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The Dead Sea Scrolls are not more ancient writings than those of the Bible. The Scrolls, besides containing several non-biblical documents, contained also manuscript copies of parts of the Old Testament much older than any manuscript copies already possessed. Biblical scholars did not find it incredible that such copies should exist. Origen (185-254 A.D.) had made use of some ancient Greek manuscripts found near the Dead Sea in 217 A.D. In the 9th century other finds had been made in the ruins of an old Greek monastery which had been built in 492 A.D. It was not, then, unthinkable that other manuscripts might be discovered although, naturally, biblical scholars did not know of the Dead Sea Scrolls until they were discovered in 1947.
It would be too much to speak of several centuries. The Scrolls belonged to the library of a group belonging to a Jewish sect called the Essenes by Josephus, the Jewish historian. This sect arose during the Maccabean Wars about the middle of the second century B.C. Under a leader described in the Scrolls as "Teacher of Righteousness" some members of the sect went to live in solitude at Qumran, about fifteen miles east of Jerusalem, near the shores of the Dead Sea. There they built a large monastery in 134 B.C., in which they lived a strictly-disciplined community life. They regarded themselves as the only true disciples of Moses and the Prophets, claiming to be the "Children of Light" as opposed to all other Jews and, of course, to the Gentiles. At Qumran they made their own copies of the Hebrew Scriptures - among those discovered in 1947 a complete copy in Hebrew of the Book of Isaiah was found as well as fragments of all other Old Testament books except that of Esther - and they also composed other documents containing accounts of their own distinctive beliefs and practices, such as a "Commentary on Habakuk", "Hymns", a "Manual of Discipline", and a kind of prophecy of "The War of the Children of Light against the Children of Darkness". When the Roman armies under Titus were advancing upon Jerusalem in 70 A.D. and the Community at Qumran realised that the destruction of their monastery was likely, the monks packed their manuscripts in jars and hid them in the caves from which they were recovered over eighteen centuries later.
There are no grounds for thinking in such a way. When three Bedouins brought the first finds to the Syrian monastery of St. Mark in Jerusalem they were turned away by the doorkeeper. Efforts by beggars to sell archaeological fakes are an everyday occurrence in the Middle East. The Superior of the monastery, Athanasius, however, hearing of the incident, sent for the Bedouins and bought the articles from two of them. The third sold his to the Hebrew University. Athanasius consulted competent authorities, including an official of the Department of Antiquities, and was told the items did not seem to be of any real value. He then consulted the Director of the American School of Oriental Research, Professor John Trever, who recognised one scroll as an ancient copy - apparently dating from about 100 B.C. - of the Book of Isaiah. Controversy ensued. Scholars were divided and thrashed the matter out in technical journals until general agreement was reached. That was all to the good. There would not have been wanting critics ready to condemn over-hasty acceptance of the documents as genuine.
That charge was based on suggestions made by popularisers such as the American journalist Edmund Wilson in his book "The Scrolls from the Dead Sea", and even direct accusations by A. Powell Davies in "The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls". Both were proved guilty of misrepresentation by German, Swiss, French, Belgian, English and even Jewish scholars actually working on the Scrolls in Jerusalem. Of Powell Davies' book the "Times Literary Supplement", August 16, 1957, said it was a case of "the blind leading the blind"; that his book was full of "inaccurate statements, throwing dust in the eyes of his readers"; and that a picture of the Hebrew Isaiah Scroll printed upside down was "a parable of the book itself". In other words, the book is a topsy-turvy and quite unreliable source of information, despite its appeal to so-called rationalists.
No responsible writers have ever accused others of having declared the Scrolls to be forgeries. All that the evidence shows is that scholars took every precaution in advance to make sure that they were not forgeries. For the rest, scientific methods have proved their second-century B.C. origin and we owe that to the very ones who were charged with boycotting them, namely, to the work mainly of Christian scholars drawn from different Churches which financed their efforts. Archaeological research has shown that the Qumran monastery was built about 134 B.C. and destroyed in 70 A.D. by the Roman armies under Titus. Roman coins found in the ruins date from between the time of the Emperor Caesar Augustus (27 B.C.-14 A.D.) and 70 A.D. Moreover, Carbon 14 tests applied to the wrapping material around the Scrolls confirm the conclusion that they date from that period and could not have been forgeries of a later period.
To that quotation - with no indication of the author of it - Dr. H. H. Rowley, Professor of Hebrew at Manchester University, has sufficiently replied. "The more sensational statements about the Scrolls and the New Testament", he wrote, "have been made by writers, not one of whom has the slightest reputation as New Testament scholars." The men who have really worked on the Scrolls would almost to a man repudiate the suggestion you quote. Among these would be De Vaux, Gaster, Millar Burrows, Rowley himself, Milik, Cross, Vincent, Van de Ploeg, Skehan, Albright, and Vermes, to mention only some of the more prominent names. Professor Rowley, in a B.B.C. Third Program talk entitled "The Dead Sea Scrolls and their Significance", declared that there is "a total difference between the place of Jesus in Christianity and that of the 'Teacher of Righteousness' in the Qumran faith", and that "the chief value of the Dead Sea Scrolls consists in the light they throw on Judaism between the Old and the New Testaments." In the year following upon this talk, 1956, John Allegro, who had studied Hebrew under Professor Rowley, published his "Pelican" book: "The Dead Sea Scrolls." Taken to task by Professor Rowley not only for its fanciful conjectures but also for its positive mishandling of the evidence, Allegro admitted that his book was a mixture of fact and imagination written for popular appeal. Two years later, in a B.B.C. talk, Allegro was much more restrained than in his science-fiction effort. In 1957 Professor Rowley summed up his own views in a booklet entitled "The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament" in which he concluded: "A vast gulf separates the New Testament from the Scrolls in thought. Their teachings are poles asunder." From across the Atlantic came a similar verdict. book "More Light on the Dead Sea Scrolls", reiterated with greater insistence his own earlier statement that the Scrolls "do not substantially affect the New Testament."
The Scrolls give no biographical information about Christ at all. Nowhere do they mention Him. Professor Millar Burrows, of Yale University writes on p. 77 of his already mentioned book: "Much has been made of the hidden years of Jesus' youth. They have always afforded a fertile soil for the growth of legends. That as a young man Jesus was initiated into the secrets of the Essenes Cullmann rightly pronounces a 'pure and groundless speculation'." Even J. M. Allegro, given as he is to rash conjectures, says in his Pelican book "The Dead Sea Scrolls", p. 160: "There is no evidence that He was ever a member of this body." The New Testament itself excludes the possibility. Until Jesus began His public ministry, He lived at Nazareth during his boyhood days and later worked there as a carpenter. This was well known to his Jewish neighbours. Amazed by his teaching they exclaimed: "Where did he get all this? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?" Mk., 6:3. St. John also records in his gospel the surprise of the Jews: "We know where this man comes from . . . how is it that this man has learning, when he has never studied?" Jn., 7:27, 15. Moreover, Josephus tells us that the Essenes, as a heretical sect, had broken off all relations with the official cult of Judaism. They refused to so much as set foot inside the Temple in Jerusalem, having their own rites among themselves elsewhere. Both the Pharisees and the Sadducees detested the Essenes with whom the Qumran group was affiliated, and had Jesus been a member or an initiate of the Community at Qumran the Pharisees and Sadducees would not have failed to bring this up in public in order to discredit him. But while they sneered at his Galilean origin and charged him with breaking the Law of Moses, they made no mention of his having been associated with the Essenes.
Nothing like proof is available for that extravagant supposition. At most, the Dead Sea Scrolls provide a greater knowledge than previously possessed of the Jewish background prevailing when Christianity appeared on the scene. Scholars have found resemblances between passages in the Qumran documents and in the New Testament; but this proves only that the Jewish sect of the Essenes and the New Testament writers were equally familiar with the Old Testament and common ways of thinking current at the time in Jewish circles. As Professor Rowley points out, however, where similar expressions occur in the New Testament they are invested with a new meaning not to be found in the Scrolls, while there are other basic differences so notable and so opposed to the teachings of the Scrolls that derivation of the New Testament from them is not possible. Even Theodor Gaster, a Jewish scholar, says in his book "The Dead Sea Scriptures", p. 12, that there is "no trace in the Scrolls of the cardinal theological concepts which make Christianity a distinctive faith."
We can forget about the imagined plagiarisms. For the rest, the Christian religion could not have been founded on the books of the New Testament. It existed before any of them was written. Some twenty years after the death of Christ St. Paul wrote the first of his Epistles, the forerunner of several others, to already existent Christian communities. The Gospels came later, the last, that of St. John, dating from about 100 A.D. The complete collection of the Epistles, Gospels, Acts of the Apostles and the Apocalypse, in all 27 books, was listed by St. Athanasius in 367 A.D. and formally approved by the Church as a whole in the following century. Nearly four centuries elapsed, therefore, before all Christians had the complete New Testament as we know it. But the Christian religion had existed through all those centuries as founded by Christ and the Apostles. Of course, granted official acceptance by the Church of the complete New Testament as the inspired Word of God, it naturally became an authentic source of Christian information for later generations and has ever since been quoted as such. But it should be clear that the Christian religion itself was not founded on the books of the New Testament. It gave rise to them; and this fact, little as many people realise it, gives rise in turn to one of the greatest problems confronting Christian scholars today, namely, that of the relationship between the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history.
In all cases the originals have long since perished and we have copies only. On this subject there is scarcely a better authority than Sir Frederic Kenyon, who was for over twenty years Director and Principal Librarian of the British Museum. In his book "The Story of the Bible" (1936) p. 33, he says that for all the works of classical antiquity we have to depend on manuscript copies made long after the original writings. He says that the best case is that of Virgil, yet between the earliest manuscript of his works and Virgil himself is a gap of some 350 years. With Livy the Roman historian the gap is one of about 500 years, and with Horace the Roman poet about 900 years. For the New Testament books we have papyrus manuscripts due to recent discoveries much older than the 3rd and 4th century Vellum Codices. The new discoveries take us back to within two generations of the original documents. Moreover, where there are only a few manuscripts of works by any classical author - that is, copies of their writings - manuscript copies of the New Testament books are reckoned in thousands. In a later book, "The Bible and Modern Scholarship" (1948) p. 20, Sir Frederic Kenyon sums things up by saying: "No other ancient book has anything like such early and plentiful testimony to its text, and no unbiased scholar would deny that the text that has come down to us is substantially sound." There can be no room for reasonable doubt, then, that from major manuscript copies, thousands of minor ones, and from quotations in the writings of the early Fathers, textual experts have been able to duplicate what was written in the first place. In fact, we would be no better off from a textual point of view if we had the originals. The real problems begin further along the line.
The Jewish historian Josephus, who was born in 37 A.D., but four or five years after the death of Christ, records in his book "Jewish Antiquities", written about 94 A.D., the fact of the existence of Christ and of his death at the hands of Pilate. He also makes mention by name of St. James as being one of his followers. Among Roman writers, Pliny the Younger (62-114 A.D.) wrote to the Emperor Trajan about the members of a sect originated by Christ; the Roman historian Tacitus (55-120 A.D.) records in his "Annals" that Christ was put to death by Pontius Pilate; another Roman historian, Suetonius (75-160 A.D.) in his "Life of Claudius" speaks of that Emperor's banishment from Rome of those Jews who were followers of Christ a decree mentioned in Acts 18:2 and which was issued about 50 A.D., within 17 years of the death of Christ. The Roman secular historians, however, although they indicate their awareness of the many religions which flourished as an important feature of social life, were not sufficiently interested in them to pay much attention to them. But these various religions had their own writings, and there was a wide circulation of Iranian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Jewish, and later Christian and Gnostic literature which provided historical documentary evidence of their existence and claims. The historian interested in religion turns to these, and not to the uninterested Roman secular historians, for information about them. For example, the first Epistle of St. Paul to the Thessalonians is undoubtedly a historical document written in 51 A.D., only eighteen years after the death of Christ. We are told, in Acts 18:11, that Paul was accused before Gallio at Corinth. This Gallio held office as provincial governor, according to an inscription at Delphi, in the eleventh year of the Emperor Claudius, that is, in 51 A.D. It was, then, from Corinth that St. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, presupposing in them a knowledge of the life and teachings of Christ although this was some ten years before the earliest of the Gospels had been put into writing.
Many have been found in the Roman catacombs. When St. Paul wrote his letter to the Romans in 56 A.D., he was addressing an already well-established Christian community in Rome. Smith and Cheetham, in their "Dictionary of Christian Antiquities", give many examples of such inscriptions, saying that the most ancient dated one belonged to the third year of the Emperor Vespasian, 72 A.D. That was over twenty years before St. John wrote the fourth Gospel, of which naturally those early Christians had no knowledge at all. Certainly no subject as that of Christian origins has ever been so closely investigated over so long a period of time by so many scholars, with every historical, geographical and archaeological aspect taken into consideration. And still more certainly Christianity as a visible institutional religion in this world naming Christ as its Founder does not owe its existence to a mythical being who never lived at all. The astonishing thing would be that anyone would need reassuring about that. Christianity is well and truly anchored in history.
They were written primarily to proclaim a religious message of salvation wrought by Christ. But this does not mean that they are religious treatises only and not also historical documents. They are both, and one must keep both aspects in mind. The mistake has often been made of approaching the Gospels as one approaches ordinary secular history books, expecting a disinterested factual account of persons and events as a neutral observer would have described them. But none of the Gospels was written in such a way. St. Mark's opening words are: "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." Clearly, he was setting down in writing an account of how the Church presented Christ in her public proclamation of the Christian faith. In writing the fourth gospel St. John declared his purpose to be "that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that through this faith you may have eternal life." Jn., 20:31. Secular historians do not write for such purposes which, in fact, go far beyond the motives of those intent only on the writings of plain, unvarnished, academic history as such. In reality, all four evangelists were immersed in the very life of the Church and were recording direct and first-hand evidence of the faith of the primitive Christian community, saying practically to their readers: This is what we Christians believe and what you should believe also.
Simply by saying that the "Jesus of History" is the one to whom must be attributed all that our faith declares Him to have been. The "Christ of Faith" and the "Jesus of History" are one and the same Person. It was the "Jesus of History" who said to Peter: "Who do you say that I am?" And when Peter replied: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God", Jesus told him: "Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven." Matt., 16:15-17. The light of faith supplied an interpretative element inseparably linked with the real personality of Jesus in a known place and period, and in the midst of a definitely historical people. On the interpretative level where Jesus is concerned we find many different estimates. Take the ordinary historical fact of his death. The neutral Roman historian Tacitus states simply that he was executed by Pontius Pilate. The hostile Jewish Talmud says he was guilty of sorcery and of subverting Israel and so was put to death. A second-century Syrian philosopher, saying that all philosophers are persecuted, held that the Jews had killed their "wise man" Christ as the Greeks had killed Socrates. The Gospels record the same occurrence, but with the entirely different significance of a Saviour promised by God and dying for the redemption of mankind. That is the verdict of Christian faith. In the Gospels the "Christ of Faith" is the "Jesus of History" in the sense that the historical reality of the facts and teachings of Jesus provide the basis for the meaning which faith perceives in them. From this point of view, the Gospels are essentially religious books calling for a religious response from those who read them; and they awaken that response in those who do read them with proper dispositions. The Second Vatican Council, in its Decree of Divine Revelation, n.19 (November, 1965) insisted on the historical character of the Gospels, declaring that "the Church has firmly and with absolute constancy held, and continues to hold, that the four gospels, whose historical character the Church unhesitatingly asserts, faithfully hand on what Jesus Christ, while living among men, really did and taught for their salvation."
An unbeliever in Christ may be tempted to speak like that. But while the Gospels do indeed put before us the "Christ of Faith", it is not at the expense of history. A remarkable feature of the Gospels is the objectivity of the evangelists who could so abstract from their own personal beliefs and feelings in stating down-to-earth facts where their narratives required no more than that. Quite simply they tell the most astonishing things without pausing to make capital out of them or to comment upon them as one would expect of those so personally involved, either directly or indirectly, in the events they were describing. They tell of the insults and brutalities heaped on Christ, but give way to no expressions of indignation. The treason of Judas and the cowardice of Pilate earn no word of reproach. Things discreditable to the apostles themselves are narrated, their presumption, jealousies and self-seeking ambitions, with no attempt to water them down or excuse them. No one can say that the evangelists did not get back thoroughly into the atmosphere of the actual time when Christ lived and of which they were writing. This is particularly noticeable in St. Luke's case. When St. Luke wrote his Gospel, St. Paul had already written the two Epistles to the Corinthians, the two to the Thessalonians, and those to the Galatians and the Romans. Now St. Luke had been St. Paul's disciple and companion, and one would think this would be recognised at once on reading his Gospel. But not so. St. Luke's mind went back to the time of which he was writing. He ignored the intervening years, and no direct influence of St. Paul was allowed to intrude itself into his account of the life and teachings of Christ. Critics, while noting that some traces of apparently Pauline influence appear in St. Luke's Gospel, agree that these could be due to St. Luke's own written sources having coincided in such cases with sources St. Paul had also happened to use. Quite recently Professor David Flusser, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has published a book entitled simply "Jesus". In it, he claims to give the life of the historical Jesus on the ground levels of experience accessible to ordinary historians and isolated from supernatural claims and the insights of faith. He has no doubts about the historical reality of Jesus. But he can put before us one who was no more than just a good man; and to do that is not to offer us the Jesus of the Gospels whose earthly history is so interwoven with the supernatural truth concerning Him that, without a kind of vivisection, these two aspects, the divine and the human, cannot be separated.
The evangelists were in no sense writing a kind of religious romance. They were setting down two kinds of facts; ordinary historical facts, although they were not interested in producing a strictly historical biography of Christ for the benefit of future historians; then religious facts, making clear what their faith was about the Person of Christ and what was the significance of the divine revelation He gave to mankind. From both points of view the Gospels are factual. They cannot be ranked as what we would call works of historical fiction; that is, as works of imagination built upon a historical basis. Even if we took such a point of view, I doubt whether they could be called great novelists, considering the material they had for their story. Alexander Dumas was a great novelist. In "The Count of Monte Cristo", he made Edmond Dantes, imprisoned for life on false evidence by his enemies in the dungeons of the Chateau d'lf, escape and return to the old scenes as a powerful and mysterious figure, there to confront dramatically and exact a fearful revenge from all who had wronged him. Readers followed with bated breath every move of the Count of Monte Cristo as he pursued his relentless way, wondering where he would strike next. Had the evangelists been novelists, they would have made Christ return after His resurrection to confront Annas, Caiaphas, Pilate and others, saying: "Now what about it?" Instead, with no such dramatic confrontation, but almost as an anti-climax, they set down the simple truth that He appeared to no one except disciples who had already believed in Him. From another point of view, however, that of characterisation, you would be right. For in the writings of the Rabbis there is ample material to construct the model Jewish teacher; yet the character of Christ does not fit in with that at all. How did the evangelists think of one at variance with all those features which custom, education, patriotism, religion and nature alike seemed to consecrate as the ideal? Only an actual living model could account for that. Even Rousseau was constrained to admit that the character of Christ is so sublime that a man who could invent it would be more astounding than the reality itself. But the evangelists had no need to invent anything. The Jesus of Nazareth on the level of natural experience, and the Christ of faith on the level of supernatural experience gave rise to the message the Church proclaimed from the very beginning; and the four evangelists, each with his own individual personality, scope and style, had but to record it.
A sheer and literal verbalism which takes words at their face value regardless of their setting or context, the theme of the writer, and the literary forms he employed, inevitably leads to many misunderstandings. As the Word of God in the words of men whose times and cultural standards were very different from our own, the Bible, including both the Old and the New Testaments, necessarily contains many obscurities and difficulties for us. In interpreting Scripture, ah instructed Catholic at least knows that, since truth cannot contradict truth, any meaning he might imagine to be that of Scripture but which is opposed to a defined Article of the Catholic Faith is certainly a mistaken one. Problems, however, remain; and the Chuch urges upon her biblical scholars and theologians a continued and deeper study of the Scriptures that by their work everybody may arrive at a better understanding of them, and especially of difficult passages in them. We have not got all the answers to everything yet, and from this point of view there will always be room for progress. Nothing in all this alters the fact that the Bible is indeed the inspired Word of God, that all should reverence and read it as such, and that by far the greater part of it, and above all its basic message, can be understood by and be most helpful to any ordinary, intelligent and well-disposed reader of it.
Such a suggestion, taken as it stands, would be quite misleading. Critical opponents of Christianity, with a preconceived prejudice against anything supernatural or miraculous, would like to hold that St. Matthew and St. Luke invented a marvellous origin for their hero, just as pagans of old did for their heroes in the ancient mythologies. But that is ruled out by the description of a Christ born in poverty and living in obscurity a very ordinary and unremarkable kind of life as the son of a carpenter at Nazareth for thirty years. The suggestion is also against the declared intention of the evangelists. St. Luke expressly presents his version as a reliable account based on the reminiscences of eyewitnesses (Lk., 1:1-4), whilst St. Matthew constantly refers to Old Testament prophecies anticipating the material contents of his account. Nor, so deeply reverencing the Gospel tradition, would these two evangelists preface their written records of it with blatantly fictitious introductions. We can, therefore, dismiss the extravagances of critics who are openly hostile to Christianity. If we turn to Christian scholars, we hear much of those who want to "demythologize" the Gospels, especially the infancy narratives given by Matthew and Luke. The main advocate here is the German Lutheran biblical scholar, Dr. Rudolf Bultmann. But in speaking of him we must be careful, for he has been greatly misunderstood. To most people the word "myth" means false or unreal. To say that the gospel story is mythical would mean to them that it is sheer fiction. But Bultmann's idea of the word "myth" was an entirely technical one, employed by biblical scholars for a symbolical expression of a truth so profound that it leaves us at a loss for words. When the Gospels were written, they say, patterns of imagery were employed to convey the truth, patterns which are not customary among us today. The same basic truth must be re-stated in modern existentialist terms, only the literary forms the evangelists used being discarded. This process Bultmann called "demythologizing" the Gospels, leaving himself open to the charge of undermining belief in them, the last thing he wanted to do. His theories have, as usual in such cases, led extremists to denials of the truth of the Gospels; but also, in more balanced followers, to deeper insights, to modifications of Bultmann's theory, and to what they believe to be a more intelligent acceptance of the substantial truth the evangelists wanted to put before us. Catholic biblical scholars willingly credit Bultmann with good intentions, appreciate his scholarly labours, and admit - some in a greater degree, others in a lesser degree - that the basically historical infancy narratives are described in a literary form which allows for imaginative illustration in keeping with the mentality of the times. But they hold that, where the Gospels of St. Mark and St. John began with the public ministry of Jesus, St. Matthew and St. Luke for their infancy narratives had access to an earlier cycle of particular traditions which probably had only a limited circulation. That these traditions were very old is clear from the fact that both are outspokenly Jewish, a noteworthy feature in St. Luke's case since he was a Gentile writing for the Gentiles. But his cycle of traditions from primitive witnesses had to do with the revival of the prophetic spirit in Israel, culminating in its last and greatest prophet John the Baptist as immediate precursor of Christ, sent as Saviour of all mankind, Jews and Gentiles alike. The incidents in St. Matthew's narrative have little in common with those in that of St. Luke; but they were genuine traditions which prompted him to quote appropriate references derived from the Old Testament for his Jewish readers. Some critics too easily and unjustifiably say that St. Matthew first chose an Old Testament text and then built upon it a pious story or, as the Jews would call it, a "midrash", entirely the product of his own imagination, to serve as an interpretation of his chosen text. No one denies the difficulty of sorting out the purely literary from the genuinely historical elements in writings dating from nearly 2000 years ago; but Catholic biblical scholars have never doubted the substantial authenticity of the Gospel accounts of Christ's birth, infancy and initial years, as given both by St. Matthew and by St. Luke.
St. Luke, 2:51, tells us that after the visit to Jerusalem when Jesus was twelve He went down to Nazareth with Joseph and Mary and was subject to them. The Greek expression used means that He "was being subject" to them; that is, He continued there, fulfilling the boyhood duties expected of Him. Later, in 4:16, St. Luke declares that Nazareth was the place where "he was brought up", regarding that as sufficiently covering the period before He began His public mission. It must ever be remembered that none of the evangelists set out to write a formal biography of Christ. Their purpose was essentially a religious one, to proclaim the fact that the Messianic promises of a Saviour were fulfilled in Christ and that He was the Redeemer of mankind for whose coming the Jews had long looked forward. The evangelists showed no interest, as they would have done had they been simply biographers, in any merely natural characteristics of Christ. They give us no description of His features and make no reference to His physical build and appearance. As He was content to wait until it was time for Him to begin His ministry in public, so the evangelists were content to wait until then (except for the brief infancy items mentioned by St. Matthew and St. Luke) in order to begin their record of the work He accomplished publicly in word and deed for our salvation. That was the all-important information they had to convey to their readers and preserve for posterity.
Not those in His home town at Nazareth said that, but those listening to Him in the Temple at Jerusalem; and they were referring to the fact that He had never attended the Rabbinical Schools there for higher learning as, for instance, Saul of Tarsus had done, studying under one of their greatest teachers, Gamaliel (Acts 22:3). In His home town Nazareth, the boys of the village attended the local Synagogue school. Judaism alone among the ancient religions of the East set out to educate the laity; and in hundreds of small villages throughout Palestine the Synagogues had schoolrooms attached to them in which the "hazzan", a paid official, taught the children reading and writing, together with a religious knowledge of the Law and the Prophets. The three Synoptic Gospels make it clear that the local people of Nazareth marvelled, not that Jesus was able to read and write, but at the wisdom He manifested in explaining the Scriptures.
There is not a trace of evidence for that fantasy. Rosicrucian accounts of Christ are but revived forms of ancient Gnosticism. When Christ began to preach publicly, the people of Nazareth made it clear that they had known Him all along as having lived in their midst. St. Mark, 6:3, records their astonished exclamation: "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?" They knew quite well that He had never gone abroad for higher studies. Moreover, His teachings show not a trace of foreign influences. They were based exclusively on the Jewish Scriptures and He presented Himself to the Jews as the Messiah predicted by those Scriptures in the only terms which would make any appeal to them. In His first discourse in the Synagogue at Nazareth He began reading the Scroll of Isaiah at our chapter 60, containing the words: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has annointed me to preach good news to the poor"; and told the people: "Today, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." Lk., 4:18-21.
"QUESTIONS PEOPLE ASK
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