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February 27th, 2010 
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Book Description
In Dead Sea Scrolls: The Untold Story, Hebrew scholar Kenneth Hanson captures all the mystery and excitement of the rediscovery of the scrolls, the half-century of intrigue that followed, and the ancient Hebrew sect that wrote, preserved, and died defending these treasured works…. More >>
The Dead Sea Scrolls: The Untold Story
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I totally agree with the reader from Los Angeles, The book is written very poorly, Hanson comes across as being a pompous jerk In addition I can actually say I dozed off on numerous occasions while reading the book
Rating: 1 / 5
Kenneth Hanson’s Ph.D., announced on the cover, offers readers brief hope of scholarship. Once inside, however, that window dressing quickly gives way to screed. Excessively redundant, omissive, repeatedly self-contradictory, shallow, clumsy and inexpertly speculative, The Untold Story almost dares readers to keep from laughing at its outrageous one-sidededness and maliciously poor editing. Were these the book’s only faults, Hanson could be pitied and forgiven. Allowances can be made for blind faith and bad spelling even from credential-flaunting writers pretending objectivity. But the author doesn’t stop with incompetence. To these flaws, he adds ad hominem pokes at anyone who contradicts his view on any matter of importance in the scrolls. Or interprets ancient Hebrew differently than he. Such theological flaming rankles even when saturated with evidence. The pathetic slurs dotting Hanson’s chapters fail to stretch his smelly argument into anything persuasive.
Rating: 1 / 5
Disappointing. Promoted as scholarship, the inherent bias soon becomes apparent – Christian spin doctoring promoting the Scrolls as a prophetic precursor and validation of the Jesus story. The glaring and logical question, however, is; did the later writers of the narrative Gospels use available contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls to pen their accounts? How? As Christian revisionist history, don’t expect this to be considered. An interesting story though, but don’t expect an unbiased account or a scholar’s insight.
Rating: 3 / 5
Our understanding of Scripture is built upon the inspired texts themselves. They are the bedrock of our faith. Over the past 2000 years, a significant body of scholarship, commentary and proclamation has been constructed above holy writ, forming what we generally think of when we consider a story or saying from God’s written word.
We may not know whether it was Augustine, Calvin or Barclay who elucidated a passage in such a way as to help us “own” it; nonetheless, we all depend on the faithful, dedicated witnesses who have preceded us to understand what we read between Genesis 1 and Revelation 22. Great literature has depended upon these insights; as has many of the social advances of the Christian era.
It is most likely that when, in our mind’s ear, we “hear” Scripture, we do so in the language of the English renaissance-the beautiful cadences of the Authorized (or King James) Version. However, remarkable discoveries have occurred since that beloved translation of the 1600s; discoveries that shed new light upon our edifice of faith. From time to time, older, more reliable copies of this or that book or collection of books from the Bible have been found-in out of the way monasteries and ancient libraries. Yet none of these have been as amazing as that day in 1947 when a Bedouin shepherd boy uncovered an entire cache of ancient scrolls that had remained in a desert cave near the Dead Sea for nearly 2000 years. What his toss of a rock revealed was one of the greatest treasures of all time.
In this book, Kenneth Hanson recounts the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, relates the adventure of tracking many down (and losing some forevermore!), and offers the reader a first-hand account of the people who wrote and hid them.
Why do we care about a bunch of dusty old scrolls, and their fragments that are too fragile to touch? Because they add their even-older corroboration of many of the Bible passages we have come to know and love. They show how the community of faith treasured and used the texts we revere and read. And they give us a source of greater understanding of the meaning of difficult-to-translate passages that have puzzled Christians for centuries.
It is a fascinating, lively account of the importance of God’s written word and the people and faith it shapes. And it points us toward the newer revisions of the King James Version (the best of which is the New Revised Standard Version)-translations that take into account the discoveries revealed in 1947.
If you have made up your mind that the scholar-archeology of the Indiana Jones type is a myth, then you might want to read this book; getting to know its author will be an eye-opening adventure.
Rating: 5 / 5
Kenneth Hanson largely met the much needed basic goal of this book: to write an accessible account of the Dead Sea Scrolls for the layperson and present the evidence in a common-sense manner. Throughout the book he shows startling parallels between the Qumran sect who wrote the scrolls and the early Christians, but he is careful not to combine the two into one as others have done. But the close parallels cannot be ignored, and Hanson gives good reasons why both Jesus and John the Baptist were well aware of the rules and teachings of the Qumran sect.
He states that a major difference is the Qumran sect (whom he identifies as the Essenes) were more rigid and exclusive than the Christians who accepted Gentiles and even changed Jewish dietary laws. But Hanson fails to point out these types of changes occurred only after Paul joined the Christian ranks (Jesus sent his apostles to the “lost sheep of the house of Israel” and adhered to strict Jewish dietary laws). Hanson states the reason the Essenes and the Christians cannot be the same is that radiocarbon dating shows the Essenes began writing their scriptures two centuries before the Christians.
But he also shows us that the writers of the scrolls were very able to change the terms of their Judaism. They used a solar rather than the standard Jewish lunar calendar and required celibacy (a preferred state to enter the kingdom of heaven according to Matthew 19:12) over the Jewish command to “be fruitful and multiply” found in Genesis 9, but we see the Qumran sect was able to splinter off into a branch that did permit marriage. The Qumran sect also adopted socialist ideas of communal living and shared responsibility that the early Christians adhered to in following Jesus’ and John the Baptist’s teachings (which the Christian Right of today’s society ironically ignores and even regards as being “unchristian”). Yet nowhere does Hanson follow his own evidence and consider the possibility that Christianity may have been another adaptation of this same Qumran sect. Jesus criticizes the Pharisees and Sadducees in the Bible but never mentions the other Jewish religious group, the Essenes, by name. Could his reference to the righteous and meek who will inherit the earth be a reference to this same group? Nowhere does Hanson consider why Christianity embraces Greek and Egyptian pagan ideas; and especially why Zoroastrian elements of the battle between light and darkness and the final judgment are so vital to both the Qumran sect and Christianity. After all, he does point out that Galilee was primarily populated by pagans until only a hundred years before the birth of Jesus. If anything is taught by history, it is when one religion overtakes another there is a meshing of the gods, beliefs, and customs of the two. (We can plainly see how Jewish elements were retained by Christianity and how both were adopted by Islam.) This raises the possibility that Jesus and his cousin John retained some of these old Galilean beliefs within their Qumran-style of Judaism, and this may account for the pagan elements that have been repeatedly noticed within Christianity. But we don’t find this kind of thinking in Hanson’s book because he clings to the popular belief that Jesus (despite having beliefs such as spirit possession causing illness) had the mindset of a modern member of Western society.
It is very apparent from these unearthed scrolls that the role of Jesus was modeled after the expected reincarnation (the early Christians believed in reincarnation too) of the revered Qumran leader, the Teacher of Righteousness, who lived two centuries before. This reincarnated teacher was supposed to appear again in the “end times,” and the apostles clearly believed in the popular Jewish view that they were living during the time of the apocalypse. After all, Jesus said, “…the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give her light, and the stars will fall from the heaven… Truly I say to you, in no way will this generation pass away until all these things have occurred” (Matthew 24:29-34), but this is something Hanson avoids mentioning.
The problem with this book is that Hanson is one of those scholars who lets his own religious beliefs interfere with his academic judgment. He clearly believes in the supernatural: “Discoveries of this kind don’t just pop up. Only an invisible, supernatural hand could have preserved such treasures for us and for our day and age” (page 38). One feels that he believes the Qumran sect accurately prophesized the arrival of Jesus rather than consider the possibility that Jesus’ life was written to conform to the previous Teacher’s life–right down to his coming back again to lead a final victory in a future apocalypse that was once again delayed by his own martyrdom. Hanson presents the sect as having psychic powers of precognition (after all, they foresaw Jesus), but he fails to adequately explain why they were so terribly wrong about the end of their own mission. What our age is left with is an inherited legacy of the very same prophecy–the Book of Revelation (that Hanson believes the Christians were reading at the start of the siege of Jerusalem, when they were most likely reading it afterwards while still expecting Jesus to return within their lifetimes). The dangerous thing about this prophecy is that so many people believe it applies to today and not during the reign of the Kittim (the Roman Empire), and we now have the means to bring a real apocalypse that may be just as disastrous for the whole world as it was for the Jews of Masada.
Rating: 3 / 5