Essene-tial Christianity? Mistranslating Adam's "rib."
Plus: UK religious freedom, reaping what 2020 sowed, and TV's backstory problem
Let’s gather for coffee this Friday, May 10, at Loyal North at 6:30 am.
Subscribers to this newsletter received via email last week a special invitation to a guided tour of Grace & St. Stephens Episcopal Church in downtown Colorado Springs, part of our Holy Places series. The tour begins at 1:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 16. Please let me know if you can make it.
Now, on to Two Things….
(1) Legacy of the Essenes: Two weeks ago, I began a deep dive into the Essenes, the ascetic Jewish community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. It all started with a Tablet article about 20th-century literary critic Edmund Wilson, who, besides hating Tolkien, helped to popularize the significance of the Scrolls in a lengthy 1955 New Yorker essay, “The Scrolls of the Dead Sea.” It was that essay’s discussion of the Essenes, and their resemblance to early Christianity, that arrested my attention:
[T]he thing that we are immediately struck by is the resemblance of the Essenes to the Christians. You have the doctrine of human brotherhood; you have the practice of ritual washing, of which baptism is a prominent feature; you have communism, which the early Christians practiced among themselves. You have phrases that bring Christian echoes…. It seems obvious that the monastic tradition of the Christians must ultimately have derived from the Essenes….
Taken together, Wilson writes, these similarities “constitute a very impressive whole.”
Now, here I need to cop to some ignorance: even though the Scrolls were rediscovered almost 80 years ago and scholars since then have steadily excavated their insights—particularly what they reveal about both first-century (and earlier) Judaism and the origins of Christianity—almost none of this ever hit my intellectual radar.
So, to remedy the situation, I picked up and quickly devoured a book titled Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls by John Bergsma, a theology professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville. Bergsma marches steadily through early (and extant) Christian practices—baptism, the Eucharist, marriage, celibacy, priesthood, and even the concept of “the Church”—and draws striking parallels to the Scrolls and the practices of the Essene community, particularly at Qumran, which is near the caves where the Scrolls were discovered.
Bergsma suggests, for example, that Essene theology and practice shed light on the teachings and lifestyle of John the Baptist, who Bergsma thinks was raised in an Essene community. The Scrolls also help explain unique features of the gospel and epistles of John the Apostle, including characteristic Johannine expressions like “Spirit of truth” and “children of light.”
One of the more interesting chapters in the book is “When Was the Last Supper?”, in which Bergsma points out that the Essenes followed a different liturgical calendar than mainstream (Pharisaical) Judaism, resulting in different dates for Passover in the first century—not unlike the differences between Eastern and Western Christians in the dating of Easter. The calendrical difference, Bergsma suggests, explains discrepancies between the Synoptics and John’s gospel in dating the events of Passion Week. (Bergsma also thinks the “Upper Room,” the site of the Last Supper, was an Essene “community house” in Jerusalem, and he points to a number of “provocative parallels” between the Last Supper and the ritualistic meals of the Essene community at Qumran.)
(2) It wasn’t Adam’s rib: A Christian and a Jew walk into a podcast … and talk biblical anthropology. This month, Rabbi Dr. Ari Lamm hosted Christian actor Nathaniel Buzolic (“Nate Buzz”) on the latest episode of Good Faith Effort for an attentive exploration of the Book of Genesis. Their discussion of the account of Eve’s creation in Genesis 2 yields up interpretive insights I hadn’t encountered before. My partial transcript, starting about 42:30, follows (all essentially R. Lamm at this point):
[When a suitable mate isn’t found for Adam,] what’s the next thing that happens? ... What everyone says [is that] God puts Adam to sleep, takes his rib out of his body, and makes Eve. That’s what the Bible says? No, it’s not what the Bible says! It’s one of the most famous mistranslations in the history of biblical storytelling.
[Genesis 2:21 says] the LORD God caused a great sleep to fall upon Adam ... and God took a tzelah from Adam and made it into Eve. Now, that word tzelah, the King James Bible famously translates as rib.... That little bone becomes Eve, so Eve is somehow lesser than Adam.
… [Yet] never in the entire Bible does [tzelah] mean rib…. During the time of the Bible, it’s a very specific term. It’s not even anatomical.... It’s an architectural term, and what it means is side. The next time we meet that word is [Exodus 25:12, where God commands the Israelites to fashion the Ark of the Covenant “with two rings on one side and two rings on the other”]. The Ark of the Covenant has two sides…. That’s what tzelah means—a half, a side.
So what happens [in Genesis] is God … puts that first human being to sleep, splits that human being in half. “Half of you is gonna be Adam, the other half is gonna be Eve.”
How do we know that’s the case? ... [The literal sense of the next verse, verse 23, is that] God built a rib. What does it mean, God built a rib? ... The answer [is that] it’s not rib.... God built the other half, that half of Adam, into Eve.
[Verse 24 then says] “Therefore, a man will leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife and they will be one flesh.” What does that “therefore” mean? Just because God made Eve from Adam’s rib, therefore people get married? No! ... It’s because [God] splits that first human being, and splits them apart into halves.... So men and women ... spend their entire lives looking to reunite those halves, to recreate that first moment of creation when humanity was whole.
Other Things