The Unique Teacher and Testaments
Presented on: Tuesday, April 18, 1989
Presented by: Roger Weir
Dead Sea Scrolls
Presentation 3 of 15
The Unique Teachers and Testaments
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, April 18, 1989
Transcript:
It turned up okay great. we're in good shape.
Do you have any idea what this series is called? (laughter) well Im not being funny. No really, Im not being funny.
**inaudible comment from the room**
We will, we'll start now. Thank you.
We will spend the next little while; I would think the next six to eight weeks on The Dead Sea Scrolls. So, if you want to label your tapes Dead Sea Scrolls one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, you can do that.
But before we get to the Dead Sea Scrolls, I have to finish up for you a note on the use of The Book of Job by the esoteric communities, in particular at Qumran.
Now most of the scholarly works that you would find concerned with The Book of Job will date it anywhere from the 6th century B.C. down till about the 4th century B.C. But I am urging your consideration that The Book of Job is contemporaneous with The Book of Daniel and occurs about the middle of the 2nd century B.C. and that a very good candidate for the author of The Book of Job is the candidate for the author of The Book of Daniel. Who is unknown in his personal name but is known now because of The Dead Sea Scrolls as The Teacher of Righteousness.
Now the peculiar quality of Daniel as we saw a year or so ago in that series of seven lectures on The Book of Daniel, is that as a work it is a methodological presentation of the way in which one moves from dream interpretation to deeper dream interpretation. And transforming the sense of imagery into symbolism, so that one can interpret not just dreams and deeper dreams, but one can interpret visions in consciousness. And the point of The Book of Daniel is that God would like man to wake up to the extent of no longer having to live on the level of needing dream interpretation. But would like him to step up to the level of being able to interpret his visionary capacities and consciousness.
Now the visions are not day-dreams. Not at all. The visions are of high consciousness. And just as dreams occur on a mythic level and have feeling tone meaning in the image base, visions occur on the thought level and have thinking toned meaning in the ideas. So that one has on one hand dreams with their emotional content and on the other visions with their ideational content.
The prophets were those who interpreted the integration of meaning from the emotional content of images. The apocalyptic writings are the beginnings of interpretation on the thought level, the ideational level of visions. So that in between there is some sort of a threshold. There is a fulcrum which is like a transparency, I guess I'm using a, an image now so that you can focus on it. There's a transparency as a fulcrum which brings together emotional meaning and integrates it. And the integration of it becomes a seed for what when expressed becomes an idea.
Now it's that threshold, that intermediary ground, that is the concern of the Teacher of Righteousness is concerned with bringing people to that transformation point, if you will. To that threshold. Now in our parlance in the late 20th century we call that the deep self. So that the Teacher of Righteousness is concerned with how to bring a human being from their emotional life into their deep self. And once in their deep self to return them back to their life with a, a refreshed vision which has a thought tone to it and not just a feeling tone.
So that there is a there's an odd quality to the Teacher of Righteousness. He is in a sense a new figure and yet in a parallel way he is a repeat figure. He is a new figure because he is delivering man into a realm which had not been explored in Judaism before. Not explored very well at all. the realm of thought, of vision, of apocalyptic ideologies. He is parallel to Moses then.
So that in this regard in The Dead Sea Scrolls we find that the Teacher of Righteousness is referred to in two distinct ways. In the first way he is called the lawgiver harkening back to Moses. So that in a sense he is a second Moses. Whereas Moses gave the Torah, the law, in terms that the emotional image base mythic level could be comprehensively integrated. The second lawgiver, the Teacher of Righteousness, is concerned with the expressive development of ideational thought toned visionary expressions. Moses concern is to bring man in consonance with his deep self where God has his own deep presence. The Teacher of Righteousness begins there, assumes that you have that capacity. Assumes that you can be there. But carries you from there to the future. Carries you from there to the new. And so, with the Teacher of Righteousness there is constantly the reminder that this is the beginnings of a new covenant.
Moses is the lawgiver at the culminating important stage of the old covenant, which began with Abraham. But the whole career of the old covenant was put into perspective by Moses in writing Genesis. And The book of Genesis in The Old Testament is the story of the development of the covenantal capacities of man. Each little segment in Genesis is like a link in a chain. And each time the covenant is renewed man grows in his capacity to establish that covenant with God. So that Abraham has a certain capacity. Isaac has a greater capacity. Jacob has an even greater capacity. And Joseph has an even greater capacity than, than all of them. And Moses comes along and has the capacity raised to the nth degree because he is able retrospectively to put everything into a completed pattern. Thus, the law, The Torah, is the completed pattern of the covenantal capacity.
Now the Teacher of Righteousness is a new lawgiver. He is different from but parallel to Moses. He lives in a time when that old covenant had run out. Not that the Covenant so much had run out but the observance of it by the Jewish population had become so lacks as to amount to the Jewish word for this is apostasy. Later on, the, the apostasy of Judaism will become the sense of heretically in Christianity. The heretic in Christianity is the apostate in Judaism. They're linked together. They have that kind of a flow.
So that the Teacher of Righteousness is concerned with the same thing that Moses was concerned with only on a higher level. He's concerned of beginning with the deep self and expanding from there into the apocalyptic ideology of the future. Now part of this apocalyptic ideology of the future is the condition of the individual. The individual person. The shape of personality is a shape which occurs in this expressively radiant broadening field. The person occurs in an archetypal model as a projection in the future, in this apocalyptic matrix. But one cannot even begin unless one can come to the deep self-first.
So that we saw that The Book of Daniel in The Old Testament almost surely written by the Teacher of Righteousness around 165 B.C. written in Palestine. Written with a exquisite attentiveness to the detail of the process. Someone who understood exactly how you move out from the equanimity of the integrated deep self into the expressiveness of the individual life with visionary reverberations. not only does the Teacher of Righteousness write The Book of Daniel as this workbook of moving from dream interpretation to the vision exploitation.
And notice that there's a change in literary genre. one moves from, from the interpretation of images to the exhortation of ideas. And out of this exhortation of ideas you have the beginnings of the literary form known as the Midrash. Before the Teacher of Righteousness there were no Midrash as in Jewish literature at all. None. About 50, 40 or 50 years after the appearance of the Teacher of Righteousness you have the first proto Midrash. And the first proton Midrash in Jewish literature he is known to us as The Testament of Job.
Now the addition that I'm going to use for you is
and just for a few minutes. We're not going to spend much time tonight on it. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. Now pseudepigrapha is a fancy scholarly literary world for false writings, phony writings. They're the writings that have been thrown out of The Old Testament or thrown out of The New Testament. They're not Dead Sea Scrolls. They're not Gnostic materials. The materials which have been collected over the past two millennia which are not in the two Testaments.
Now the sub entitle here, Volume One: The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments. That is to say from our perspective this thousand-page collection and the volume two which is another thousand pages are sketches towards that apocalyptic envisioning process. The only thing that was kept, traditionally, was the final pattern. The Old Testament as the Jewish pattern and The New Testament as the Christian pattern. The Old Testament was a completed pattern. This is it. We have had the vision, and this is it. And The New Testament likewise was a completed pattern. This is the vision, and this is it. All of the sketches towards completing those were then excluded. This material are the sketches. These are the sketchbooks. These are the notebooks. These are the trial balloons as it where these are the material that went towards those completed patterns.
Now in this material, in this particular volume there are two types one apocalyptic literature and the other testaments. And we're going to focus for about 15 minutes on the, on the testaments. The Testaments that are left out of The New Testament and The Old Testament. Now notice that the term testament means literally the completed pattern of it, of a vision. Of a vision of what? Of man's relationship to God. All the possibilities and the actuality which traditionally energizes them is the completed pattern. The center with all of its radial spokes.
The Old Testament has a covenantal capacity which is finally focused on the law, The Torah of Moses. If one follows The Torah one is an inheritor of the whole capacity that came at one time from Abraham just to one son Isaac. And from Isaac just to one son Jacob. And from Jacob supposedly just do one son and so forth. At one time it was just a thin line. It could only be passed to one son at the time. With Moses the understanding is that through observance of The Torah every man enters into the covenantal making capacity. But that capacity had frayed. Not the covenant God has not frayed but man on his side went astray. That Jewish observance became watered-down, increasingly, with the experience with the exile to Babylon. With experience of coming back and finding themselves under Persian rule. However beneficent Cyrus the Great was and his successors like Durras or Xerxes. They were still Persians and they were still very powerful people.
But even more powerful were the Greeks, beginning with Alexander the Great. And finally, with the great Seleucid king Antiochus the fourth, who simply took over the entire temple and the entire temple worship in the city of Jerusalem. The high priest became an employee. Administering and Antiochus the fourths Hellenistic religious ideas which then blended Judaism into this Hellenistic world vision. Now the ecumenical of the Hellenistic world vision was not the vision of The Old Testament. Not the vision of the covenant.
And so, the Teacher of Righteousness comes at a time when according to The Dead Sea Scroll material the old covenant is now abrogated because man has let down his end. That covenant is gone. And the only thing that is left according to The Dead Sea Scroll language is a remnant. The remnant consists of two aspects. One the ragged group of exiles that fled from the city and went into the countryside into various little communes called camps. And the more sophisticated of them that went in a further exile to the city of Damascus in Syria. Looking for twenty years for a teacher who could interpret the law to them again. Bring the remnant back to life. And then were found by the Teacher of Righteousness in Damascus and brought back. And Qumran was established on the shore of the Dead Sea to be the University of this new law. And so, the Teacher of Righteousness was a new law giver.
Now this whole aspect as you can see involves writing a new Torah as it were. And what is the basic Torah? It is the coherence of The Old Testament brought together. But especially in The Old Testament the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses. So that it was only natural that the Teacher of Righteousness be an author writing new books. new books to replace, to refurbish the essence but to replace the old material. Not in the sense of that the old material must be thrown away but the old material must be seen with new eyes. And that the new material then are methodological practical workbook approaches to gaining the new eyes. And the Book of Daniel is one of those books of gaining new eyes. How to see that you can move from learning about dream interpretation to learning about symbolic dream interpretation, which is deeper. To learning about conscious visionary interpretation, which is even deeper.
Along with The Book of Daniel we have a series of hymns by the Teacher of Righteousness in The Dead Sea Scrolls. We have a whole sheath of hymns by him. And I am encouraging you to consider very strongly that The Book of Job is also one of these new methodological workbooks by the Teacher of Righteousness. Written about the middle of the 2nd century B.C. the whole core of The Book of Job, as we talked about last week, is about the cultivation of a particular perfection. a virtue, patience.
Now this use of patients as a perfection as a virtue is not limited to The Book of Job. is not limited to the Jewish tradition. Patience becomes a perfection and a virtue in a number of ethnically toned expressive literatures. For instance, in Mahayana Buddhism perfection, The Paramitas include patience as one of the perfections. Kshanti in Sanskrit is a perfection. That is to say it's a quality, a personal quality, which if investigated to the full that investigation will lead you to explore all capacities of yourself. It's a perfection because its roots go into every aspect of your life. So, if you explore patience, you will have a thoroughly you will explored the complete capacity of your consciousness to understand. So, The Book of Job centers around that.
But in particular the moving fulcrum in The Book of Job is chapter 28. And in chapter 28, as we saw last week, is a poem, a sacred poem, almost like a Hymn on the Inaccessibility of Wisdom. Wisdom is inaccessible in a natural way to man. Because wisdom is an integration of the image base in a totality. So as long as you're dealing with images and their natural reference you cannot understand God's meaning. You can only accept it. But if you want to understand it like Job wants to understand it. Not just accept it but to share in the understanding. One has to bring the meaning of that naturally refermented image base into an integration and then express that meaning out again in terms of a vision. And The Book of Job is a vision of God. And the word for that is called a theophany, a vision of God. and Job says I have heard of you before with the hearing of the ear but now mine eyes sees thee. And I repent in dust and ashes.
The fulcrum of The Book of Job is the Hymn on The Inaccessibility of Wisdom in chapter 28. And it's that hymn that we're using for our own practice here. I mean aside of having these presentations the material were actually working at this ourselves. We're trying the methodology out ourselves. And we're finding that indeed it still works and no wonder we have the same structure of the psyche as there was 2,000 years ago. We have a new layer, a new expressive layer, but the core is exactly the same. It works just the same way.
And in fact, this was the second quality in the Qumran community according to the Teacher of Righteousness. The first quality was that there was a remnant of people. Who regardless of the sacrifice wanted to know the truth. We must know the truth regardless of the sacrifice of our worldly careers. Regardless of the personal expense. Regardless of the suffering involved. We must know the truth. And the complement to that, the second part, the Teacher of Righteousness says besides this remnant of man there was a tail in remnant of God's presence within man. That the effectiveness of The Old Testament tradition was not just in the Torah, not just in the law, but was in the prophetic interpretation of the law in terms of the mythic image base. So that the prophets were a guideline whose meaning kept the presence of God alive. And within the individuals they would be able to find clues from the prophets to go with the remnant of their striving. And that these two elements brought together would enable them to reconstruct a new testament, a new covenant.
So, we've gotten that far. And I'm recapping for you and for some who haven't been here for, for a while and some who are new. So, you can see that we're trying to explore. We're trying to pioneer. And by going back and empathizing with the conditions, particularly in the 2nd century B.C. Particularly with that small group of people it couldn't have been much more than several thousand people at the most. out of a population somewhat approaching I imagine there were a million people in Palestine at that time. Just a trace element. And as far as they knew all of the proper religious structures, all of the Orthodox life establishments had all been co-opted by the Hellenizing watering down process and could no longer be trusted. The only thing they had was themselves, their inner trustworthiness between themselves. And the ability to go deep within and find that presence of God the clues of which were in the prophets. And especially the prophets Isaiah, Ezekiel and Jeremiah. And the fourth prophet Daniel as we've seen was added because in retrospect the Teacher of Righteousness had refurbished Daniel in his own time. And just so Job was refurbished in his own time.
Now the peculiar quality about The Book of Job is that we have here in The Testament of Job, in this volume of pseudepigrapha. The Testament of Job takes up about 40 pages or so in here. The Testament of Job is the first commentary. It's the first kind of ideologically oriented commentary on a biblical book that we have. It's most certainly from the time of the late 1st century B.C.
Now The Book of Job with its testament then form an interesting length. It's the beginning of a tradition which will when it develops produce in Judaism the tradition of Midrashs. Idea expansions of Old Testament themes and motifs. Now notice the transformation that happens. The Midrash becomes the vehicle which displaces the simple priestly function of administering a right. When you interpret something that has a symbolic base not just an activity base but an understanding base. So that in what we know as Judaism today, the whole norm of religious practice for a Rabbi is to be able to interpret literature, interpret motifs, interpret life. His whole capacity is in this kind of Midrashic capacity. There was no capacity like this for priests in Judaism say even in the 3rd century B.C. that was not the function of a Rabbi.
The first time that that function comes into play is in the 1st century B.C. with The Testament of Job. Or if you like in the 2nd century B.C. with the appearance of the Teacher of Righteousness. So, the Teacher of Righteousness is the single individual who starts this entire tradition. And thus, in The Dead Sea Scrolls he's not only called the lawgiver, but he is also referred to as the unique teacher.
In The Damascus Rule, that scroll, which we'll take a look at. if we have any time at all tonight, we'll begin to take a look at it. You can see that he is called the unique teacher. The sense of unique in is that he begins the tradition all over again. he renews the covenant. So that the archetypal festival for the Essenes was the Feast of the Renewal of the Covenant. The Feast of the Renewal of the Covenant becomes the great festival. And the basis upon which the Feast for the Renewal of the Covenant may be celebrated is the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. If one can bring oneself to that deep resonance with God within on the day of atonement then you will be able to celebrate when the festival comes, the Renewal of the Covenant.
So that in the Essene tradition, in The Dead Sea scroll communities, there is this kind of a two-handed approach to the entire new pattern. This new visionary pattern that they're seeking to explore and bring into manifestation. On the one hand is the contact with God within. And whatever procedures and methodologies there are to delve within and come to that contact. And two to express that contact through the celebration of the Festival of the Renewal of the Covenant.
Now this new covenant becomes a theme which as you must recognize that early Christianity coops for itself. Says we are the new covenant. we are the new covenant. But the fact is, and no one knew this before. The fact is, is that there was a new covenant in Judaism 150 years maybe 200 years before Jesus.
So that the idea of a new covenant is a vision of Hellenistic Judaism fighting to save its own integrity. And as such is not a Christian revision of Jewish experience, but as a Christian acceptance of that aspect of Jewish experience and then developed along its own lines. Now this is a revolution.
This is a revolutionary perspective because it shows that the roots of Christianity and the roots of Rabbinic Judaism are identical. There is no difference whatsoever. There is the same transformation. There is the same sequence of development. There is the same unique teacher at the beginning of that whole process. There is a shared development for almost 300 years. So, one can ask why is it that Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism have consistently, in our experience of history and civilization been at odds? And the fact is because the true history has been obscured. The true practice has been blurred.
And part of our work here is to show the consistency of those two traditions. With swi
with several others as a matter of fact. If you've been following this for any length of time you know that religious Daoism from the 5th century A.D. on is consonant with this. Mahayana Buddhism from the 1st century A.D. on is consonant with this. Islam in its deep mystical Sufi orientation is consonant with this. So, there are five or six of the worlds great religions that in actual practice are what we would call psychologically and theologically consonant with this beginning in this development.
One of the, one of the great ideas that came out of this is that there was a world civilization in the 3rd century A.D. there was a world civilization that was shared anywhere from Ireland to China. From India to Northern Europe. That there was one great ecumenical world religion. But unfortunately, the facilities of history and geography fractionated this, and the different fractions went on their own trajectories. And we live in a time when we're only now being able to reconstruct the wholeness of the world that once was quite real.
So that The Book of Job becomes for us as important as The Book of Daniel. It, The Book of Job is a workbook. It's a methodological approach to how to get to that quiet center and stay there. Regardless of what is happening in the world that quiet center exists. That point of contact exists even when all of the arguments that can be brought against your being worthy of having it are presented. You still have it. In other words, The Book of Job not only takes away property. Not only takes away children from Job. Not only takes away his health. Takes the way the regard and friendship of his wife. But it also exposes Job to very wise men who bring arguments to show Job that he is unworthy of having a contact with God and prove it to him. And even under that Job says I may be unworthy, yet I still have that contact. So that the point of Job is endurance or as we would say today patience. The Greek term for this is hypomone. H-y-p-o-m-o-n-e and the accent is on the e. Hypomone.
Endurance is perhaps better than, than patience. But when my daughter was young and we were practicing some of these virtues, we would talk about practicing, practicing patience and how difficult it, it was. And even little children of three, four years old our good companions to talk to about practicing patience. They bring out all of the problems right away. It's very difficult to do this. And especially the most difficult part is when you feel like you don't want to.
**inaudible comment from the room**.
When you feel like you don't want to is, when endurance is just sheer suffering. And so, and, and I can remember her saying but daddy why do we have to be patient with bad people? And, and it comes out very naturally that that is like the, the crux. Notice the symbolic language? The cross, the crux, of the whole matter is being patient with your enemies. It's a very essence of endurance.
What Jobs detractors present are logically superb, ironclad arguments to show Job that God has done this to him. It couldn't be anybody else. God has done this to you; therefore, you must have done something wrong. Because God is not unjust. And they proved to Job that God didn't do this. Is doing this to him. It must be God. And Job maintains his integrity. Maintained the fact that he has that deep presence with God.
And The Poem and the Inaccessibility of Wisdom chapter 28 in Job comes at a strategic juncture. The Book of Job has 42 chapters. 42 is 3 times 14. There are 3 sections of 14 in The Book of Job. And the first time, the first round of objections is brought up to Job is at the end of chapter 14. And at the, at 28, chapter 28 is the end of the second round where Job is absolutely con
convinced that on any natural basis he has done something, and God is punishing him. But his reply is The Poem on the Inaccessibility of Wisdom. That beyond man's understanding Job has a confidence that there's a God's understanding. Which even though he hasn't penetrated to he has confidence that God has it. And this is Job's glory. That even though he knows that he cannot understand, he believes that God does understand. And The Poem on the Inaccessibility of Wisdom is a sacred poem. This hymn celebrating this capacity of God which transcends man.
Now in the final fourteen chapters, the final third of it, turns out that Job is right. God says you were right. Your detractors were wrong. And therefore, I'm going to give back to you double. The mythic thing is you get back twice what you've lost.
Now The Book of Job then how's this peculiar kind of a structure where the core of it involves a symbolic transformation. It involves a deep self-experience of equanimity. Where all of the meaning from a feeling toned world experience is brought into absolute equanimity of integration. Because all of the feelings come together. Every one of them. They come together in a harmony. In a balance. In a tranquility where no feeling is given any kind of priority. All feelings together give that oceanic all of tranquility. One is fill. And this becomes later on in Gnostic ideologies the pleroma.
So, the experience of the deep self is the all becomes the pleroma. But the pleroma is a transformational room to a new world. To a world where feeling having come together now what is born out of that is the wide range ranging Riggins divergent radiance of thought. Indefinite numbers of ideas that can come out of this. But that they're held together because they have the same origin. And the origin is the mind. So that very often one has this kind of ideology later on that the pleroma is God but man's experience of it is his mind. his mind with a capital M. And notice the tone here, the kind of thinking quality ascribed to it.
So, at The Book of Job, written about 160 B.C., has the very first proto Midrash in Jewish history, The Testament of Job. And I won't go into this completely tonight. I'll talk a little bit about it tomorrow. But The Testament of Job is a, is a wonderful piece. We have, for instance, about a half a dozen Testaments in the pseudepigraph collections. The pseudepigraphic collections include not only The Testament of Job but there is a Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, A Testament of Abraham, A Testament of Isaac, Testament of Jacob, A Testament of Moses, A Testament of Solomon and A Testament of Adam.
Now all of these Testaments brought together are very interesting. The very first Testament is that of the twelve patriarchs. And it's written about 105-104 B.C. And I'll talk about that at a subsequent Tuesday night. It's several hundred pages long.
Should we wait for the tapes?
END OF SIDE ONE
The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs about 105 B.C. is a document which brings together into a completed form Testaments of Levi's, Testaments of Nathalie, Testaments of the Twelve sons of Jacob. The twelve tribes. Later on, that sense of the twelve patriarchs of the twelve tribes as a completed symbolic matrix will be echoed in parallel by the twelve disciples of Jesus. The twelve disciples of Jesus will then be the twelve patriarchs of Christianity. And the oldest Christian church liturgical document that we have is the liturgy, the proto liturgy, that became the Eucharist later on. Much later on will be the, the twelve on of apostles that liturgy. And we have it. A copy was found in the late 19th century and on Mount Athos in Greece. and was big cause celeb. I have a first edition from 1887 showing a big engraving of the bearded patriarch who brought it to light and the translation made into English and so forth.
The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs as a book about 105 B.C. sets in motion a residence with which later on will become the beginnings of the liturgical experience of Christianity and the twelve disciples. The twelve apostle. Now in between those two is this development of the Testament genre. And the first Testament that occurs in this is The Testament of Job.
And The Testament of Job is quite different from The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs because it is a commentary on The Book of Job. A commentary in the sense of a proto Midrash. It develops the themes so that one can understand these are the ideas that are at stake. These are how the ideas are expressed. This is the meaning then that one should take from this. This is the kinds of consideration which you should entertain in yourself as conscious individual striving for a better relationship with God.
Notice that the emphasis is that your relationship with God now is not just to follow the ritual, however well administered by a priesthood. But to participate in schooling your mind to be able to understand more of the meaning of what is happening. And very subtly the shift goes from a law applied to a person to a person who applies the interpretation of the law to his own sense of developing conscience and consciousness. The transformation is in the worth of the individual. In the tremendous emphasis placed upon the individual person to make the decision.
And notice now that even in our time the archetypal quality that's there in so called primordial Christianity, Billy Graham type Christianity, are you going to make a decision for Jesus or not? It's just on that one threshold. Yes or no tonight. It's that kind of a quality. It's extremely interesting because Billy Graham is quite accurate archetypally. He puts his finger exactly on the only moveable part in the whole show. Are you going to accept it or not? But the meaning is that you have alone the capacity to make that decision. It's not a foregone conclusion. Even if you just keep up the ritual appearances it's only appearance. Even if you go say to use the metaphor if you go to church every Sunday and tithe and pray and go through all the ritual practices. If you don't really mean it, it doesn't do any good at all. Notice that the ritual comportment, the old Torah, is not brought into play at all unless you are there in the center making it work. You have become the hub of the pattern of the law.
What was the hub of the pattern of the law before? God's presence. What is the transformation? that somehow God's presence is taken out of the wheel of the law and put into you. And unless it works in you the wheel of the law doesn't mean anything. This is the transformation.
So that the whole methodology is a Teacher of Righteousness in The Book of Daniel, in The Book of Job, in The Thanksgiving Hymns from The Dead Sea Scrolls. His whole strategic methodology is to bring you to that still point within. To make that commitment that this is your still point and at your still point God's presence exists. So that when you move from that still point you not only move with all of your integrity but with God's presence along with you. So that the life lived then is from your wholeness and God's presence and you can't separate the two. How could you ever separate the two?
So, the purpose of the Teacher of Righteousness is a new lawgiver different from but parallel to Moses. And his new law is that there is a new covenant. The covenant is no longer in this process that began with Abraham but has been transformed and now begins with your capacity to reach your deep inner self.
So private prayer becomes one of the methodological pegs upon which the whole experience of the Essenes rests. Do you have the capacity in your own self for private prayer? And in The Damascus Rule just like in The Gospel According to Matthew and The Sermon on the Mount the emphasis is literally can you close the door and be quiet with God alone? Can you close the door on the rest of the world? Can you close the door on whatever else is going on in your life? Can you close the door wherever you are and enter into that presence alone where only your deepest self and God's presence abide? Can you do that? If you cannot do that and yet you want to do that, then you know what your work is cut out for. Your work is to be able to get to that point.
So that there is in The Dead Sea Scrolls the phrase is an assembly of the people. The Assembly of the people are all those individuals, a remnant to begin with but after several generations it became quite a tradition. That assembly of the people are all those people who aspire to do this. And they're out to help each other to do this. When they have done this the assembly of the people transforms. It's no longer the assembly of the people as aspires but it becomes the congregation of the community. So, in The Dead Sea Scrolls you find these two phrases used all the time. The assembly of the people is like that exoteric broad community. It's like in the Pythagorean tradition the auditors. The acousmatice. Those, those who came just to hear. But then there's that esoteric group, the inner group, who actually not only came to here but came to see and to do. The Pythagorean mathematice. And for the Essenes that was the congregation of the community.
Now the congregation of the community originally was collected around the Teacher of Righteousness. But the Teacher of Righteousness came to a time when he was physically taken away. We do not know for sure whether he was killed. Whether he died of natural causes. Or whatever happened. The Dead Sea Scrolls simply say that he was taken away. But he was taken away with a strict understanding by the congregation of the community. They could see in their own minds. They shared the insight together. They had the same vision together. That he was taken away but that he would come back. That he would return. Why? Because he had been so closely integrated with the presence of God that death held no terror for him. Held no bound for him. Was not a limitation any longer on him. That he would return. And when he returned, he would return as the anointed. And that when he returned, he would be the Messiah of Israel.
So that the whole idea which in Christianity became the Second Coming is actually a Hellenistic Judi
Jewish idea from the 2nd century B.C. about the Teacher of Righteousness transferred to Jesus. He was seen as The Anointed One.
But notice that later on when there was a kind of a questioning period about well was Jesus successful? What did he do? There was a regression. And a real ascription that well he'll come again Jesus will come again. Be a second coming. And instead of moving on in the vision there was a regression going back. And using again, refurbishing what had been said about the Teacher of Righteousness to be said about Jesus. And one of the things that we're looking at here is try, to understand really about Jesus and not about the mythic misinterpretation of him that has just caused all kinds of havoc in many civilizations. Many civilizations.
The Teacher of Righteousness on his return would come back at the end of days. He would come back on what amounts in Christian mythological lore as Judgment Day. Now the final days in terms of The Dead Sea Scrolls was that this would be the end of a whole cycle. What is at the end of the cycle of? It's the end of the cycle of the old law and the beginning of the cycle of a new law. A new covenant had been made but had to be brought together. Had to be consecrated as a new Torah. In other words, just having the new covenant beginning doesn't make the new Torah. Out of the new covenant has to come a tradition and a community and finally someone who is able to make the new Torah. So, the new covenant, the new community of the covenant, is a presage of the new law, the new Torah. And this gets extremely complicated unless one can follow this patiently like we're doing. Almost nobody has ever done this. Has followed it patiently, taking theme by theme, taking development by development and following through.
Now one of the keys that I want you to just consider tonight for the next ten minutes is, is this theme of Testaments. Yes, we know about The Old Testament and The New Testament. But let's follow for a moment the theme of the Testament literature that was left out of The Old Testament and The New Testament. There are six or seven of these Testaments written over a period of about four or five centuries. In fact, these Testaments, if you take them as a literary genre and you plot their trajectory beginning with The Testament of Job you find that the motion goes off the graph. That is to say it does not follow any kind of a normal development but follows a psychotic kind of a development. The Testament of Job is very accurate. It is a very recognizable, albeit the first of a genre. It's a proto Midrash on The Book of Job interprets it and sticks very closely to the book. And has a kind of homiletic integrity because of it.
Now the next Testament that comes is a series of the Testaments of the three patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And they all come from the A.D. centuries. Now The Testament of Abraham is usually dated around the end of the 1st century A.D. And goes back to the beginning of the covenantal process. Goes back to Abraham. So, as a testament, a testimonia, of the covenantal making capacity of man in the first place.
The next Testament, The Testament of Isaac comes from about the 2nd century A.D. and goes a little further afield but still is somewhat close to it. The Testament of Jacob is from the very end of the second, beginning of the 3rd century A.D. and goes a little further afield. Then we come to The Testament of Moses. and the Testament of Moses written towards the beginning of the 2nd century also has this kind of a movement away from interpretation and more coming back to a kind of reconsideration of the old elements. And maybe we haven't understood it all together.
But then we come to a 3rd century ad Testament, The Testament of Solomon and we have completely left any recognizable Midrashic application of interpretation of the meaning of a book, like The Book of Job. Or even further the interpretation of a mythic image like a patriarch. Or like Moses. We come now to an apocryphal not, not apocalyptic but apocryphal mythic image of Solomon. And the whole Testament of Solomon is like a catalog of magical practices. incantations that engender various demons and demonic spirits, which Solomon then in dialogue form interrogates and finds out what they can do. And uses them in their various capacities to build his temple. So, that the understanding is no longer historical or even religious but is kind of like a romantic explosion of magical apocryphalness of solemn Solomon building the temple with the aid of various demons and so forth. And actually, what it is, is a catalogue of late Roman Demonology. It has all of this kind of an aspect.
Then finally from the 5th century A.D. A Testament of Adam. And it again goes back and is an odd kind of a presentation. And it begins,
The first hour of the night is the praise of the demons and at that hour they do not injure or harm any human being. The second hour is the praise of the doves. The third the praise of the fish and the fire and of all the lower deficit. The fourth hour is the holy, holy, holy praise of the Seraphim. And so, I used to hear before I send the sound of their wings in paradise when the Seraphim would beat them to the sound of their triple praise. but after I transgressed against the law, I no longer heard that sound.
And then the fifth hour and so on.
So that by the time we get to the 5th century A.D. the testament literature is dying out in a kind of a wash of romanticizing apocryphal qualities that have nothing to do with the tuning of an intellectual understanding of a powerful idea and of a deep self-experience.
This trajectory as we can call it of the testament pseudepigrapha is a very good index to what happened to the religious capacity of the mind in this tradition. As long as the emphasis was on the practice and on the material that aided the actual practice, it was powerful. it was coherent. was incisive. it was logically well met together in terms of literary expression. It just sintinated with genius. But as the practice became more and more slovenly, less and less important, the apocryphal elements, the regressive elements, the kind of romanticizing became more and more accentuated. Until finally you have the whole thing run out about the 5th century. About the 400s.
It's a very interesting career to notice because exactly the same line could be drawn for the integrity of classical situation, uhh civilization. Classical civilization in the 1st century B.C. was at a white-hot point of capacity. And in the 1st century A.D. that capacity was challenged to the utmost and yet maintained itself. In the 2nd century, even though the challenges were less, the ability to maintain the integrity was somewhat impaired. In the 3rd century the integrity began to fray. And the challenges began to become almost insurmountable. So that classical civilization ended at with the 3rd century A.D. and at the beginning of the 4th century A.D. classical situ
civilization switched its allegiances from persecuting Christianity and believing in the Roman, Greco-Roman God Pantheon, shifted and became Christian. And then persecuted anybody who was heretical and still believing in the old pagan ways.
But the civilization though it flip-flopped and changed its base continued to unravel in the 4th century A.D. So much so that with the end of the 4th century A.D. you find almost an end to the integrity of classical civilization. Becomes more and more isolated in provincial pockets. You have a pocket around Constantinople reaching to Ravenna in Italy. You have a Roman pocket. You have a Spanish pocket. You have an Egyptian pocket. And, and with the close in the 5th century A.D. you have a complete fragmentation of classical civilization.
So that the trajectory of the testamental literature is like an index to the inability of civilization to hold itself together in the envisioned total pattern. And that is directly commensurate with the inability of the individual to practice deep self-penetration and expression of the deep self-penetration into one's personal life. the two go together. They're almost like a railroad track. If you do not have the capacity for individuals to go to their deep selves and bring that refreshment into their lives, then the vision of civilization which those people live in will not hold. And it will fray, it will fragment and there's nothing that can be done. There's, it's not a question of power. It's a question of capacity. If the individual cannot do this the civilized projection, which is just a vision of the pattern from the deep self-experience will not be able to be held. The light will flicker and go out. The image, the civilization will vanish.
What we're concerned with here, we're concerned in particular with that shift of brilliance that occurred. Especially from the middle of the 2nd century B.C. to the end of the 1st century A.D. when that capacity was intact. When, when it was not unusual. By the end of the 1st century it was not unusual for thousands of tens of thousands of human beings to practice in a kind of perfection the technique which had once been pioneered by a few individuals of genius. We see in the lives and stories of the saints. We have a collection from Pilateus done in the 3rd, late 3rd century, early 4th century A.D. We have his recounting of several hundreds of individuals who were able to lead what we would call today very saintly kinds of lives. people who are extremely experienced in life. Extremely capacious in their own personal life. But all shared the capacity to be able to go to that deep-self God presence and bring that quality, that tranquility, into their lives and share it and make communities.
The great heyday of this was the 1st century B.C. and the 1st century A.D. And in the 1st century B.C. it was the property of very small communities. In the 1st century A.D. it was the property of broad populations in urban areas. In the 1st century B.C. characteristically there would be small esoteric groups on the edges of cities in retreat from the cities. in the 1st century A.D. the exact opposite had happened. They were no longer in retreats, but they were in the cities. And it was the general population that had achieved this. It was not an index to the brilliance of thought in the 1st century A.D. that was an index in the 1st century B.C. In the 1st century A.D. it was the ability to actually do this with your own life. And the people who could do this most openly, most assuredly, were those who had really no stake in any other kind of worldly concerns. The poor, the disenfranchised and so forth.
So, the early experience in the 1st century A.D. of religious genius was that it was a capacity of human nature in general. And not the property of some kind of financial or intellectual elite. It was the heritage of every human being to have this capacity. And anyone who attempted this was generally very successful.
Now we can see that in this trajectory that as the centuries went by, by the 5th century by, the by the late 4th century early 5th century it again was becoming questionable. It was again reverting back to the B.C. pattern. Where if you wanted to find a presence of God you were told to go to a monastery. You were told to go to the retreats. Go to the desert. get out of town we're busy. So that the late 4th century A.D. and the beginning of the 5th century A.D. are a massive regression. A whole civilization regressed back to the beginning point. Back to the adolescence of this developmental process.
And of course, they didn't have the **inaudible word** the adolescence of this, of the process had in the 1st century B.C. And so, what happened is when they retreated and went out of the civilization, out of the cities, those cities lost those values. Lost those people at those capacities. And the ensuing dark ages is an index of what happens when nobody can do anything. And the only people who could were tucked away in monasteries and not participating in life at all. Tucked away in retreats and paying no attention to the world. And so, you took the heart out of the world. You took the soul out of the world. And this heartless zombie type experience just collapsed in its own weight. And that collapse took about a thousand years to recover from.
And the recovery came only because of very peculiar circumstances that a few of the people in retreats came back into the cities. They were forced to with the fall of the Byzantine Empire forced thee the monks and so forth to come, come back into refuge. And it was just like in our time what they say like the Tibetan Buddhist refugees having to come back into a secular society. And bringing with them incredible enthusiasm for practice. It isn't a matter of them having esoteric secrets so much as a as the infectious enthusiasm of let's do it. Let's go into ourselves and be there. Let's have that presence. Let's do it. It's not that hard. It's not that unusual. we can do it.
So, we're looking at the development. And we want to emphasize for the next I think at least six weeks, the material of The Dead Sea Scrolls. What are The Dead Sea Scrolls? What do they say? And their whole focus will be around this nascent beginning of this practice. And from The Dead Sea Scrolls then we'll be able to I think get a good picture of the setting of Jesus. We'll take it up to, well take it up to his lifetime.
So, starting next week I'll start with a Damascus document. And one interesting note on The Damascus Document. And then we'll pause and wait until next week.
The Damascus Document was found in three of the caves at Qumran. We have fragments from three different caves at Qumran. But it is the only Dead Sea Scroll that we had before Qumran. That is to say two manuscripts in fragment were found in Cairo in the large central synagogue in Cairo. Which has been there all this time, 2,000 years. And in a classic synagogue, in a Middle East synagogue, there was a place called the Ganesa. It's like a little room that you could go down. Where sacred literature, which by religious law could not be destroyed. So, you just put the old worn-out materials on shelves and left them there. And God in his own time would do whatever you wanted with them. In the Ganesa of the Cairo synagogue in the 1890s a Rabbi discovered two manuscripts. Which were fragments of this Dead Sea Scrolls of Damascus document. And they were published under the title Fragments of a Zo Zodiac Manuscript from the high Priest named Zodiac.
It wasn't until after the Second World War, after The Dead Sea scroll material came out, that sound very learned Rabbi. I forget now I think it might, it might have been Abraham Heschel. Some very learned Rabbi looking over The Dead Sea Scroll material, a phrase hit him in some of the commentary. The phrase was the cave
the sect of the cave. And he remembered that there is a phrase the sect of the cave used in a classical medieval Jewish philosopher named Saadian Gayon. Who wrote in Babylon around the 11th century A.D. And sure, enough we went to look up in Saadian Gayon writings he found in there, Saadian Gayon gives a description of a letter which a man had received, a Rabbi a fellow Rabbi some long time before had received. That in Palestine along the shores of the Dead Sea in a cave certain jars have been found that had ancient writings in them. This would have been about 790 A.D. And that the writings in there were the writings of the sect of the cave. And in particular the writings of the great philosopher of Alexandria. The great Jewish philosopher of Alexandria who must surely is Philo.
Now that material, that Essene Dead Sea scroll material that was found in 790 A.D. was circulated in translation throughout Judaism in the early 800s. That would be the early 9th century A.D. fragments were preserved in Cairo in the Ganesa. That material have been put in the Ganesa sometime in the in the 10th century A.D. and looked in there for almost 900 years.
Now it's interesting because that material, those Dead Sea Scrolls facsimiles of them, copies of them, circulating in the Jewish world of the 9th century are directly responsible in Spain for the writing of The Zohar, The Book of Splendor. Which is the matrix out of which The Kabbalah comes. The Book of Splendor if one goes to. We have the five-volume complete translation here. If one goes to The Book of Splendor the author is saying that he's writing this in a vision which he has received from someone in the 2nd century of the common Era. A Rabbi in the 2nd century who had a vision of what was really going on in God's world. In God's mind. But all he could see was the radiant structure of the vision. There was no earthly content just the radiant structure. And so, The Zohar, The Book of Splendor is the revelation of this vision in medieval Jewish literature of the 2nd century vision from the sect of the cave.
And when we get to the end of The Dead Sea Scroll material, I'll bring in The Zohar. And I'll show you how the origins, the original matrix of The Kabbalah is the exact same neo-Pythagorean vision that the Essene material and the therapeutae community from Alexandria had at the turn of the millennium. Two millennium ago. It's exactly the same material.
So, I think in the next six weeks or if it takes eight weeks. We'll just take eight weeks. We'll explore the Dead Sea Scroll material with an eye towards moving towards appreciating The Zohar as a, an early Renaissance of The Dead Sea scroll material. And then of course we'll continue with our exploration of, of how this affected Jesus. In our understanding here that Jesus in His incredible brilliance, intellectual brilliance, brings all of this integration that had been packed together and opens it out in such a way that all of it becomes expressible. That if there's any brilliance at all that's distinctive of Jesus, it's not packing it in but its opening it up. Opening the entire psyche, the entire symbolic self so that every aspect of its integration could be expressed. And appreciating that I think goes a long way towards restoring our faith in human beings.
Thank you very much.
We have tapes of last week or tonight. And we can make you copies if you want. Just let me know and I'll make them up.
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