The Covenanters of Damascus; A Hitherto Unknown Jewish Sect

by George Foot Moore

The first of them, the Messiah descended from Aaron and Israel, in consequence of whose work “they meditated over their sin, and knew that they were guilty men,” is John the Baptist. John's father was a priest, and though his mother also is said to have been of priestly descent, “this need not stand in the way of believing that there was a strain of non-priestly Israelite blood in the family.” The Sadducees would naturally prefer a priestly Messiah to a Davidic one, and, when John won the recognition of the people as a prophet sent by God, it would not be strange if a priestly party acclaimed him as in some sense a Messiah, or anointed leader of the nation.

The other Messiah, the Teacher of Righteousness, must then be Jesus. That he appeared twenty years after John, so far from being an argument against this identification, would relieve the difficulty of trying to crowd John's whole history into little more than a year. “It is surely not necessary to defend the Lucan tradition on this point at all hazards, and it seems quite likely that the newly discovered document has at last given us the right perspective of events.”

If these identifications are correct, the “man of scoffing,” or Belial,[100] who is sent to pervert the nation and turn it from the law, can be no other than the Apostle Paul, and it is noted for confirmation that “the period here assigned to his activity and that of his immediate following is about forty years, a space of time not far removed from the result of recent critical computation.”

The New Covenant so often referred to in the texts is clearly to be connected with the identical conception and expression [pg 372] in the New Testament, nor does it seem to be accidental that the Teacher of Righteousness is several times spoken of as the “only” or “unique” one.

Mr. Margoliouth presents his complete hypothesis as follows:—

The natural and apparently inevitable conclusion of the whole matter, therefore, is that we have here to deal with a primitive Judaeo-Christian body of people which consisted of priests and Levites belonging to the Boëthusian section of the Sadducean party,[101] fortified—as the document shows—by a considerable Israelitish lay element, besides a real or contemplated admixture of proselytes. They acknowledged, as we have seen, John the Baptist, as a Messiah of the family of Aaron, and they also believed in Jesus as a kind of second (or, perhaps, as pre-eminent) Messiah whose special function it was to be a “Teacher of Righteousness.” Paul they abhorred; and they strove with all their might to combine the full observance of the Mosaic Law, as they understood it, with the principles of the “new covenant,” again as they understood it. On the destruction of the Temple by Titus, finding that it would not serve any good purpose to linger in Judaea, they determined to migrate to Damascus,[102] intending to establish their central organization in that city, and to found communities of the sect in different parts of the neighboring country. It was at this juncture that the manifesto, [pg 373] bearing as it does unmistakable marks of personal touch, was composed by a leader of the movement.

No scholar who has made an independent study of the texts published by Dr. Schechter can have failed to consider the question whether these schismatics, with their “unique teacher,”[103] their “new covenant,” their “Supervisor,” whose name and functions might be compared with those of a bishop ἐπίσκοπος, their loyalty to their dead leader, God's Anointed one (Messiah), who made them know his holy spirit, and their expectation of an Anointed one in the last times, their hostility to the Pharisees, can have been a Jewish Christian sect.

The more closely the documents are examined, however, the less tenable this conjecture appears. One feature of the sectarian eschatology which, if established, would afford the most striking coincidence with early Christian belief, namely, that the Messiah who died in the early days of the sect is to “reappear” (Margoliouth), or “rise again” (Schechter), has no support whatever in the text.[104] The “new covenant” in the land of Damascus is plainly the obligation by which the members of the sect bind themselves to the organization, with its peculiar interpretations of the law and its distinctive observances. Neither in the terms of the covenant nor in the law itself is there anything that suggests Christian origin or influence. That “a man should love his neighbor as himself” is not peculiarly or even preëminently a Christian precept. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs reiterate it; by the most orthodox rabbis it was recognized as the most comprehensive commandment in the law.

The things which the sect esteems of vital importance lie wholly in the sphere of the law; polemic zeal for a code which is at every point more rigorous than that of the Pharisees is the salient characteristic of both parts of the book. The moral precepts are the commonplaces of Judaism narrowed to a sectarian horizon.[105] [pg 374] The judgment of God is similarly circumscribed. It is not a judgment of the world or of the Jewish people, but of those who reject and controvert the legal interpretation of the sect, and of those who have fallen away from it.

The code of law which is the constituent principle of the sect and the reason for its existence was given it by its founder, the Teacher of Righteousness. This unique teacher was not a prophetic reformer, but “the interpreter of the law who came to Damascus,” “the legislator.” The statutes he decreed are final; the sect “shall receive no others until the teacher of righteousness shall arise in the last times.”