The Dead Sea Scrolls Reveal What “Messiah” Really Meant w/ Dr. John J. Collins

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and today we have Dr. John Collins with us on an amazingly fascinating topic. Dr. Collins, thank you for your time today. Looking forward to our conversation.

Dr. John J. Collins: Welcome.

Johnny Ova: Dr. Collins, first question. Let's pull the curtain back. If a first-century Jew heard that the Messiah had come, and then heard that he was crucified by the Romans, what do you think their reaction would have been? Would that have made any sense to them at all?

Dr. John J. Collins: For most people, it wouldn't, in fact. I think for most people, that would have been disconfirming evidence.

Johnny Ova: What do you mean by that?

Dr. John J. Collins: I believe there was a standard expectation of a Davidic Messiah in Judaism in the first century, and he would be somebody who would restore the kingdom of David. That meant, first of all, drive out the Romans. So the first thing he was expected to do was smash heads. One of the classic messianic prophecies in the Old Testament is Balaam's oracle in the book of Numbers, where he will smash the heads of the children of Sheth. So they were not looking for a peaceful Messiah, a suffering Messiah, a dying Messiah, any of that. By the end of the first century you get the idea in 4 Ezra that the Messiah would stay for 400 years and then die. But that's very different from getting crucified before you really get started. So there should not be any surprise that some Jews didn't accept Jesus as Messiah. What's more difficult to comprehend is why some of them did.

Johnny Ova: That's a great point, because when we think Messiah, I think most Christians picture one very specific thing. What did the word actually mean in ancient Judaism, and is it as straightforward as we think?

Dr. John J. Collins: The word actually means anointed one. It's not really clear where the Israelites got the idea that a king or a high priest should be anointed. It may have been a Canaanite custom, but it's not well documented. In any case, it's documented from a very early time in the Hebrew Bible. Saul is the anointed of the Lord, and so is the chief priest. And in at least one case, Elijah is told to anoint Elisha as prophet after him. So those are the three you hear of being anointed. If you hear of the Messiah without further qualification, it's normally the king.

Johnny Ova: Just a little side track. We know Elijah anoints Elisha. Is that the same word, Messiah?

Dr. John J. Collins: Yes, the same exact word. Messiah is just the English adaptation of mashiach, anointed one.

Johnny Ova: One of the most shocking discoveries in the Dead Sea Scrolls is that some Jewish communities expected more than one Messiah. What do the scrolls actually say, and why would a community need two anointed figures?

Dr. John J. Collins: First of all, there may be three passages that refer to messiahs of Aaron and Israel. There's an arcane dispute about whether it's always two messiahs or whether it could be one messiah of Aaron and Israel. I think it was two. That goes back really to the Babylonian exile, when a lot of the future course of Judaism was determined. When they came back from the exile, the book of Zechariah talks about two sons of oil. It's not the same word, but many people would translate it as two anointed ones, two messiahs in effect: Zerubbabel, who was expected to restore the kingship but didn't, and the high priest. In Zechariah chapter 6, he shall have a priest by his side and a peaceful understanding between the two of them. So it's the new structure of the community after the exile, where the high priest is as important as the king. That comes about because a lot of the people taken to Babylon during the exile were priests. The people who came back had a lot of priests, and they established the hegemony of the priesthood. Then, when Zerubbabel didn't succeed in restoring the monarchy, the high priest became the man.

Dr. John J. Collins: So what happens in the Dead Sea Scrolls? This is my view. Not everybody would agree, but needless to say, I think I'm right. For most of the Second Temple period, they more or less gave up on the expectation of a kingly messiah. I don't think anyone would have said it's not going to happen. It's the way a lot of Christians now think about the Second Coming: you may say it's going to happen, but you'd be surprised as hell if it actually did. So it wasn't a live expectation. That began to change when the Hasmoneans, the successors of the Maccabees, declared themselves kings, and some people felt they had no right to proclaim themselves kings. Then they were brought to an end when the Romans came in, and this aggravated matters again. Outside the Dead Sea Scrolls, the first clearly messianic text we have in that period is the Psalms of Solomon, written after Pompey's conquest of Jerusalem. It says to the Lord, raise up for them the king, the son of David. And it talks about the sinners who had taken the promise when the promise wasn't made to them. That was the Hasmoneans.

Dr. John J. Collins: So it's, give us a real king, and the real king would be the descendant of David, and first priority is drive out the Romans. There are maybe five or six biblical texts cited repeatedly, and one of the famous ones is Isaiah chapter 11, how he will smite the sinners with the rod of his mouth. But we know whatever rod he's using, it's a rod. It doesn't mean he's going to scold them. So that's when the kingly messiah is revived. What you get in the scrolls is that they wanted a kingly messiah to drive out the Romans and make possible what they would consider a proper society. Their view of a proper society would be centered to a great degree on the temple. It would observe the law the way they thought it should be observed, with all the sacrifices. The high priest would presumably be one of them, or at least somebody they approved of, and he would be the Messiah of Aaron. There's a text called the Rule of the Congregation that describes a meal when the Messiah is present, and the Messiah has to wait for the priest to say the blessing over the food before he stretches out his hand to it. So even the Messiah defers to the priest, at least on some things.

Dr. John J. Collins: That's what's at issue there. What they were looking for was a transformed society. For the most part, I think, they weren't looking for the end of the world. They also believed that individually, when they died, they had fellowship with the angels in heaven. But that's not the end goal, in a way. The end goal is the transformation of the earth. It's more like a millennial kind of vision, where they're looking for the transformation of society so that it lives properly in accordance with the law.

Johnny Ova: We're going to get into the apocalyptic part of this. I know you've written a book on it, which we'll link in the description on YouTube, the podcast and the website. When we think of the end of the world, we think of the end of the actual planet. But in their mindset, could the end of the world have meant the end of the world as they knew it? When you talk about transformation: we're tired of things going the way they're going, we need a revival or reformation, a transformation into the way we think it should go. Would it be similar?

Dr. John J. Collins: The idea changes over time within the Second Temple period. If you go back to the Persian period, there are chapters in the book of Isaiah sometimes called the Apocalypse of Isaiah, chapters 24 to 27, which seem to be later than most of Isaiah. They talk about the earth crumbling and convulsing, and then Zion alone will be exalted in that day. That incidentally makes the point that the end is never final. There's always something after the end. But that, I think, was largely metaphorical. Jeremiah had a vision where he saw the earth waste and void. What he was really talking about was the invasion by the Babylonians. In those cases you're talking about the end of the world as we know it.

Dr. John J. Collins: When you get to the second century BC, there are a number of books attributed to Enoch, and one of them talks about this world being written down for destruction and a new creation. But the book of Daniel doesn't. Daniel talks about a kingdom that will be given to the people of the holy ones of the Most High, and that kingdom will presumably go on on earth indefinitely, as far as one can tell. Daniel doesn't talk at all about the end of the world. But by the end of the first century of the Common Era, in books like Revelation, 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch, written after the destruction of Jerusalem, they very clearly expect the destruction of this world, more or less the end of the world as we would think of it. In 4 Ezra you have seven days of primeval silence, just to make sure the old world has really ended. And of course in Revelation you have a new heaven and a new earth. So that changed somewhere along the line. I think it was coming in already in the early second century BC. Most of the apocalyptic literature we have is clustered around the Maccabean revolt and the destruction of Jerusalem. We're not so well documented for the period in between. The scrolls would be our main source for that period, and they don't talk much about the destruction of the world, except that one of the hymns talks about a fiery flood overrunning the earth. But that could be pure metaphor.

Johnny Ova: Your book The Apocalyptic Imagination is the definitive work on this topic. What was the apocalyptic worldview, and why did it grip the Jewish people so powerfully? You just mentioned it could have been metaphorical in the BC period, and as we come closer to the first century we're talking about the end of the planet. Did they really think God was telling them, I'm going to destroy this planet completely, period? Or was it, I'm so sick of the way things are right now, I need the world to end?

Dr. John J. Collins: I think somewhere in between. What you said last, I'm so sick of the way the world is that I'm going to wipe it out, happens already with the flood. So there was an old paradigm for that, and then life comes back after it. That's the idea there. Now, the apocalyptic worldview is what my new book is about, and to a great degree I follow Lorenzo DiTommaso, who has written a good deal on this subject. Lorenzo points out that the key elements of an apocalyptic worldview are time and space. Time is linear and coming toward an end. I would add that the end is never final, but an end is a cutoff point, even if it's just the cutoff of a period. That's one aspect. The other is spatial. Everybody in the ancient world believed there were beings up there in heaven. What changes in the apocalyptic literature is the degree of access human beings have to that world.

Dr. John J. Collins: To a great degree these changes came in with the Hellenistic world. The book of Daniel alludes to four kingdoms arising on the earth. You had several waves of empire that progressively united the world. Alexander went farther than anyone had gone before, and then the Romans came after. All of that gave the impression that time and space are one continuum, and that to a degree sets the stage and makes the apocalyptic worldview possible. Several Hellenistic philosophers thought the world as we know it would end, though it might be regenerated. The Stoics, for example, thought there would be an ekpyrosis, a conflagration of everything, and then it would start over. Plato already has the idea that the world ends several times, that there are several destructions, and then it starts over. The Hellenistic writers talk about that as just the order of nature. What's different in the apocalypses is that the end comes because of divine judgment.

Dr. John J. Collins: In the pagan sources, it's not a moral issue. It's just the order of nature. But to some degree the apocalyptic writers also take that over, because in much of the Old Testament, if God is going to intervene to judge the world, you could call it off. If people repent, he might not do it. In the apocalypses, with only one exception I can think of, it's going to happen anyway. It is set. So I think they had absorbed some of the Hellenistic idea that nature follows a natural course, but they inject into it the very biblical idea of divine judgment. That's one thing. The second, to my mind probably the biggest innovation of apocalyptic literature in the biblical context, is the belief in judgment after death. Before that, everybody went to Sheol, the netherworld. It was a shadowy existence. The dead couldn't even praise the Lord. But beginning in Daniel and some of the books of Enoch, you have the idea that the dead are raised for judgment, that some are taken up to heaven to live with the angels and some are sent down to a fiery underworld. That makes a huge difference. Again, those ideas were already circulating in the Hellenistic world. What the apocalyptic writers do is make them a matter of divine judgment. Your soul doesn't ascend and become a star just because it's an airy substance that flies up when you die. It requires divine intervention.

Dr. John J. Collins: Those were the big things. To a great degree it was triggered by a couple of crises. One was the persecution in the time of the Maccabees. But before that, some of the Enoch books, which I think are older, are reacting to culture change. The spread of Hellenistic culture in the East had an effect somewhat like Western culture in a conservative Arab country nowadays, where you have a very traditional culture that is very restrictive in matters of sex and the human body, and then the Greeks come in with a wide-open attitude. In the Apocalypse of Weeks in 1 Enoch, they talk about the Watchers coming down and corrupting the earth. Some of what they do is teach people how to make weapons, but they also teach women how to put on eye makeup and all of this. There's great impiety and much fornication. I take that to be an allegorical reference to the impact of Greek culture in the East, and that's the shock that triggers the apocalyptic vision. The apocalyptic vision, then, is the desire to get out of this. To a great degree it's defined not only by what you think is going to happen but by what you think will come after. It's not just that the world is going to be destroyed. It's that the dead are going to be judged, and that there is another form of life that will not be subject to sin and death. That's the real aspiration of this literature, I think.

Johnny Ova: I'm trying to juggle these ideas with the story arc of the Scriptures from the Old to the New Testament. It's almost like it started one way and then changed and transformed. Take the idea of Satan as a literal being. In the Old Testament, besides Job, where you see the satan in a courtroom setting, the way they talk about evil is different from how we talk about it in the church today: the devil made me do it, the demons are this and that. In the Old Testament it's almost nonexistent. So how much did the surrounding Near Eastern cultures influence what they believed? When we read in the Scriptures that the world is going to end, am I reading what God is telling them, or their interpretation of who they think God is, right, wrong or indifferent?

Dr. John J. Collins: Well, inevitably you're reading their interpretation. There's a Jewish scholar who teaches at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Ben Sommer, who made the very good point that what you get on Mount Sinai are the words of Moses, not the words of God. That's a way of saying everything is mediated. Everything is filtered through the human recipient. In the ancient Near Eastern world, I think, there was a lot of belief in demons and the like. That becomes much more prominent in the Hellenistic period in Judaism, and it comes up a lot in the apocalyptic literature. So the idea that the devil made me do it is quite at home in the apocalyptic literature, but it has also been contested.

Johnny Ova: What about communities like Qumran? Did they believe they were living in the final generation?

Dr. John J. Collins: Yes. The Dead Sea Scrolls are wonderful because they're firsthand evidence for a period from which we had practically nothing before. How much of the Dead Sea Scrolls can be attributed to this one community is an open question, but certainly some of it can. The scrolls describe a community, and most probably there was a settlement of that community at Qumran. I don't think that was ever the whole thing. And they very definitely believed it, because we have a number of texts in which they interpret prophetic texts, and one of their assumptions is that the prophets weren't talking to their own time, as we would now assume. They were really writing messages meant for us. In this sense I think the people of the Dead Sea Scrolls were kind of fundamentalist. They assumed it's all about us. They even say in the commentary on the prophet Habakkuk that God told Habakkuk what was going to happen but didn't explain it to him. You have to wait for our teacher, the Teacher of Righteousness, to come along and explain what's really going to happen.

Johnny Ova: I find that fascinating, because time feels like a flat circle. The obvious question is, why would God tell these people about things that have nothing to do with them, and deliver the message without explaining that it has nothing to do with them?

Dr. John J. Collins: I know. But there are a lot of people who read the book of Revelation that way nowadays and think it's all about us.

Johnny Ova: Of course. We hear this so much with Revelation. Now, the scrolls describe a cosmic war between the sons of light and the sons of darkness. How did this dualistic worldview shape what they expected the Messiah to do?

Dr. John J. Collins: I think the Messiah would have a subordinate role in that, because the battle for them isn't just between the archangel Michael and Satan. You also have the forces on earth, and this is also true in the book of Daniel. Things are fought out at two levels. The Messiah would be expected to be the leader on the human level. On the angelic level it's the archangel Michael, or in one text he's identified as Melchizedek, but that's probably just a different name for the same figure. The main evidence for this is the War Scroll. They never say it was written in such and such a year, which would have been very nice, but they don't. Many of us think the War Scroll went through different stages, and there may have been an early version before the Romans came in at all. But in the final text we have, it's pretty sure that the Kittim, the human enemies, are the Romans. They are aligned with Belial, whom we would call Satan.

Dr. John J. Collins: In the War Scroll, Michael and Belial fight it out. Michael wins the first round. Belial wins the second. Michael wins the third, Belial the fourth, Michael the fifth, Belial the sixth. And then God weighs in at the seventh stage, and that settles it. I think that is taken pretty directly from a form of Zoroastrian myth that we know through the Greek writer Plutarch. They probably didn't get it accurately, and they weren't trying to. They were taking an idea and adapting it for their own purpose. It looks very much to me like they may have thought, when the Jewish revolt against Rome started, this is it. Up until then they say very explicitly, especially in the Community Rule, return evil to no man until the day of vengeance. In other words, hold your fire until the time is right. My suspicion, though there's no hard evidence for it, is that when the revolt against Rome started they thought, this is the time, all bets are off now, folks. We know Qumran was destroyed by the Romans. Arrowheads were found, and it was burned down.

Dr. John J. Collins: We don't know who defended it. It could be that the Essenes, assuming these were the people who lived there, had gotten out and the Zealots came in. Or it could be that the Essenes made a stand. It always reminds me of the Ghost Dance, because in the Ghost Dance they thought the dead ancestors would come back to help them, and in the War Scroll they think the angels will come to help them in the battle. And the angels and the ancestors tend not to show up.

Johnny Ova: I feel like that's disappointing for them, obviously. But we always figure out a way to push the goalposts back. All right, maybe this wasn't it, maybe next time. On the Messiah, I just thought of your book The Scepter and the Star. Where does that title come from, and what does it mean?

Dr. John J. Collins: That's right, exactly. It comes from Balaam's oracle in the book of Numbers, where there is a scepter and a star. This was one of the texts repeatedly interpreted as referring to messiahs. Since you have a scepter and a star, in the scrolls they take that as two different figures. The scepter is the kingly messiah, the one who's going to smash heads, and the star is the priestly messiah. In some other Jewish texts of the time, they take them both as the same figure. I think even Philo in Alexandria has that. And then the last Jewish revolt against Rome was led by Bar Kokhba, which literally means son of the star, and Rabbi Akiba supposedly said he was the fulfillment of Balaam's oracle. But he was again assuming the scepter and the star were one.

Johnny Ova: Makes sense. I want to talk about the Son of Man imagery from Daniel 7, because it obviously shows up everywhere in the Gospels. How was this figure understood in Jewish apocalyptic circles before Jesus?

Dr. John J. Collins: The first question is, what evidence do we have? The first thing I'd say is within the book of Daniel itself. The expression is "one like a son of man," which is an idiomatic way of saying one like a human being, a figure who looks like a human being. You might infer from that that he isn't actually a human being but looks like one. There are a number of other times in Daniel when figures appear who look like human beings. The angel Gabriel appears a little later, I think in Daniel chapter 9, and the Hebrew expression is like the appearance of a man. It's a different word for man, gever, which is probably a play on Gabriel. Later there are two angels who appear, and again they look like men clothed in linen. So in the early apocalyptic literature, if you see somebody who looks like a human being, that is probably an angel, a godly figure, let's say.

Dr. John J. Collins: What has caused a lot of controversy about the figure in Daniel 7 is that he comes riding on the clouds of heaven. In all of the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, the figure who rides on the clouds of heaven is always Yahweh, the Most High. But here there is an Ancient of Days who seems to be above him, so I don't think you can take him as Yahweh here. I take it that this is Yahweh's representative, and later in Daniel he's explicitly identified as Michael. So I'd figure that was the original meaning. When do we meet him again? There's a text in the book of Enoch, the Similitudes of Enoch, which is largely devoted to a kind of interpretation of that passage. It's a series of visions about that son of man, meaning the one Daniel saw. In the Similitudes it isn't the archangel Michael but a figure above Michael, who never comes to earth at all. He's never incarnated, but he is like a heavenly savior figure, a heavenly messiah, and he is actually called a messiah. A super angel, if you like.

Dr. John J. Collins: Also at the end of the first century, in 4 Ezra, which you can find in the Apocrypha as 2 Esdras, Ezra sees a man coming up from the sea on a cloud. Again, that's pretty obviously a play on the figure riding on the clouds in Daniel 7. He turns out to be the Messiah, quite a traditional kind of Messiah. He takes his stand on Mount Zion, all the nations attack him, and he defeats them with the breath of his lips. So by the time you get to 4 Ezra, the son of man is identified as the Messiah who will appear at the end of days. He isn't that yet, I think, in the Similitudes of Enoch. The Similitudes were not found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and some people think they were very late. I don't think they were that late. They couldn't have been written by a Christian, I think, because they don't identify the Son of Man as Jesus. In fact there's an epilogue to the Similitudes where God says to Enoch, you are the son of man who has righteousness. No Christian would have said that to Enoch. So the Similitudes give you a stage in the development.

Dr. John J. Collins: Then there's another text that doesn't use the expression but says, "son of God he will be called," in language very similar to the Gospel of Luke. There are a lot of allusions to Daniel 7 in it. It's not explicit that it's interpreting the one like a son of man, but it's possible, and if so they were already taking it as the Messiah. In the Gospels, one of the perennially debated questions is whether Jesus actually referred to himself as Son of Man, and there are several theories. The Gospels as we have them assume that Jesus, at the Second Coming, will come as the Son of Man riding on the clouds of heaven. But that's in the future. Whether Jesus himself would or could have said "I am the Son of Man," the Gospels don't actually claim he put it that way, but he refers to the Son of Man having power to forgive sin and so on. There was a great scholar at Oxford, Geza Vermes, who took that as a roundabout way of referring to himself, meaning "this fellow." Not everybody believes that by any means. I think it's more likely that after the death of Jesus his followers hoped he would come back as the Son of Man. Whether it would have made sense to anybody to identify Jesus as the Son of Man while he was on earth is not clear to me.

Johnny Ova: I'm wondering about the apocalyptic language in all this, because they spoke apocalyptically so much. When you talk about riding the clouds of heaven, it seems that every time that's mentioned in the Old Testament it refers to a judgment of some kind, not God physically taxiing down on a cloud, handling business and driving back up. I know some Christians today hold that view of a future Second Coming. But I think it's really important to understand what they were trying to express when they used apocalyptic language, like judgment.

Dr. John J. Collins: There is a whole movement, as I'm sure you're well aware, of preterists, who think this is all metaphor for things that were actually happening. I don't find that very credible. In the use of that language in the Gospels, I think they're quite clearly looking to something that hasn't happened yet. So the destruction of Jerusalem is not the coming of the Son of Man. They may have thought it was a prelude to the coming of the Son of Man, but they also expected the world to change. And we are still waiting for that.

Johnny Ova: I've got two more questions for you, Dr. Collins, and again, thank you so much for your gracious time. I want to talk about the apocalyptic atmosphere Jesus walked into, and then being crucified almost as a messianic pretender. How do these expectations help us understand why Rome saw him as a threat, and how did the early church make sense of it all?

Dr. John J. Collins: The easiest part of that question is why Rome saw him as a threat. Here you have somebody going around attracting a crowd. If the story of Palm Sunday is historical, and I'm inclined to think it is, it fits with a lot of things that happened in the first century. This prophet has been going around the country, and now he's coming up to Jerusalem at Passover time, and his followers get excited. He's been talking about the kingdom of God being at hand. What he meant by that, we will never get agreement on, I think. But one thing it might mean is that the Romans are going to be overthrown and you'll get a native Jewish kingdom instead, or at least that the Romans will be overthrown, whatever form the kingdom of God then takes. So you have somebody entering Jerusalem talking like that, and his followers shouting, Hosanna to the son of David. The Romans think, here's a guy trying to set himself up as king. They didn't bother analyzing how seriously they needed to take him. They kill first and ask questions after. Round him up. We have several stories a few decades later of prophetic figures who came along and attracted followers, and the Romans just sent out the legionaries and cut them down, even though in all probability they were harmless. So that, I think, is what the Romans thought.

Dr. John J. Collins: What Jesus thought is a tough one. I think it's clear enough what his followers thought after his death. His followers at the time seem to have thought Jesus was going to miraculously restore the kingdom of Israel, or the kingdom of God, that he was going to do some kind of miracle in Jerusalem that would bring everything to a head. And then he gets crucified. Their way of coping with that is to believe he was risen from the dead. Have you ever met anyone who believed they had seen a relative of theirs who had died and came back to talk to them? I haven't directly, but I have heard people tell me stories of that happening. It was a couple, in fact, who told me their son had died in an accident, and then one night he came in, stood at the end of the bed and said, it's all right. I wasn't going to tell them that was an illusion. If they saw it, they saw it. That doesn't mean anyone else could have seen it. It's not what we call objective fact, but there's some kind of reality to it.

Dr. John J. Collins: The followers of Jesus react to it that way, and they then project into the future an even grander coming of Jesus than what they had been expecting in the first place. So the expectation is that he'll come back and do the job right the next time. As for what Jesus himself thought he was doing, to be honest, I have no strong convictions. On the one hand, a lot of the teaching of Jesus isn't really apocalyptic at all. The Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, all those kinds of stories are about how you live life day to day. There's a good case to be made, and several people have made it, that this was really the heart of Jesus' preaching: how you live in this world. Now, I don't rule out the possibility that he might nonetheless have expected Daniel's prophecy to be fulfilled. The argument for that is, could his followers have gotten him so completely wrong? Could they have come out with such an apocalyptic conviction if he didn't have it at all? I vacillate on that. I don't know.

Johnny Ova: Good points. Dr. Collins, I can't thank you enough for your time today. You've been so gracious and so full of wisdom, and I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. I know a lot of our listeners are going to enjoy this. I'm going to have your books linked below. Is there any way people can get a hold of you, email or a website?

Dr. John J. Collins: Well, email. John, you have my email. And maybe when you post this, you could put up the link to my book, which I just emailed you.

Johnny Ova: Yep, I've got it. I'll put it at the bottom for anybody who has questions. Again, Dr. Collins, thank you for your time today. I truly appreciate you.