The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The ... - josephprestonkirk

CHAPTER SIX
THE IMPACT OF SELECTED QUMRAN TEXTS ON THE
UNDERSTANDING OF PAULINE THEOLOGY
Heinz-Wolfgang Kuhn
The following “parallels” have been collected and selected by the Munich
project “Qumran and the New Testament,” which I brought into being
and which I later confined for my own work mainly to Qumran and the
authentic letters of Paul. 1 “Parallels” can be correctly understood only
when they are interpreted in their individual contexts. This can, of
course, only partly be done in this paper, but the reader is requested to
consider more of the contexts than are quoted. Indeed, the user of a
collection such as this, even when its author tries to avoid any misleading,
should always be aware that the greater context, beginning with the
writing itself, is important. It will also not be possible to go into Qumran
1. On the occasion of forty years of Qumran research, I gave a lecture at the
Qumran Symposium at the Universities of Haifa and Tel Aviv in 1988, where I chose
from my collected material the “top ten” passages in the authentic letters of Paul on
which the Qumran Scrolls throw light; see Heinz-Wolfgang Kuhn, “The Impact of the
Qumran Scrolls on the Understanding of Paul,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Forty Years of
Research (ed. D. Dimant and U. Rappaport; STDJ 10; Leiden: Brill, 1992), 327–39.
In this chapter, first prepared in 1997 and 1998 in connection with a symposium held
at Princeton Theological Seminary (November 1997) and updated in the winter of
2004–5, I present nineteen Pauline passages where the comparison with the Qumran
texts is of interest for an understanding of the apostle’s theology. All ten passages
from the former paper are included here; these are, according to the numbering in
this chapter: A 1; B 1, 2, 3; C 1, 3, 6, 7; D 1, 3. In 1999 I published a paper with eight
parallels that show a rather close relationship to the Qumran community (here esp.
A 2, 3; B 1; C 4; D 3; further B 2, 3; D 1); see Heinz-Wolfgang Kuhn, “Qumran und
Paulus: Unter traditionsgeschichtlichem Aspekt ausgewählte Parallelen,” in Das
Urchristentum in seiner literarischen Geschichte (ed. U. Mell and U. B. Müller; ZNWBeih
100; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 228–46. Cf. also my six papers on 1
Thessalonians, Galatians, and 1 Corinthians (listed in the bibliography). I selected
works that focus fully or partially on Paul and the Qumran texts; though some of
these works have not been cited in the present chapter, all of them appear in the general
bibliography at the end of this volume. I thank Dr. Almut Koester for correcting
my original English manuscript and Alison Deborah Sauer for correcting the final
English version. My collaborator Jacob Nordhofen was of great help in preparing the
final manuscript.
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