Selections from Chapter 13: (Click here for full text)

 Conspiracy?

Much of the information in this book has been available to scholars for more than a century, and you might well be asking why the church has not re-examined its teaching on divorce and remarriage to take it into account. Was it simply due to incompetence and the inability to fit all the facts together? Or was there a conspiracy? Although one of the Dead Sea Scrolls was suppressed and the status quo of the church is a powerful consideration, I don’t think there was a conspiracy – but you may disagree when you find out some of the facts.

From the day they were discovered, to the day of their full publication, the Dead Sea Scrolls were surrounded by mystery and intrigue. The delay in publication, due to the length of time it took for scholars to complete the huge task of editing the documents, provoked rumours that they were being deliberately suppressed. One such rumour suggested that the Vatican wanted to hide heretical details about Jesus, and another one said that some Jewish scholars were trying to hide embarrassing discoveries.

When the original scrolls were eventually put on public display in the specially built Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, there was great excitement and the press were out in force, expecting to report scandalous revelations. A friend of mine, who was working on one of the texts at that time, told me that there was a huge commotion in the Librarian’s office where the journalists were asking questions, but none of them went to actually see any of the newly unveiled ancient documents. The scholars did not bother to attend either because they already knew what the journalists were about to find out … there were no ‘suppressed’ documents.

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It must be admitted that changes in society have been an incentive for this study. Although I’ve pursued the subject with the rigor and discipline of a scholar, my thoughts have often dwelt on actual abuse within Christian marriages and the misery which is produced by the church’s teaching. I don’t think that such abuse has increased in this generation, but the increasing openness of society means that we now hear much more about it, and church teaching has been brought into disrepute as a result.

Changes in society were also the incentive for the Church Fathers to accept a different interpretation of Jesus’ teaching because they needed a way to turn the church away from the hedonistic world of the 2^nd century. Like them, we are in danger of finding only what we want to find in the words of the New Testament, so we must make sure we listen to the Holy Spirit as well as to the scholars.

Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would lead us into all truth, but this depends on our listening to him. We know that the Holy Spirit will not force us to hear the truth – because theologians and scholars have not preserved the church from divisions or even wars in the past – so must be willing to listen to each other and, most of all, to listen to Scripture. We should use our God-given intelligence while we seek to understand and apply his word and we should pray for God to point out the truth to us. And, of course, we should be prepared to admit that we might be wrong.