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Monastery Works to Preserve Ancient Christian Texts | PBS NewsHour | Dec. 31, 2010 | PBS
RAY SUAREZ: Next, a project that protects early religious texts from age, insects and war.
Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports.
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REV. COLUMBA STEWART, director, Hill Museum, St. John's Abbey: Who would have thought that in a monastery in Central Minnesota is the world's largest collection of photographs and manuscripts?
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: For 50 years, this underground library at St. John's Abbey has collected and catalogued historic Christian manuscripts. Father Columba Stewart says it's part of a monastic tradition that dates back to the 6th century.
FATHER COLUMBA STEWART: I'm a Benedictine monk. There's an impulse in Benedictines to exercise this role of cultural guardianship. And that's an impulse that continues even in the modern age.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Many of the texts were handwritten long before printing presses. Some, like this Koran, were created soon after, this one commissioned for study by some of the first Protestant scholars.
FATHER COLUMBA STEWART: It's the first printed copy of the Koran. It was published in 1543, with a preface by Martin Luther.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Father Columba says these ancient texts echo with relevance to our time.
FATHER COLUMBA STEWART: Christians were -- were dealing with Islam and there was a real desire to understand it better. So the result was they wanted a translation of the Koran into Latin, so that Christians could read it. And, of course, it wasn't for the sake of religious understanding, it was for the sake of refutation.
And this whole question of how Western, predominantly Christian countries, dialog with or relate to majority of Muslim countries is something we've been talking about since 9/11. But what we forget is there are centuries -- centuries of experience of Christians and Muslims
And in many of these areas, significant Jewish communities as well --living together. And it wasn't always easy. And these manuscripts tell the story of that. They tell the story of legal prescriptions, which were made either to protect or to oppress a particular community.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Preserving that history is a matter of utmost importance to religion scholars like Father Columba.
FATHER COLUMBA STEWART: If you believe that we can learn from the past -- the past of our lives, the past of our families and our own nation or culture, the only way the past has come down to us is in the form of these writings.
Ethiopian manuscript, Latin manuscript.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Impressive as the physical manuscripts are, this library's much larger collection consists of digital copies of sacred texts. Most of the originals remain in churches a world away from here.
FATHER COLUMBA STEWART: Over 100,000 manuscripts from Europe, the Middle East, from Ethiopia, from India; well over 30 or 40 million pages. We've lost count long ago.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The texts are recorded digitally, catalogued
and stored in underground vaults.
FATHER COLUMBA STEWART: And our pledge is that those will be safe forever.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The library's effort began in the 1960s in Europe, a time when microfilm first became available; also a time when there was fear of a nuclear war.
Next, the librarians went to Ethiopia, anticipating, correctly, that many of that country's orthodox manuscripts could be destroyed in the political turmoil of the '70s and '80s.
In recent years, the focus has been on the Middle East.
FATHER COLUMBA STEWART: Our goal since 2003 was to do as many Eastern Christian manuscripts in the Middle East as possible, because we all know that these manuscripts are endangered from a variety of causes.
The one people think of most is violence, because they associate this region, whether it's Lebanon or a place like Jerusalem, certainly a place like Iraq, with immediate physical danger to manuscripts.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: We followed Father Columba to Jerusalem, a city fought over for centuries among Muslims, Jews and Christians; also among Christians.
These pilgrims were on their way to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where they believe Christ was buried.
FATHER COLUMBA STEWART: I'm going to show you a diagram of the Holy Sepulcher Church. All that's left now is really this area.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The building was destroyed by Muslim rulers and rebuilt in the 13th century by the Crusaders. It is one of Christianity's holiest sites; also a symbol of its divided family, something that complicates the task of tracking down and digitizing their sacred books.
FATHER COLUMBA STEWART: So the Greeks have the central piece, the Armenians have quite a bit of the chapel surrounding the center, the Latins have the far side, the Syrians have a small chapel in the back, the Copts have a small chapel inside. So it's a little microcosm of all the different religious traditions here in the Middle East.
And, unfortunately, relations are not always easy, because when you have all of these different groups living in a -- what is a fairly small building, they're fiercely protective of their rights.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Many regions where these traditions evolved, modern day Turkey and Iraq, Armenia and Russia to the north, as far south as India, have seen war and upheaval through the ages. And just
last October, a Syriac Orthodox Church was bombed in Iraq. All this increases the urgency to record the texts that have survived, says
Father Columba. He is particularly interested in digitizing the Syriac church's collection in Jerusalem.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Father Columba.
FATHER COLUMBA STEWART: How are you?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Fine. Thank you very much.
FATHER COLUMBA STEWART: Good to see you.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: It will take dogged diplomacy.
FATHER COLUMBA STEWART: These Eastern Christian communities, many of which have been persecuted -- massacres are within living memory --this stuff is really in their gut.
And so you -- you have to build a relationship where they understand that the motives that we bring to these projects is one of deep reverence.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The Minnesota library also brings the money need for such projects, several hundred thousand dollars each year, raised from various private donors. Local church staff are trained in the tasks. And while copies go to Minnesota, the local church retains copyright.
FATHER COLUMBA STEWART: So if you have a monk or a layperson who you think would be a good person to do this work or two people.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And our monks, always, they will be with them. Yes.
FATHER COLUMBA STEWART: This is a very -- a very old manuscript, perhaps 7th, 8th century?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It doesn't say.
FATHER COLUMBA STEWART: It doesn't say.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It doesn't...
FATHER COLUMBA STEWART: But it's very old...
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: In years ahead, Father Columba expects to return repeatedly to the Middle East, until, as it were, the word is made safe.
RAY SUAREZ: Fred's reporting is a partnership with the Project for Under-Told Stories. Starting in January, the project will be based at St. Mary's University in Minnesota.
Dead Sea Scrolls Mystery Solved?
Ker Than
Published July 27, 2010
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.)
The new view is by no means the consensus, however, among Dead Sea Scrolls scholars.
"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).
Dead Sea Scrolls Written by Ritual Bathers?
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).
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.")
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.
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."
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."
Theodora: the empress from the brothel | Life and style | The Guardian
In September 2006, in a near-empty church in Ravenna, in north-east Italy, I found myself in front of a vibrant, 1,500-year-old mosaic of a woman in purple. She had a halo, her own courtiers, and was taking up an enormous space beside a mosaic of Christ. I knew she had to matter. At the gift shop, I bought the booklet about her, which took five minutes to read. The woman was the empress Theodora and although I had never seen her before, she has come to dominate my working life
