The Sound of Silence

[David Guyatt]

Barbara Theiring is a local DSS scholar who has written extensively on the interpretation of the DSS. She makes a far better case for real history than does the bible or church.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jesus-Man-Interp...0552139505

I believe a lot of her work can still be found on scribd.com. I think she was another maverick as was John Allegro who is becoming more vindicated as more of the scrolls are being published. Sex, drugs and ancient rock n roll! People never change.

I agree with much of Theiring's opinions but anything contrary to the rubbish that has been handed down by the church is kept as quiet as possible. A trillion dollar per year industry doesn't go away overnight but now there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

just so we understand who we;re talking about and the other side of the story (and what appears to be peer review)....

Barbara Thiering
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Barbara Thiering (born 1930) is an Australian nonfiction writer, historian, and Biblical exegete specializing in the origins of the early Christian Church. In books and journal articles, she challenges Christian orthodoxy, drawing on claimed new evidence that gives alternative answers to its supernatural beliefs. Her analysis has been rejected by many scholars in the field.

From her speciality, studying the Dead Sea Scrolls, their semiotics, and their hermeneutics, she has propounded a theory arguing that the miracles, including the Turning water into wine, the Virgin Birth, Healing a man at a distance, the man who had been thirty-eight years at the pool, and the Resurrection, among others, did not actually occur (as miracles), as Christians believe, nor were they legends, as some skeptics hold, but were "deliberately constructed myths"[1] concealing (yet, to certain initiates, relating) esoteric historic events. She alleges that they never actually happened (that is, that the events they chronicle were not at all miraculous), as the authors of the Gospels knew. They wrote, according to the methods of pesher, which she discovers in the scrolls, on two levels. For the “babes in Christ,” there were apparent miracles, but the knowledge of exact meanings held by the highly educated members of gnostic schools gave a real history, of what Jesus actually did.

Born in Sydney, Australia, Thiering graduated in 1952 from Sydney University with first class honours in modern languages, was a high school teacher of languages for several years, and then, while caring for her three young children, continued study and research privately. She obtained an external B.D. degree from the University of London, a M.Th. degree from Melbourne College of Divinity, and a Ph.D. degree from Sydney University in 1973.

As a consequence of her research publications in academic journals, she was invited to lecture at Sydney University, at first in the Department of Semitic Studies, then in the School of Divinity (now the Department of Religious Studies) where she continued until her retirement. During this time she was a member of the Board of Studies in Divinity and the Board of Continuing Education, and served for twelve years as a lay member of the NSW Equal Opportunity Tribunal. When her work became known in the USA, she was made a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar.

In 1990 a documentary film about her research, Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls, was shown by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Dr. Thiering's book: Jesus the Man has recently been re-published.
Contents

Academic Reception of her Work

While Thiering's thesis attracted some controversy in the media when Jesus the Man was published in 1990, her ideas have not received acceptance by her academic peers. In a response to a letter Thiering wrote to The New York Review of Books, objecting to a review by Geza Vermes, Vermes gave his personal estimation of the academic reaction to her work:

"Professor Barbara Thiering's reinterpretation of the New Testament, in which the married, divorced, and remarried Jesus, father of four, becomes the "Wicked Priest" of the Dead Sea Scrolls, has made no impact on learned opinion. Scroll scholars and New Testament experts alike have found the basis of the new theory, Thiering's use of the so-called "pesher technique", without substance."

(The New York Review of Books, December 1st, 1994)

In 1993 Nicholas Thomas Wright, now Bishop of Durham, wrote:[2]

It is safe to say that no serious scholar has given this elaborate and fantastic theory any credence whatsoever. It is nearly ten years since it was published; the scholarly world has been able to take a good look at it: and the results are totally negative.


Historian Dr. C.B. Forbes from the Department of Ancient History of Macquarie University says "No reputable historian agrees with her identifications between people in the Scrolls and people in the New Testament, or believes in her "hidden history". Here she is utterly out on her own...Dr. Thiering's ideas have no historical credibility."[3]

In 2005 Peter Flint, Professor of Religious Studies and Co-Director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Institute at Trinity Western University in British Columbia, wrote:[4]

"Her views and theories on Jesus and Christian origins have little basis in the scrolls, and even less in the New Testament. Her pesher technique misuses the concept of pesher, her datings of the scrolls are suspect and seem informed by an outside agenda, the connections she draws between Qumran and other nearby communities in the Judean Desert are highly questionable, and the links she finds between the scrolls and the New Testament are almost always without foundation."

This is not an area I have knowledge of so I will step with some care.

From her speciality, studying the Dead Sea Scrolls, their semiotics, and their hermeneutics, she has propounded a theory arguing that the miracles, including the Turning water into wine, the Virgin Birth, Healing a man at a distance, the man who had been thirty-eight years at the pool, and the Resurrection, among others, did not actually occur (as miracles), as Christians believe, nor were they legends, as some skeptics hold, but were "deliberately constructed myths"[1] concealing (yet, to certain initiates, relating) esoteric historic events. She alleges that they never actually happened (that is, that the events they chronicle were not at all miraculous), as the authors of the Gospels knew. They wrote, according to the methods of pesher, which she discovers in the scrolls, on two levels. For the “babes in Christ,” there were apparent miracles, but the knowledge of exact meanings held by the highly educated members of gnostic schools gave a real history, of what Jesus actually did.

Her theory strikes me as a very sensible hypothesis and one that is easier to believe for instance, than the reality of the Virgin birth, turning water into wine or the Resurrection etc.

I can easily see why Religious scholars find her theories abhorrent and unacceptable. That's scholars for you - a highly jealous and protective class of individuals who are, imo, less concerned with historical accuracy than with their own elevated place in the order of things.

Never-the-less her views are more than interesting to me and I think she may be getting close to the truth on these matters. Not necessarily the truth itself, but approaching the vicinity of it perhaps.