-Caveat Lector-
[Sounds like this "Angel Scroll" may be describing where
Jesus/Yashua just might/could have had a "Close Encounter of the
Nth Kind," huh? --MS]
Source:
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Sunday-Times/stifgnmid01001.html?2177977
Scroll names Jesus as sect member
By Matthew Kalman
Jerusalem
SINCE their discovery almost half a century ago, the Dead Sea
scrolls have fascinated biblical scholars. The mystery
surrounding them has deepened, however, with claims that a
hitherto unknown scroll, which threatens to challenge the
originality of Christian theology, was spirited out of the Holy
Land and ended up in the hands of Benedictine monks, who tried to
suppress its contents.
According to a bizarre tale that has unfolded over the past few
weeks in Israel, the so-called Angel scroll was found by a
Bedouin tribesman in Jordan in the late 1960s on the eastern
shore opposite the Qumran caves, where the Dead Sea scrolls made
famous by the late Professor Yigael Yadin were discovered in
ancient pottery jars several years earlier. The Bedouin is then
said to have sold it to an antiquities dealer in the Jordanian
capital, Amman.
As news of the find circulated, scholars began frantic talks to
buy the scroll through an intermediary, an international arms
dealer identified only as Ziyad H.
It was then that a German Benedictine monk - named as Matheus
Gunther, which is believed to be a pseudonym - became involved.
Armed with huge sums of Benedictine money, he allegedly
negotiated for a year and was finally allowed a 3mm fragment of
the scroll.
Finally, in 1981, the deal was completed and the scroll, bearing
1,000 lines of mixed text, was smuggled out of Jordan to a
Benedictine monastery somewhere near the German-
Austrian border, to be studied by a team of monks who had taken a
vow of silence.
Gunther died in 1996, but is said to have bequeathed his notes
and a copy of the text to an Israeli friend known as Steve
Daniels. For the past three years, Daniels has been allegedly
preparing it for publication, together with two other Israelis
who knew the monk.
According to the two Israelis - one of whom spoke to The Sunday
Times on condition of anonymity - the text contradicts the
official origins of Christianity and is so explosive that church
authorities decided to suppress it. Gunther could not bear to see
it left mouldering in the vaults, they claimed, and he decided
that his vow of silence should be broken after his death.
"I saw in this scroll the crowning achievement of my scholarly
work and of my religious mission," the monk wrote in his notes,
some of which were shown to the Jerusalem Report, a leading
Israeli news magazine. "I promised that I would not carry to my
grave the secrets of this remarkable scroll."
The text, said to have been carbon-dated to the 1st century,
supposedly describes a religious vision experienced at Ein
Elgatain, a desert encampment on the eastern shore of the Dead
Sea, by Yeshua ben Padiah, who was taken by an angel, Panameia,
through the gates of a palace and into the heavens. Yeshua is
Hebrew for Jesus.
It is said to mirror the teachings of Jesus to such an extent
that it calls their originality into question. Many of the ideas
described in the scroll imply that Jesus was heavily influenced
by, or even a member of, the Essenes sect widely credited with
writing the Dead Sea scrolls.
Scholars who have studied excerpts from a computerised transcript
are divided over the text's authenticity, however.
To give a definitive answer, they say they must first see the
original - or at least a photograph.
"If it is the real thing, we'll be talking about something
phenomenally important to understanding the background of
Christianity and Jewish mysticism," said Professor Stephen Pfann
of the University of the Holy Land, an expert on the scrolls. "I
haven't yet seen anything that discredits it in such a way that I
would put it outside the realms of possibility."
Pfann, who has translated some of the text into English, said
that Yeshua's vision contained many concepts similar to the other
Dead Sea scrolls. It is dated some 100 years later, however,
indicating it was written during, or shortly after, Jesus's
lifetime.
Many scholars are still unconvinced. "The text itself is very
queer. There is Hebrew with Aramaic words," said Magen Broshi,
former curator of the Jerusalem museum that holds the Dead Sea
scrolls. "The whole thing is so strange and I think, if I were
about to commit a forgery, this is what I would have done."
Another problem authenticating the story has been tracing
Gunther's origins. Father Bargil Pixner, a Benedictine monk and
scholar in Israel, said he never knew of any such monk and was
"very sceptical" about the story.
In favour of the monk's account, however, is the supposed content
of the Angel scroll. The text is said to contain embalming
recipes for resurrection and the use of herbs and stones for
healing, practices attributed to the Essenes by the Jewish
historian Josephus.
Other phrases often associated with the mystic sect recur in the
scroll, such as the "children of light", a term used by the
Essenes for those endowed with the power of God, and the
contrasting "children of darkness".
It also uses the word "el" for God, and Pfann has said grammar
and spellings throughout the text are similar to those in the
acknowledged Dead Sea scrolls.
He said he had even found a complete phrase in the Angel scroll
that he had been trying to reconstruct for years from other
documents. "This new discovery may well prove to be an important
witness or missing link to the connection between Qumran, early
Christianity and early Judaism during the 1st century," Pfann
concluded.
Next page: Euro-watchdog reveals Brussels has spent 3 billion in
error
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