Prologue
The Roman Empire - 1st Century
Gathered somewhere in Rome in their vast underground mithraeum, or temple, the forty syndexioi—devout initiates "united by the handshake”—chanted in unison as they bound themselves to their pagan deity. One end of the arched-stone chamber featured the vivid hues of a tauroctony—a painted scene of their god Mithras slaughtering a sacred bull.
From the first through the fourth centuries, Christianity and Mithraism embodied two rival factions reacting to a similar series of cultural influences. Mithraism flourished for three hundred years before being extinguished by harsh persecution from the more politically powerful Christian population. Comprised largely of Roman soldiers, Mithraists had found a covert camaraderie, a brotherhood of like-minded followers who shared a secret knowledge of the universe, specifically its constellations and cosmic movements.
Little remains of this once-vibrant cult apart from archeological evidence of thousands of their subterranean mithraea, or temples, throughout the Roman Empire, many hundreds of them in the city of Rome alone.
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Judea - 1st Century
Before Titus Flavius Vespasianus, better known to history as Vespasian, became Emperor of Rome in 69 CE, he was a famed and revered Roman legate—the equivalent of a high-ranking general—who, just a year earlier, had led an army 60,000 strong through the hot barren deserts of Judea in a years-long war against the Jewish population of the Holy Land.
On orders from Emperor Nero, Vespasian was commanded to suppress the major rebellions of Jews against the Roman Empire in what became known as the Great Jewish Revolt, a five-year war fought mainly in Roman-controlled Judea. The Jews were greatly outnumbered and suffered devastating destruction of their towns, expropriation of their lands for Roman military use, and widespread displacement of Jewish people from their ancestral homes.
At the base of the terraced cliffs on the northwestern shores of the Dead Sea—located in what was then called Palestine—a secluded ascetic community of some twelve hundred mystic Jews known as the Essenes could foresee what was in store for them. The Romans were coming to destroy their community and their way of life. It was only a matter of time.
Desperate to preserve and protect their life’s work—an extraordinary library of nearly a thousand sacred biblical scrolls, the product of their tribe’s past two centuries of scribal efforts—they carefully wrapped the parchments and papyri in linen, placed them into tall clay jars, and concealed them in a series of caves not far from their homes on a dry marl plateau called Qumran. They then fled to save themselves, hoping to return at some later time to resume their lives and continue their work.
But the Essenes never returned to their home, having been vanquished after the Roman Siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Their precious scrolls sealed in the nurturing protection of earthen jars lay undisturbed in the arid climate of the Qumran caves for nearly two thousand years.
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Judea, Israel - 20th Century
It was in the spring of 1947 when a fifteen-year-old Bedouin shepherd named Muhammed edh-Dhib from the Ta’amira tribe was tending his herd of sheep and goats among the hilly escarpments of the Qumran desert when one of the goats went missing in search of better pastures. Muhammed scrambled up the rocky, sloping hillsides in search of his caprine runaway when he chanced upon one of the many hidden caves in the area.
Hoping to flush out the goat, but wary of entering a dark hole in the desert alone, the young boy erred on the side of caution and tossed in several stones, for Muslim lore decreed that when in the suspected presence of dark spirits, stones must be thrown at them. Muhammed did not want to encounter dark spirits in an underground cave. He just wanted his goat.
But to his puzzlement, each time he threw a stone into the cave opening, he heard the sound of an object cracking and breaking. In a newspaper interview he gave later, Muhammed was quoted as saying, “I started throwing rocks inside the cave and every time I was throwing a rock I was hearing a sound of breaking pottery. At that time I was confused by the sound, and I loved to know what is inside the cave.” Already apprehensive, though, the shepherd returned later with a friend to explore the source of the shattering sounds.
What the two young Bedouins found that day has forever transformed biblical scholarship and, indeed, even Christianity itself as it was previously understood. The cave was filled with cylindrical jars of red clay pottery—the same jars abandoned by the Essenes nearly two thousand years earlier. Seven of the jars contained a number of remarkably preserved parchment manuscripts, written mostly in Hebrew, which came to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls—biblical writings from between 150 BCE and 70 CE that largely predated even the Gospels, and which comprised the oldest surviving manuscripts of entire books later included in the biblical canon: Genesis, Exodus, Isaiah, Kings and Deuteronomy.
An antiquities dealer ultimately bought many of the scrolls, which soon found their way into the hands of biblical scholars. Publicity about the sensational discovery spread like gossip in a hookah lounge, and it wasn’t long before ambitious archeologists and treasure hunters made their way to Qumran, unearthing some fifteen thousand scroll fragments from ten more caves in the area, ultimately accounting for nearly a thousand Essene manuscripts.
In efforts to prevent the plundering of further scrolls and other rare artifacts bound for the illegal but lucrative black market, archeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority have for years conducted their own excavations of caves burrowed among the steep escarpments and canyons of the Judean Desert.
But the IAA’s efforts are often outnumbered by bands of highly motivated antiquity looters, and the fight to preserve the Holy Land’s cultural legacy continues unabated.
