
This group of rebel priests may have escaped to Qumran to worship God in their own way. While there, they may have written some of the texts that would come to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Essenes may not have abandoned all of their old ways at Qumran, however, and writing in code may have been one of the practices they preserved.
It's possible too that some of the scrolls weren't written at Qumran but were instead spirited away from the Temple for safekeeping, Cargill said.
"I think it dramatically changes our understanding of the Dead Sea Scrolls if we see them as documents produced by priests," he says in the new documentary.
"Gone is the Ark of the Covenant. We're never going to find Noah's Ark, the Holy Grail. These things, we're never going to see," he added. "But we just may very well have documents from the Temple in Jerusalem. It would be the great treasure from the Jerusalem Temple."
(Also see "King Herod's Tomb Unearthed Near Jerusalem, Expert Says.")
死海古卷來自四方八面？
Dead Sea Scrolls From Far and Wide?
Many modern archaeologists such as Cargill believe the Essenes authored some, but not all, of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Recent archeological evidence suggests disparate Jewish groups may have passed by Qumran around A.D. 70, during the Roman siege of Jerusalem, which destroyed the Temple and much of the rest of the city.
A team led by Israeli archaeologist Ronnie Reich recently discovered ancient sewers beneath Jerusalem. In those sewers they found artifacts—including pottery and coins—that they dated to the time of the siege. (Related: "Underground Tunnels Found in Israel Used In Ancient Jewish Revolt.")
The finds suggest that the sewers may have been used as escape routes by Jews, some of whom may have been smuggling out cherished religious scrolls, according to Writing the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Importantly, the sewers lead to the Valley of Kidron. From there it's only a short distance to the Dead Sea—and Qumran.
The jars in which the scrolls were found may provide additional evidence that the Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of disparate sects' texts.
Jan Gunneweg of Hebrew University in Jerusalem performed chemical analysis on vessel fragments from the Qumran-area caves.
"We take a piece of ceramic, we grind it, we send it to a nuclear reactor, where it's bombarded with neutrons, then we can measure the chemical fingerprint of the clay of which the pottery was made," Gunneweg says in the documentary.
"Since there is no clay on Earth with the exact chemical composition—it is like DNA—you can point to a specific area and say this pottery was made here, that pottery was made over here."
Gunneweg's conclusion: Only half of the pottery that held the Dead Sea Scrolls is local to Qumran.
捲軸理論“為每人所拒絕”
Scroll Theory "Rejected by Everyone"
Not everyone agrees with the idea that Dead Sea Scrolls may hail from beyond Qumran.
"I don't buy it," said NYU's Schiffman, who added that the idea of the scrolls being written by multiple Jewish groups from Jerusalem has been around since the 1950s.
"The Jerusalem theory has been rejected by virtually everyone in the field," he said.
"The notion that someone brought a bunch of scrolls together from some other location and deposited them in a cave is very, very unlikely," Schiffman added.
"The reason is that most of the [the scrolls] fit a coherent theme and hang together.
"If the scrolls were brought from some other place, presumably by some other groups of Jews, you would expect to find items that fit the ideologies of groups that are in disagreement with [the Essenes]. And it's not there," said Schiffman, who dismisses interpretations that link some Dead Sea Scroll writings to groups such as the Zealots.
UCLA's Cargill agrees with Schiffman that the Dead Sea Scrolls show "a tremendous amount of congruence of ideology, messianic expectation, interpretation of scripture, [Jewish law] interpretation, and calendrical dates.
"At the same time," Cargill said, "it is difficult to explain some of the ideological diversity present within some of the scrolls if one argues that all of the scrolls were composed by a single sectarian group at Qumran."
洞穴是為臨時滾軸存放？
Caves Were for Temporary Scroll Storage?
If Cargill and others are correct, it would mean that what modern scholars call the Dead Sea Scrolls are not wholly the work of isolated scribes.
Instead they may be the unrecovered treasures of terrified Jews who did not—or could not—return to reclaim what they entrusted to the desert for safekeeping.
"Whoever wrote them, the scrolls were considered scripture by their owners, and much care was taken to ensure their survival," Cargill said.
"Essenes or not, the Dead Sea Scrolls give us a rare glimpse into the vast diversity of Judaism—or Judaisms—in the first century."
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/07/100727-who-wrote-dead-sea-scrolls-bible-science-tv/
◆「死海古卷是否證明聖經有錯」之總結◆
文◎tjm
1998年十月一日shirley兄貼出了一些相關的POST，主要是論及死海古卷證明新舊約聖經有很多錯誤，並認為教會故意封鎖消息，所以這些證實聖經錯誤的證據都不被基督徒所瞭解。這一些post引起許多爭論，目前大概已經算是雙方把該說的都說完了。為了避免這些討論無疾而終，不久之後又重新被拿出來討論，所以我特別整理基督徒方面的意見，當成是這段討論的總結，期望對大家有幫助。另外，我整理這些是為了總結爭論，而不是另外引起爭論，所以如果沒有新的論點進來，我就不會繼續回應這個話題了。
一、死海古卷是否證明聖經有誤？
其實，這樣的說法一開始就有問題了，因為我們完全無法證明死海古卷比今日的聖經抄本更接近聖經原著，死海古卷和今日的聖經抄本都是「抄本」，都是可能有錯而必須對照研究，而不是被盲目尊崇的。
死海古卷不是聖經，而是一堆古典籍的抄本，裡面包含有聖經的碎片。因此，研究死海古卷，是屬於舊約經文鑑別學的範疇，而不是要建立塑造另一本「聖經」。
亦即死海古卷裡面的聖經殘卷是被用來研究到底舊約聖經的原文是什麼，現有的舊約聖經到底有沒有因為抄寫而有些錯誤，而非是另一部更準確的聖經。再者，死海古卷算是一本「抄本」，並不一定比現有的馬所拉經文接近原文，到底哪一個抄本比較接近原文，得要透過經文鑑別學的研究才能決定。
因此，當有人宣告「死海古卷證明聖經有誤」，其實是因為誤解了經文鑑別的研究方法，而下錯了結論。
二、死海古卷裡的版本如果與瑪所拉經文有差異，對基督徒是不是傷害？
基督徒忠誠的目標是上帝與上帝的話，因此能夠清楚知道「聖經的原文到底是什麼」，是一件可喜可賀的事情。而抄本的差異是經文鑑別學中常見的現象，如果能夠透過比瑪所拉經文早幾百年的死海古卷抄本，讓我們更接近上帝的話，那大多數的基督徒都會非常樂意的。
事實上，死海古卷中所發現的經卷抄本，內容大部分都跟目前的沒有兩樣。在Wadi al-Murabbaah 洞穴中所發現的十二小先知書，甚至跟今日的瑪所拉經文完全一致。
三、死海古卷中有沒有新約經卷：
以下是shirley兄引的資料「 七號洞共出浦草紙古卷19部，其中兩部於1962年已經翻譯，知是出埃及記和《耶利米書信》（次經）兩書的希臘文。
一九七二年，西班牙耶穌會學者何西奧可勒根（他是羅馬主教聖經研究學院的一位蒲草紙文獻專家）宣佈，那餘下的17部古卷中有新約經文。他利用古文書學的知識翻譯了其中9個片斷，包括：馬可福音、使徒行傳、羅馬書、提摩太前書、雅各書、彼得後書。這些手抄本的年代經證實後是公元五十至一百年」
我所查到的資料中，大部分都沒有提到這件事情，楊牧谷的當代神學辭典中只說「第5-10號洞的資料比較沒有價值」，但是透過搜尋引擎可以查到兩個網站：
http://www.flash.net/~hoselton/deadsea/cave07.htm 談到：
All the manuscripts recovered from this cave are in Greek and, untilrecently, were thought to be exclusivelybiblical compositions. There has been some conjecture that they were NewTestament texts, however thisseems so unlikely that it requires extraordinary supporting evidence to betaken seriously. The best recentevidence suggests something quite different.
http://pw2.netcom.com/~emuro/index.html這篇的內容是作者檢驗出第七洞所謂「the first New Testament」是以諾書的一部份而非新約的一部份。不過我去看了一下碎片的圖片，還真是小....居然由這小小的碎片就可以推測出到底是那一本書，真是令我讚嘆不已。
另外，在新約經文鑑別學權威Nestle的聖經中，也沒有提到死海古卷足以成為新約經文鑑別學的新文件資料。
四、如果死海古卷真的有新約，基督徒會不會難過？
其實，如果單單為基督教的好處，基督徒應該非常樂意接受這些資料的，想想：
馬可福音著作年代大約是西元 65年
使徒行傳著作年代大約是西元 60年以後
羅馬書著作年代大約是西元 58年
提摩太前書著作年代大約是西元 64年左右
雅各書著作年代大約是西元50年左右
彼得後書著作年代大約是西元60年或90年左右
尤其其中提摩太前書、彼得後書有比較多的爭論，如果今天找得到西元50-100年間這些聖經的抄本（注意，不是原著喔！），那就打了很多比較自由主義學者的耳光。因為有抄本就證明原著已經出現，而且是流傳一段時間了才產生抄本。 如果這真的是聖經學者的共識，那對基督教真的是大大的好，呵呵！而我想Nestle這些人應該會立刻把死海古卷當成是新約經文鑑別學資料的一部份，修正目前新約的原文去接近這麼接近著作年代的聖經抄本。但是我們看不到這件事情被教會界廣為宣傳，我手邊不管是自由派或者是保守主義的書籍都沒有提到這偉大的發現。談聖經無誤的書籍也沒有這方面的說法，那....我們心裡就該有數了。
五、死海古卷是不是證實正典的選定有問題？
shirley認為死海古卷中出現一些目前被列為次經、偽經的資料，就代表目前的正典書目是經過後人刪改過的（亦即shirley兄認為出現在死海古卷中的文件就是當時被認為是正典的文件）。
不過，死海古卷包含：舊約抄本、社群守則、感恩詩卷、光明之子與黑暗之子大戰、哈巴谷書註釋、銅製藏寶圖、巴柯巴的私人信件、法律文件、聖經譯本等等文件總不能說這些東西全部都被昆蘭社團當成是「正典」吧？尤其在第四號洞裡面發現了四百件文獻，一般認為這裡是昆蘭社群的小圖書館，總不能說整個圖書館的內容都是正典吧？
在缺乏文獻直接記載正典書目的情況下，直接由出土的文獻內容要判斷到底什麼書被昆蘭社團的人當成是「聖經」，是有相當困難的。貿然拿著文獻目錄就來質疑今日的正典書目，更顯示自己對整個死海古卷的內涵瞭解不夠。
六、結論
死海古卷的發現，對基督教、猶太教、天主教與舊約聖經，都是一件福氣，幫助我們回溯了近一千年的時間，對舊約聖經與耶穌時代的昆蘭社群有更深入的瞭解。至於有網友居然會把這福氣說成是基督教的災難，我個人是非常不解的。不管如何，能夠引發這麼詳細的討論，應該是對許多人都有幫助的一件事。
http://a2z.fhl.net/textual/textual25.html
約旦戰鬥去重獲'無價'的基督教聖物：70金屬書疑隱藏基督密碼
維基解密之死海古卷
沒有留言:
發佈留言