• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The Zadokite Elect's predictions or intentions appear in another Dead Sea Melchizedek text, "The Last Jubilee," which reveals:

The future king of Righteousness-that is, Melchizedek redivivus-will execute upon them God's avenging judgments, and at the same time deliver the righteous] from the hands of Belial and all those spirits of his ilk.29

In this paragraph is another connection between the Dead Sea scrolls and the New Testament, in which Jesus is made a "priest after the order of Melchizedek," as the word "redivivus" is a Latin term meaning "second-hand" as in "building materials," which sounds very much like the "cornerstone the builders rejected," i.e., Jesus, as he is called in the gospel story. Hence, Jesus is "Melchizedek redivivus." This scroll does not serve as an astoundingly accurate "prediction," however, but as a blueprint for the creation of the ultimate godman.

Furthermore, the sons of Zadok, like Melchizedek, the priest forever, were the "priests whom God has chosen to keep His covenant firm for ever,"30 which covenant was "now consummated" with "the church of the members of this Community," as was said in the scroll titled "The Messianic Kingdom."31 Regarding the word "church" in this text, Gaster says, "It is interesting to find in the Hebrew the same word (knst), the Syriac cognate of which was later adopted by the Christians to designate their own communion."32 Thus, we have yet another element connecting the Zadokites, Syria/Samaria and Christianity.

Joshua

The mention of Joshua in the scrolls provides another piece of the puzzle, since Joshua was a northern kingdom hero. In fact, he was the Carmelite/ Israelite tribal sun god and savior, who admittedly served as a "type of Jesus" used in the creation of Christianity.

In discussing one of the "messianic expectation scrolls," regarding the "five Scriptural passages attesting the advent of the Future Prophet and the Anointed King and the final discomfiture of the impious," Gaster relates:

The fifth is an interpretation of a verse from the Book of Joshua. An interesting feature of this document (not noticed by the original editor) is that precisely the same passages of the Pentateuch are used by the Samaritans as the stock testimonial to the coming of the Taheb, or future "Restorer". They evidently constituted a standard set of such quotations, of the type that scholars have long supposed to have been in the hands of New Testament writers when they cited passages from the Hebrew Bible supposedly confirmed by incidents in the life and career of Jesus.33

These statements themselves constitute a virtual acknowledge-ment that the scroll author is a Samaritan and that Jesus was a remake of Joshua by Samaritans. Furthermore, since the scrolls evidently for the most part were not written at Qumran but gathered from elsewhere, possibly over a period of two centuries, it is feasible that some of these Samaritan Zadokites emanated out of the ancient monastery at Mt. Carmel, site of a Temple of Jupiter or lao (Pater) that also served as a temple of Melchizedek and of Joshua.34 As noted, it was the apostate Israelites hiding on top of Carmel who so vexed Amos.

Their reverence for the sun and for solar gods and heroes, their solar calendar, overt astrological texts and zodiacs in their synagogues, as well as their white robes, all reveal that the Zadokites/Sadducees were remnants of the ancient priesthood of the sun. Furthermore, Gaster relates that the Dead Sea "sectarians" were expecting the end of the "Great Year":

The [writers of the scrolls] were swept ... by other winds. One of these was a widespread and well-attested contemporary belief that the great cycle of the ages was about to complete its revolution.... When major upheavals occurred, it was promptly supposed that the cycle was nearing its end, that the Great Year was at hand, and that the cosmos was about to revert to chaos. . . . Then the cycle would begin again; a new world would be brought to birth.35

The term "Great Year" usually refers to the precession of the equinoxes,