Scholar Unravels Dead Sea Scrolls in ‘First Messiah’

“The first messiah of recorded history,” according to Michael O. Wise, was not Jesus of Nazareth.

Wise, a scholar of ancient languages and biblical history, has extracted from the Dead Sea Scrolls what he calls “the archetypal messiah,” a charismatic figure who predates Jesus and may have served as a model for his ministry. He is known only as the “Teacher of Righteousness” in the recovered texts of the scrolls. Wise dubs him “Judah” and tells his life story in an imaginative and sometimes novelized form in “The First Messiah.”

To help us understand exactly what he means by a messiah, Wise opens his book with a brief discourse on the phenomenon of the “crisis cult,” a movement that “takes its start when a body of people, whether small or large, comes to feel that their culture--or major aspects of it--no longer ‘work.’ ” Crisis cults are “a way to cope with revolution, war, natural catastrophes, economic dislocation, contact with a seemingly invincible and imperialist foreign people,” Wise explains. “The stage is set for the prophet or messiah.”

Then Wise flashes back to ancient Israel at the turn of the 1st century BC and shows us a landscape that provided rich soil for “crisis cults.” The rival factions known as the Sadducees and Pharisees were struggling for power in a tumultuous country that was already in the shadow of Roman imperialism, a conflict that resulted in civil war and then foreign conquest.

“Judah stepped forth from the highest ranks of the Jerusalem priesthood,” writes Wise. “About 60 years old, he was one of the greatest minds of his generation. Now he confronted his weary nation with an urgent message from God.”

Wise’s principal source for “The First Messiah” are the so-called Thanksgiving Hymns and other long-lost sacred texts that have been pieced together out of the fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Quoting generously from these texts and engaging in some daring interpretive flourishes, he works up an elaborate and mostly convincing framework for understanding the origins and original meanings of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The man he calls Judah, Wise proposes, was a “leading Jerusalem priest and sage” who had once served as a royal counselor, but came to be accused of the crime of “false prophecy” when the Pharisees replaced the Sadducees as the party in power. He was sent into exile, along with a small band of followers, and there they began to set down the writings that were ultimately recovered 2,000 years later in the form of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

“You rescued the life of the poor one whom they plotted to destroy,” goes one of the Thanksgiving Hymns cited by Wise as evidence of Judah’s plight, “whose blood they planned to spill over the issue of Your Temple service.”

A “crisis cult” attached itself to the charismatic Judah, who came to be revered as a prophet and a redeemer. After his death, his followers preserved and expanded upon his teachings, and awaited the “Year of the End” that was predicted in his writings but failed to come. When the world did not end, Wise proposes, the cult that he calls “Judah’s Society” withered away. The first messiah was succeeded by many other claimants, and all of them were eclipsed by a new messiah, the one whose name was Jesus.

The biographical details of “the first messiah” are mostly a matter of conjecture and in some cases pure invention. Because the nameless author of the Thanksgiving Hymns describes himself as “gray,” for example, Wise concludes that he was “middle-aged or even elderly.” The author simply invents the transcript of the imagined trial of Judah on charges of false prophecy. Even the name by which Wise refers to the Teacher of Righteousness is something of a literary conceit.

“The name of the first messiah is nowhere stated outright, but a few clues in the Dead Sea Scrolls suggest that it may have been Judah,” writes Wise in a brief explanatory aside. “That is what I shall call him.”

Wise ventures beyond the familiar terrain of conventional biblical scholarship in his reading of the Dead Sea Scrolls and his reconstruction of the life of “the first messiah.” At moments, his flair for the well-told tale threatens to overwhelm the careful scholarship that underlies his work. But his book is certainly a worthy addition to the literature of the Dead Sea Scrolls, even a groundbreaking one, and a careful reading of “The First Messiah” will bring these strange and tantalizing texts to life in surprising new ways.

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Jonathan Kirsch, a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times Book Review, is the author, most recently, of “Moses, a Life” (Ballantine).