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

426 DEAD SEA SCROLLS AND THE NEW TESTAMENT
where his traces are lost. This story is constructed not only from the
Qumran texts but also from the Gospels, which are read not on the simple
literal level but on another level of meaning, as kinds of allegories.
The decisive argument that destroys all these constructions is the
argument from the dating of the texts. Early palaeographical studies had
already excluded a Christian date for the majority of the Dead Sea
Scrolls. 67 But the uncertainties of the palaeographical method were
mostly removed by the use of the radiocarbon method, which was
applied to an increasing number of fragments from Qumran and has
widely confirmed the earlier palaeographical dates. 68 The fact that
authors like Eisenman and Thiering are forced to neglect or even reject
the results of the scientific dating methods show most clearly that their
constructions are not compatible with what we can know today. Their
stories are novelistic and largely beyond the range of sound scholarship.
Even if some of the Qumran manuscripts were written in the first century
C.E. (Herodian era), many others were written in Hasmonean times or
earlier. The conclusion is inevitable: The Qumran texts are not a reflection
of early-Christian history, and none of the figures known from early
Christianity are mentioned in the scrolls.
c. Pattern 3: Christian Documents within the Qumran Library: The Problem of
the 7Q Documents (O’Callaghan, Thiede)
A theory that has been defended chiefly in conservative Christian circles
is about the fragments from Qumran Cave 7, some of which were suggested
to be fragments of New Testament texts. It is a striking fact that in
this cave, only Greek documents were found. Seemingly the cave—probably
a working room of one of the inhabitants from Qumran—was
already opened in ancient times, so that the excavators who discovered
67. Cf. the fundamental study by Frank M. Cross, “The Development of the Jewish
Scripts,” in The Bible and the Ancient Near East: Essays in Honor of William Foxwell Albright
(ed. G. E. Wright; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 133–202.
68. Cf. Georges Bonani et al., “Radiocarbon Dating of Fourteen Dead Sea Scrolls,”
Radiocarbon 34 (1992): 843–49; A. J. Timothy Jull et al., “Radiocarbon Dating of
Scrolls and Linen Fragments from the Judean Desert,” Radiocarbon 37 (1995): 11–19;
repr. in, Atiqot 28 (1996): 85–91. Most recently, cf. Gregory L. Doudna, “Dating and
Radiocarbon Analysis,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment
(ed. P. W. Flint and J. C. VanderKam; Leiden: Brill, 1998–1999), 1:430–65, esp.
463–64, who thinks that even the scrolls with “Herodian” scripts should be dated earlier,
in the first century B.C.E. See the comprehensive report in Flint and VanderKam,
The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 20–33.