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

PAUL GARNET 375
confession would be in order. Qumran also had the idea of individuals
coming together to form a people for God, but John’s was a mass movement.
The repentance called for by John did not involve leaving society,
but living the righteous life in the tax office and the barracks (symbols of
oppression to Israel) as well as kindness to the needy (3:10–14). To be
baptized by John was to justify God, to acknowledge that his condemnation
of sin was just, and to accept his “counsel” with regard to oneself
(7:29–30). This amounted to a doxology of judgment. We find this attitude
enjoined in Jesus’ teaching too (15:18–19; 18:13) and exemplified in
the confession of the dying thief (23:40–41). Acceptance of the divine
punishment as just was not only a corporate matter at Qumran, the
means to fulfill Lev 26:40–42 and thus to hasten the end of the national
punishment; it was also a matter of individual piety based on the spiritual
pilgrimage of the founder himself and to be exemplified by the
lyk#m, mas 8kîl, the Leader (1QH 17 [= 9].9–10, 1QS 10.11–12, 23–24).
Those who thus accepted God’s justice found ironically that this justice
involved for them a justification (1QS 11.9–15). 20 The relevance of this
for Paul’s doctrine of justification has been studied long ago, 21 but of
more direct application to the NT doctrine of atonement is the fact that
in Rom 6:10 the death of Christ is presented as an acceptance of God’s
judgment against sin: Christ “died to sin once.”
The Passage of Time and the Exilic Debt
We have seen that “messianic” atonement at Qumran was largely a matter
of the fulfillment of the predetermined time of Israel’s exilic
punishment. It does not seem to resemble NT atonement ideas. Yet the
widespread expectation that Israel must serve time before being delivered
forms an important background to Jesus’ soteriology. His ministry
opened with the good news that the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of
God at hand. This was the time in which Israel’s exilic debt was canceled.
The idea seems to have been that the year of acceptance had come (Isa
61:2), but this was presented as grace rather than as having been earned
by the period of 490 years of suffering. Rather, a huge debt was thought of
as having been forgiven. In response, it was appropriate for God’s people
20. Mis ]hpa¯t in this passage can variously mean judgment, punishment, justification.
See my discussion in Salvation and Atonement, 76–77.
21. Siegfried Schulz, “Zur Rechtfertigung aus Gnaden in Qumran und bei Paulus:
Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Form und Überlieferungsgeschichte der Qumrantexte,” ZTK
56 (1959): 155–85.