of the Teacher of Righteousness with John the Baptist and Jesus
as the Wicked Priest (who was married, divorced, and remarried,
and the father of four children!). There are obvious affinities
between this approach and that which has been taken to some of
the apocryphal gospels: both assume that the version of the events
in the New Testament is a deliberate falsification and that the
‘true’ story was altogether racier and subsequently suppressed.
Yet such attempts to see John the Baptist, or Jesus, or James, or
Paul in the Scrolls are bad history. As the distinguished Dead Sea
Scrolls scholar Geza Vermes puts it, ‘all these theories fail the
basic credibility test: they do not spring from, but are foisted on,
the texts’ (Vermes 1997: 22). Indeed, no appeal to early Chris-
tianity is necessary to explain the contents of the Scrolls: there
are perfectly reasonable identifications of the various figures
mentioned in them that can be made from Jewish history. It is
better to view the Scrolls more neutrally, as a source of infor-
mation that sheds light on certain trends in Palestinian Judaism
at the time of the birth of Christianity (see chapter 4).
Another category of literature similarly attests to the fecun-
dity of the Jewish religious imagination in this period. In the same
way that many early Christians produced accounts of Jesus and
his followers that failed to make the canon, so too many Jews of
the Hellenistic and Roman periods produced texts on biblical
themes that were not included in the canon of Hebrew scriptures
(the texts that make up the Christian Old Testament). Here we
encounter a slight problem of definition, since some of these
Jewish texts are called ‘apocrypha’ and others ‘pseudepigrapha’.
The Old Testament apocrypha (as it is called by Christians)
consists of certain books that had been included in Greek manu-
scripts of the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew
scriptures) and consequently were included also in early codices
of the Christian Bible. In the fourth century, however, when the
monk Jerome came to produce an authoritative Latin translation
of the Bible, he limited his efforts to those texts included in the
Hebrew canon; the remaining works (all of them in Greek) he
regarded as ‘apocrypha’. This term now encompasses historicalSOURCES AND THEIR INTERPRETATION
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