Michael O. Wise, The First Messiah: Investigating the Savior before Jesus. HarperSanFrancisco 1999. Pp. x + 342. Reviewed by Kathryn Murano for R.Kraft's RelSt 225 class at UPenn (Spring 1999) The First Messiah, by Michael O. Wise, is a thought- provoking examination of the prime mover in the Dead Sea Scrolls, The Teacher of Righteousness. Wise, who also has translated a nearly complete version of the Dead Sea Scrolls with his co- authors Abegg and Cook, is very familiar with the Scrolls and thus has a wide body of knowledge from which to draw his conclusions. Some of his ideas reaffirm the traditional views of the Scrolls, while others sharply contrast with the accepted interpretation. Most importantly, however, Wise uses facts and inferences from the Dead Sea Scrolls and history to indirectly make many generalizations about culture that are useful to the study of Judaic and Christian studies at large. The book begins with a cross-cultural study of various crisis cults at different periods in history. Through these examples, Wise serves to establish various attributes of a crisis cult in order to define such a movement. He says that crisis cults begin when an aspect of society becomes a source of tension for a certain amount of the population. The people become disenchanted for various reasons with society, and this leads to insecurity. As a response to this stress, a charismatic leader is able to emerge and form a subculture within the population whose values differ on one or many aspects from the larger culture. This leader, in a religious context, can be either a prophet or a messiah. Wise makes a specific distinction between the two. A prophet claims to have divine revelations and communicates God's words to the people, but a messiah "sees him or herself as divinely ordained to establish a new order. The distinction hinges on the centrality of the messenger to the movement's aims" (30). Wise states that while "every messiah is a prophet, not every prophet is a messiah" (30). Another concept introduced by Wise in this elongated introduction-like portion of his book is that of the myth-dream. Defined as a "particular culture's ideal reality," this myth-dream is largely a subconscious cultural ideal that characterizes the population's nationalistic Utopian society. It seems to me that while this idea of the myth-dream may work as a valid concept to describe the collective subconscious of Israel in the first centuries before and after the turn of the era, it may not be a useful construct to apply in other instances. For example, the myth-dream of African- Americans may be very different from that of white Americans in this society today. After illustrating the concepts central to his arguments, Wise goes on to provide a historical setting for the Dead Sea Scrolls. Wise concurs with most scholars in his general dating of the Scrolls, but not necessarily in the specifics. He estimates the birth of the group responsible for the Scrolls at 70 BCE, and their demise to be in the year 34 BCE. He describes the rise and fall of this group as the life cycle of a crisis cult, headed by its charismatic leader "the Teacher of Righteousness." The Scrolls do not mention the names of the historical figures to whom they refer, but they do provide code names. However, through comparisons of the Scrolls with known historical events, Wise identifies most of the important players in the texts. Whether his interpretations are correct remains to be seen. Wise believes that the Teacher of Righteousness' name is actually Judah, for what reasons he does not explicitly state, so I will refer to him by this name as well. Wise asserts that the texts known as the "Thanksgiving Hymns" reveal the answers to this mysterious figure. All written in the first person, Wise says that a literary analysis reveals that some of these texts refer to "I" as a metaphor for the group. However, others use the first person in a more authoritative manner, distancing this "I" from the group. Wise feels this is sufficient evidence that many of these Hymns were actually the diary of Judah himself, published by the group post-humously. Although the exact personage of the Teacher of Righteousness can't be confirmed, Wise believes he can infer the characteristics of Judah and his position in society through these writings. As a partial summary of the book, I will relate Wise's interpretation of the historical development of the Dead Sea Scroll crisis cult. According to Wise, Judah's extreme handle on biblical texts shows that he is a high-ranked member of society, and in the priestly class that served under Alexander Jannaeus. He believes that before fancying himself the messiah, Judah lived in Jerusalem as a wisdom teacher. Wise most obviously dissents from the traditional interpretations of the Scrolls in his ideas about this Teacher of Righteousness. Wise believes that Judah was a member of the priestly class, and intimately connected with the Sadducee group. However, most scholars believe that the group responsible for writing the Dead Sea Scrolls was an isolated group of Essenes. Wise does not even mention the Essenes once in this book. In fact, the Sadducean identity of Teacher of Righteousness is the basis for all of his interpretations. It is the conflict between the Sadducees and Pharisees concerning the way to perform Temple sacrifices upon which the formation of the Dead Sea cult emerges. Wise uses history to support his theory. After Alexander dies, his wife Alexandra becomes Queen and transfers her allegiance to the Pharisee movement, which is popular with the peasants and thus gaining mass adherence. Because Judah speaks out against what he considers the defilement of the Temple rituals, he becomes a main enemy of all the important people of the time and forms what Wise labels "a conservative backlash against this rising movement" (77). In the tradition of a wisdom teacher Judah feels he must communicate his revelation and urges people to enter the New Covenant, condemning all those who continue to obey the false Pharisaic laws of the Temple to being smote by God in the Latter Days. Wise identifies the 4QMMT document as a legal treatise sent by Judah to the Wicked Priest to undermine the Pharisaic laws. Wise also thinks he has enough evidence to put a name to the man identified in the Dead Sea Scrolls as the Wicked Priest. This man is supposedly Hyrancus II, high priest under Alexandra's rule after Alexander dies. Because of this treatise, Hyrancus wants Judah dead. Extrapolating from the texts themselves, Wise claims that the "Thanksgiving Hymns" show a progression of events that occurred in Judah's life and his attitudes towards these occurrences. He believes that these texts combined with the "Commentary on Habbakuk" provide evidence that Judah is arrested as a false prophet and tried. It is during his arrestation that Wise thinks Judah himself has the epiphany that he is the Messiah, and identifies himself as the "Suffering Servant" from Isaiah, one of the biblical books found among the Dead Sea texts. The sole arbiter of the trial is none other than Hyrcanus, and Wise envisions the prosecutor to be Shimeon ben Shetah, a powerful Pharisaic figure of the period whom Wise alleges to probably be the Man of the Lie referred to in the Damascus Document. The trial is doomed to be unfair, and Judah is convicted, but somehow escapes the sentence of death by stoning, as was the custom. He is permanently exiled, however, and takes about 150 of his followers with him. Here is where Wise and the accepted theory differ again. Wise believes that when the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls say they live in "the Land of Damascus," they literally mean in the area around Damascus. He pinpoints their existence not in Qumran at all, but in a wilderness area known as Trachonitis. Furthermore, he says that the only realistic way for this group to survive was to resort to banditry! After moving into exile, many of the cult members defect from the group. Wise cites their apostasy as possibly due to Judah's revealing to the group that he is the Messiah, thus conferring all authority on himself and alienating some of the members of the priestly class. These defectors presumably go back to Jerusalem and inform the royal family of Judah's blasphemy, who in turn send an army to slaughter the community and put an end to the danger of a revolt in the future. The attack occurs on the community's Day of Atonement, and many women and children are killed, but the Messiah is somehow not. After a few years in exile, Judah, who is supposedly an old man, dies. The cult shrinks to an all-time low, as the prophecy that Judah will rise to power and rule over Israel obviously cannot now come to fruition. The followers respond through "redaction," that is, reworking the earlier prophecy to create a new one. They add to his Hymns, creating the full collection we have preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and thus altering some of his views. Wise claims that in order to come to terms with the death of their "Messiah," they elevate him to the status of second only to God. Furthermore, the group develops the idea of a Second Coming of Judah in which he will judge everyone in the Latter Days and the believers in him will be atoned for all of their sins. In addition, the group constructs the Manual of Discipline as a manifesto for the future rule of their community, with the Instructor picking up where Judah left off. Wise says that sometime later, most of the original group returns to live in Judea. Then, beginning in 63 BCE, the group's membership increases exponentially. The cause for this growth is the break out of war with Rome. This war, although a little late and not with the Seleukid Greeks as prophesied by Judah, was interpreted to be the confirmation of one of Judah's prophecies. If the number of new copies of texts is representative of group membership, Wise calculates the membership of the group between 45 and 35 BCE to be about 4050 people (243). However, as all crisis cults are fated to either stabilize and decrease their tension with the rest of society or die out, the Dead Sea Scroll community died out abruptly. The group had determined the Final Judgment to occur in 34 BCE, and when this prophecy wasn't fulfilled, the group could no longer hold together their beliefs. Although Wise does provide a logical and for the most part, coherent, explanation for the rise and demise of this cult, some of his conclusions are hard to accept. For one, I do not believe that while in exile the Dead Sea Scroll community resorted to banditry. Although Wise presents justifications for this theory and his individual arguments seem convincing, I feel that this sort of immorality would inherently undermine the purity striven for by these people. Wise also fails to explain the need in his paradigm for the group to deposit their writings in the Caves at Qumran, especially since he asserts in his "Notes" that the writers of these documents never lived at this location. Another problem I had with this book is that it seems to rely heavily on inferences. Although I realize this is a problem that can't be escaped when dealing with fragmentary texts this old and cryptic, I feel that it is also not shrewd to base an entire history on an inference from one word. For example, Wise has a tendency, especially with Judah's Hymns, to extract parabiblical phrases and relate them as allusions to their corresponding biblical passages, thus using the context of these passages to infer hidden meanings and nuances. He assumes that such allusions were the intention of the writer, and that the reader of today might not catch them due to general non-familiarity with the Bible. While this is probably true, I think Wise takes it to an extreme. Much of the biblical phrasing is due to the close proximity of religion with way of life, and coincidental if not accidental. I can't help but think he may be reading things into the text that the author had not intended. Furthermore, Wise states all of his inferences as though they are incontestable facts. He often states things that are said in the texts without citing the specific text, which makes me question the amount of stretching he had to do to make that statement. He even digresses into historical fiction narratives, complete with dialogue, on topics only hinted at in the Scrolls, and completely lost to history (i.e. Judah's trial). While these possible reenactments give a certain possibility of what might have happened, they further complicate the issue of discerning between fact and fiction. The problem of word extinction in translating old texts is also inevitable, as Wise discusses in several circumstances in his book. While parallelism can help to interpret the meaning of a term within a reasonable range, this can never be more exact than an estimation. In an instance where a translator envokes a parallel term, the word might have actually been an opposing one, as dualism is also a big theme in the Scrolls. This problem can therefore also lead to problems in interpretation. In some instances, a parabiblical form existing in the Scrolls may be exactly the same as a corresponding biblical one, but differ in one word that changes the meaning of the whole passage. For this reason, the tradition that has survived until today may be a completely different understanding than that of the first century before the common era. And the difference may have occurred because of a simple copying error, which is why I don't think Wise should read as much into these one-word differences as he does. Underlying Wise's account of the Dead Sea crisis cult history are several truths that are mostly implied and at times directly addressed. The Dead Sea Scrolls illustrate the inseparability of religion and way of life in the Judaism of this time, perhaps more evidently than any other religious texts. The writers of the Scrolls, and especially Judah himself, are almost incapable of non-parabiblical thought. Experts at synthesizing pieces of the Bible together to convey new meanings, they seem unable to have any thoughts that don't in some way refer to or relate to religion. Politics and social situations are so engrained in religious belief that conflict in something as seemingly trivial to me as where to pour out the libation in a ritual can lead to violent divisions between factions, leading to exile and even death. The ancient Jews also held very strongly the belief that there is a basic order in the world established by God, and that if one can dig under the surface randomness and chaos, this order is possible to be ascertained by humans. This concept had pervaded Western thinking since the time that monotheism developed, or even earlier, and it is a notion central to the possibility of a prophet or messiah. To both God reveals the predetermined fate of the world, which is written on the heavenly books. Furthermore, this is why wisdom literature has such a long tradition in Judaism and Christianity. Once one person feels they have discovered a part of this underlying truth and order, they must communicate it to the others. Astrology and the importance of the calendar are also examples of the greater importance of the order of things in God's world. This is why Wise affirms that it was so important to Judah that the people of the New Covenant use the solar calendar, the one he claims to be used by the Patriarchs to chart the days of the festivals. Problems of faith are also inherent in the discussion of the Dead Sea crisis cult. If both sides claim to have the right answer, it is hard for anyone to decide who is right. This was a problem in Judea at this time because there were so many different sects of Judaism that hinged on the same basic set of beliefs but differed in only very minute details, yet weren't tolerant of each other in the slightest. The "dissociative thinking" of people who have had mystical experiences makes it all the more confounding for the average person to sort out. Judah's conflicting imagery often seems opaque to the non-visionary. Wise points out that those who claim to be Messiahs may even sound insane. This claim would be all the more insane if you were the first to ever claim it. However, the Bible was thought to have declared that a Messiah would come and deliver the Jews from foreign rule, as had Moses. People in this time especially accepted biblical precedent as the truth, so all Judah had to do is fit the definition of the Messiah by articulating the myth- dream of the people to be accepted. Once his prophecy came true (sort of), that was all the confirmation the masses needed to get on board with the true prophet. Wise goes on to claim that the importance of the first messiah does not lie in the fact that he is or is not the true messenger of God to effect change. This is an article of faith, which is purely subjective and not of interest to historians. All Messiahs are important in the fact that they serve to shape the myth-dream of a people into something different, and thus pave the way for the next Messiah to come. Before Judah, Wise pinpoints "the Staff" in the Damascus Document, not as a metaphor, but to refer to an actual person who came before the Teacher of Righteousness, and whose work Judah brought to perfection (206). Similarly, after Judah was dead, many other prophets arose, the most famous being Jesus Christ. Wise believes that some of the elements between Judah and Jesus are coincidental -- mere products of being the leader of a crisis cult. But others, he insists, are not. He says "These elements were connected to the myth-dream of Israel, which Judah fed, molded, and changed and which came to Jesus in that changed form, ready for him to tap" (255). Among the similarities between Judah and Jesus are that both men were elevated by their followers to the status of being at the Right Hand of the Lord. Both died, presumably at the hands of the enemy, and are supposed to come again to judge the living, and both pronounced judgment on Jerusalem. The Dead Sea Scrolls illustrate Wise's belief that while many people emphasize the uniqueness of particular movements to show that they are special, these movements are better understood when they are not viewed as isolated occurrences but evolutions of the same desires and ideals. Overall, I thought this book was very helpful in shedding some light on the greater context of the Dead Sea cult in history. While Wise deviates from the norm in some fundamentals ways in his views on the Dead Sea community, he presents his ideas in a logical and convincing manner that warrants a second look at the texts themselves and any historical references to the time period available, namely Josephus. In my opinion, this book was interesting because it presents the material in a technical yet narrative manner that opens up a whole story and plot to the reader, rather than merely a sterile reading of a bunch of old pieces of leather. //end//