A few weeks back I posted notice of the Maltz Jewish Museum’s exhibit titled “Cradle of Christianity: Treasures from the Holy Land,” which includes authentic artifacts from the lives of Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate.

Now I see that Cleveland also recently played host to Prof. Lawrence Schiffman, a leading authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Schiffman is author of Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls: The History of Judaism, the Background of Christianity, the Lost Library of Qumran. His ventures in Ohio were reported by the Cleveland Jewish News.

According to Schiffman, the Scrolls, which were discovered in caves in Israel in 1947, have given us “a picture of Judaism that was practiced at that time that we simply didn’t have before … We’re talking about people who were all Sabbath observers and who followed the commandments … They had very strict purity laws and acted as if they were living as priests in the (Jerusalem) Temple.” Members of the Qumran sect observed ritual bathing and wrote of a ritual banquet at which a messianic priest offered bread and wine. Some men of Qumran practiced celibacy.

For Christians, the Dead Sea Scrolls have provided a glimpse of the Church’s deep roots in Judaism. They also may help us to understand a bit about the religious life of the Holy Family, the apostles, and their contemporaries. Prof. Schiffman, an Orthodox Jew, has been a critic of common Christian interpretations of the Scrolls. But his own scholarship has itself illuminated the religious life of that long-ago time and place.

A small portion of the Temple Scroll from Qumran is currently on display at the Maltz Museum as part of “The Cradle of Christianity” exhibit.

If you would like to see a great Christian scholar’s (very early) analysis of the Scrolls, grab yourself a copy of Cardinal Jean Danielou’s The Dead Sea Scrolls and Primitive Christianity. A more integrated (and recent) approach to Christianity’s Jewish origins is Oskar Skarsaune’s In the Shadow of the Temple: Jewish Influences on Early Christianity.