ITV
10 August 2019 • WAR cry • TELEVISION 3 Seb is determined to help Alina
BATTLING THE TRAFFIC NAIL-BITING Coronation Street storyline, written in collaboration with A Salvation Army specialists, has hooked Weatherfield watchers and given them a glimpse into the reality of modern slavery.
When troubled teenage misfit Seb (Harry Visinoni) fell for eastern European girl Alina (Ruxandra Porojnicu), who worked at a nail bar, he found that she began acting oddly towards him. Despite seeming to like him, she avoided him and lied about leaving her job. Seb watched as England and Wales, and has helped she became increasingly frightened of more than 7,000 victims of modern her boss. He realised that something slavery. was not right. To create an accurate storyline, After sneaking into the back of the Coronation Street script editors worked nail bar, he discovered her sitting on with Salvation Army specialists who a worn mattress and living in poor help victims of modern slavery. The conditions. Eventually Alina told him that she was smuggled into the UK as part of a human trafficking ring, and had to do what her boss, Rachel, told her so that she could send money back home. She begged Seb to stay out of her situation. But Seb would not remain silent. He confronted the traffickers and, despite church and charity is looking to boost being warned off, decided that he would awareness of the issue through the bring the perpetrators of modern slavery plot, and its helpline number has been to justice, risking everything to protect featured on the soap. the girl he cared about – with dramatic The Salvation Army is also launching consequences. a social media campaign to help the While events on Corrie’s cobbled public spot and report suspicions of streets are a work of fiction, modern slavery within their local communities. slavery is all too real, as Salvation Army Fake pop-up adverts will appear to personnel know. indicate cheap deals on the types Since July 2011, The Salvation Army of goods and services whose prices has been the government’s official are sometimes kept low through the provider of anti-trafficking services for trafficking and exploitation of workers.
Seb watched Alina become increasingly frightened of her boss
Salvation Army shapes soap’s modern slavery storyline, writes Emily Bright Users will click through to a landing page that features stories of real victims of modern slavery helped by The Salvation Army. Major Kathy Betteridge, director of anti-trafficking and modern slavery at the organisation, tells the War Cry about what motivates such work: ‘For more than 150 years The Salvation Army has been working with victims of slavery, and our commitment remains as strong now as it has been throughout our history. ‘Supporting modern slavery victims is exactly where we are called to be, and the issue is one of the most serious facing society. ‘Part of The Salvation Army’s mission is to serve suffering humanity and save souls, and we have always responded to the needs of the most vulnerable.’ The Salvation Army believes that God loves every individual and seeks justice for the oppressed. It won’t switch off until human trafficking is brought to an end.
8 INTERVIEW • WAR cry • 10 August 2019
Dead Sea discoveries are scrolling back the years
An area of caves near the Dead Sea where scrolls were found
10 August 2019 • WAR cry • INTERVIEW 9
PHILIP HALCROW
Seventy years after the first of them were uncovered, the Dead Sea Scrolls are still being analysed – and are still giving scholars insights into the development of the Bible, as Professor CHARLOTTE HEMPEL tells Philip Halcrow Professor Charlotte Hempel
‘I
T’S probably because of Dan Brown and all that stuff. And whenever people see something described as “esoteric”, they are immediately drawn to it.’ Sitting in her office at the University of Birmingham, Professor Charlotte Hempel is considering why some ancient scrolls found in the desert 70 years ago remain a hot topic. ‘They are intrinsically important,’ she says, ‘but it is interesting how they are so popular.’ The Dead Sea Scrolls make headlines. News outlets report when a fragment is deciphered or a forgery uncovered. Last year, when scholars reconstructed a text that contained a solar calendar in an esoteric script, Newsweek picked up an article written by Charlotte for academic media resource website The Conversation. Dan Brown may have mentioned the scrolls in The Da Vinci Code – where a character talks about them containing suppressed Christian writings – but long before that work of fiction became a bestseller, they were at the centre of controversies and conjecture about cover-ups. They have been surrounded by drama since they began to see the light of day in 1947, when, according to the story, a Bedouin stumbled across some scrolls in a cave
We have to work out where the pieces belong near Qumran while looking for an animal that had strayed from the flock he was tending. The initial find was followed by many others around the region. The story of their publication includes antiquities dealers, secret meetings and regional conflict. ‘We’re now talking about almost 1,000 fragmentary scrolls,’ says Charlotte. ‘The number keeps going up as scholars identify fragments and work out where they belong. There are only about 15 or so really big scrolls. Most of what we have are small pieces. But with some of those fragmentary scrolls, we’ve got enough readable material on them so that we can make out what they are about. ‘There are gaps. We’ll have some writing from one part of the text and then we’ll have a little bit of the text somewhere else, and we have to work out where the pieces belong. If it’s a biblical book which we know from
Turn to page 10
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10 INTERVIEW • WAR cry • 10 August 2019
From page 9 elsewhere, then we can work out what comes first and what probably comes next. But some of the texts are ones that we’ve never seen before, so we don’t really know what is the start and how it goes on. ‘Sometimes there’s quite a lot of technical reconstruction involved.’ The work has been painstaking – but also at times over the past 70 years, it seems, painfully slow. Charlotte describes how scholars have made slow progress with the material because of a number of factors. ‘You do need time to do these things properly,’ she says. But she
You can often see more on those images than on the original scrolls
PA
adds that the team originally given the task of publishing the scrolls was quite small and could not cope with the volume of material – especially when the team members were not working full-time on the scrolls but ‘all had day jobs at Harvard or Oxford’. Initially scholars could also perhaps have been less backward in coming forward with what they were working on. Their reticence possibly contributed to claims of cover-ups and of the suppression of material that would shake the foundations of Christianity. ‘Access to the unpublished material was for some decades very restricted,’ says Charlotte, ‘but the reason for that wasn’t a Vatican conspiracy or the Israeli secret service or anything like that – it was a reluctance to share the load. The scholars working on the
Fragments of the scrolls in the Israel Antiquities Authority department at the Israel Museum
scrolls knew that if they revealed something new in whatever they published, they would be very well respected for it. Similarly, scholars without access might come up with an ingenious new theory only for someone else to refer to an unpublished text that would disprove it.’ Full sets of photographs of the scrolls were held at institutions in California and Oxfordshire, but even that was not always the key to access. Charlotte says that Geza Vermes – the renowned academic and author of The Dead Sea Scrolls in English – ‘couldn’t get access to the photos that were under his nose in Oxford. It’s quite unbelievable. ‘Then the Huntington Library in California got a new president, and he decided to make all the photos available. The editor-in-chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Israeli Antiquities Authority – who look after the material that is in Israel – threatened to sue, but they didn’t. So suddenly people had access to photos of everything. ‘Now we are in a different phase altogether, because we have digital photos of the scrolls.’ Technology is helping more people study the scrolls in more depth. Anyone can scroll through the big manuscripts online at the Digital Dead Sea Scrolls project, which is run with the Israel Museum. Another online resource, the Israel Antiquities Authority’s Leon Levy Digital Dead Sea Scrolls Library, includes different kinds of images made by technology developed with Nasa. Charlotte says: ‘The team working on the Leon Levy project has taken photographs of the scrolls so that when you explore one you can usually see infrared and multispectral colour versions. You can often see more on those images than you can on the original
scrolls, because you can zoom in. The infrared technology is helping scholars identify things that they couldn’t previously read.’ There are still puzzles to be solved about the content of the scrolls, but scholars have also long been trying to identify who composed and copied them. Some of the scrolls relate to the organisation of a community – often in the past they have been linked with a sect known from sources outside the scrolls, the Essenes – but Charlotte is cautious about identifying any particular group and attributing particular material to them. She does not talk about the Essenes, instead referring to ‘the movement for a time associated with Qumran’. But the scrolls contain more than esoteric calendars and rules for a community. ‘In the scrolls we have biblical texts, copied roughly between 250BCE and about 68CE when the site was destroyed by the Romans,’ says Charlotte. Among them is the oldest complete copy of the Book of Isaiah, dating from about 125CE. But, despite any suggestions by characters in Dan Brown novels, there is, says Charlotte, ‘nothing from the New Testament’ in the Dead Sea Scrolls. She points out: ‘There was a scholar who said some of the Greek papyri from one of the caves were New Testament, but the most complete word in all of them was “and”. They are very small, and most people now think they were part of a book known as 1 Enoch or the Old Testament in Greek.’ The Dead Sea Scrolls may not contain any New Testament writings, but they do give a glimpse into the world in which it was formed, at the same time offering scholars insights into the development of the Bible. ‘The scrolls contain many copies of ancient Jewish texts – such as 1 Enoch – that later did not become part of Judaism’s canon and that otherwise we knew about mainly because they
10 August 2019 • WAR cry • INTERVIEW 11
One of the Dead Sea Scrolls displayed in the Israel Museum were preserved by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church,’ says Charlotte. ‘Among the writings that are now in the Hebrew Bible, we have found every book, except Esther. The fact that Esther has not been found may be chance, because some of the books we count as being among the scrolls are in reality only little pieces. Or it could be because in the Hebrew version of Esther, God is never mentioned. ‘Most scholars don’t believe there is any New Testament among the Dead Sea Scrolls, but what’s interesting in connection with the New Testament is that, while we have in the scrolls almost all the Old Testament books, we haven’t got the same number of copies. Some books were more popular than others. We have what one of my colleagues has called a canon within a canon.
‘We can never be 100 per cent sure, but we can see that Genesis, Isaiah, Psalms and Deuteronomy are the frontrunners, so to speak, in the scrolls. When you look at the biblical citations in the New Testament, the list of the most popular books is exactly the same: Genesis, Isaiah, Psalms and Deuteronomy. ‘It could mean that across the whole of Judaism – out of which Christianity came – those books were more popular for everyone. Or it could mean that there were certain groups of Jews who focused on these books, and perhaps among them were some who became Christians.’ The Dead Sea Scrolls have also helped scholars assess the similarities and variations in the text that has come down through thousands of years and now sits on the pages of modern Bibles. ‘The oldest complete Hebrew Bible, the Leningrad Codex, dates from about the year 1000CE, but with the scrolls we now have
PHILIP HALCROW
There were various writings circulating and still being put together
Charlotte with a copy of one of the scrolls
manuscripts that are about 1,000 years older. ‘When scholars were writing translations or preparing editions of the Hebrew Bible, they would turn to the Leningrad Codex, which contains the standard text – the Masoretic text – or the Aleppo Codex, which is a bit older than the Leningrad Codex but not complete. There’s also a very ancient Greek translation, the Septuagint, which was started in the 3rd century BCE by Jews. It’s what the early Christians used too, because Greek was the lingua franca at the time. ‘Among the Dead Sea Scrolls we found Hebrew manuscripts that weren’t like what eventually became the Masoretic text. ‘Previously when scholars saw something in the Septuagint that was very different from the Hebrew, they would think that the translator had added something or left something out. But some of the Dead Sea Scrolls have proved that the Septuagint Greek is based on a different Hebrew text. We found Hebrew manuscripts that attest a Hebrew text which the Septuagint translated literally.’ The Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrate what Charlotte calls a ‘plurality’ of versions. Among the writings in Hebrew are the 151st Psalm in Hebrew, which was known from the Greek version of the Old Testament, and longer and shorter versions of the Book of Jeremiah. The plurality seemed to be replaced by unity after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE. ‘You can see clearly from the scrolls that there were various writings circulating and still being put together, and there was a little bit of fluidity in the finer points.’ The Dead Sea Scrolls are now influencing modern translations of the Bible, but the adjustments and alterations are mainly ‘in the detail’ of the text. ‘The biblical manuscripts in the Dead Sea Scrolls are pretty similar to the text of the Bible we’re used to,’ says Charlotte. ‘On the whole there’s an unusual and overwhelming harmony between them.’ She also believes the Dead Sea Scrolls to have an overwhelming significance. ‘For me, they’re more important than anything else we’ve got about one of the most important periods of history,’ she says. ‘They represent the world where both Judaism and Christianity started out.’
12 INNER LIFE • War Cry • 10 August 2019
Prayerlink YOUR prayers are requested for Lynn, who is facing cancer for the third time; and for Steven, who is in an induced coma and has pneumonia, and for his nan, who has supported him. The War Cry invites readers to send in requests for prayer, including the first names of individuals and details of their circumstances. Send your requests to Prayerlink, War Cry, 101 Newington Causeway, London SE1 6BN. Mark your envelope ‘Confidential’.
Becoming a Christian There is no set formula to becoming a Christian, but many people have found saying this prayer to be a helpful first step to a relationship with God Lord Jesus Christ, I am truly sorry for the things I have done wrong in my life. Please forgive me. I now turn from everything that I know is wrong. Thank you that you died on the cross for me so that I could be forgiven and set free. Thank you that you offer me forgiveness and the gift of your Holy Spirit. Please come into my life by your Holy Spirit to be with me for ever. Thank you, Lord Jesus. Amen Extract from Why Jesus? by Nicky Gumbel published by Alpha International, 2011. Used by kind permission of Alpha International
Nigel Bovey gives chapter and verse on each book in the Scriptures
Amos MOS is prophesying to the northA ern kingdom of Israel during the reign of King Jeroboam II, some 20 to
40 years before the country is invaded by the Assyrians. This is a time of great suffering for the people living in Israel (see 2 Kings 14:26). Neighbouring armies have destroyed their settlements (Amos 1:3), sold communities into slavery (1:6), killed men (1:11) and gutted pregnant women (1:13). But God will punish them. Within Israel, there is injustice, idolatry and immorality (2:6–8). The nation refuses to acknowledge its covenanted relationship with God and has ignored his warning shots of hunger, drought, failed crops and plagues (4:6–10). People would rather make money than make time for worship, with traders cheating their customers and trading in human misery (8:5 and 6). God issues an ultimatum: repent. He tells them to stop worshipping at altars to false gods (5:5) and instead ‘seek the Lord and live’ (5:6). Amos goes on to tell them that God wants them to stop oppressing the poor (5:12) and start living godly lives (5:24). The alternative, he says, is punishment. In a series of visions, Amos details the possible judgment. It could be as all-encompassing as a plague of locusts
(7:1–3). It could be as all-consuming as a fire (7:4–6). God measures Israel against a plumb line and declares it crooked (7:7–9). Divine retribution will come when the time is ripe (8:1–3).
People would rather make money than make time for worship The day of judgment will be characterised by natural disaster, darkness, famine, spiritual hunger and the destruction of the kingdom of Israel (8:8 to 9:10). However, after the punishment, God will restore the nation. People will return from captivity. Towns will be rebuilt and land cultivated once more. Never again will Israel be uprooted (9:11–15).
Key verse
‘Let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!’ (Amos 5:24 New International Version)
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