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

440 DEAD SEA SCROLLS AND THE NEW TESTAMENT
groups, and yet they were studied or even copied by members of the
Qumran community. They are, therefore, not significant for the Essene
position but give evidence of views held within other Jewish groups of
the third to first centuries B.C.E. Probably all the documents written in
Aramaic, most of the sapiential texts, the majority of the new parabiblical
texts such as previously unknown pseudepigrapha, and even a passage
like the well-known Doctrine of the Two Spirits (1QS 3.13–4.26) seem to
belong to the literary treasure the Essenes inherited from other Jewish circles,
probably from precursor groups. Possibly the texts came into their
possession as the property of new members who entered the community;
possibly they were deliberately acquired for purpose of study. They were
added to the library, studied, copied or at least preserved, and finally
hidden in the caves before the attack of the Romans in 68 C.E.
In my view, the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls for biblical
exegesis is based not only on the “sectarian” texts of the Qumran community,
but even more on the numerous nonsectarian texts. These documents
have opened up a new and broader perspective on the Jewish
literature of the Second Temple period: they demonstrate that Judaism at
that time was much more pluriform and multifaceted than scholars earlier
thought. Before the Qumran finds, there were practically no Hebrew
or Aramaic documents from Palestinian Judaism at the turn of the era.
Scholars gathered their information only from the books of the
Maccabees, from various pseudepigrapha that had been transmitted in
secondary translations, from the writings of Josephus and Philo, and
from later rabbinic sources. Under the impression of the rabbinic view,
scholars spoke of a “normative type” of Palestinian Judaism as a background
for Jesus and the Palestinian Jesus movement. 123 In view of the
variety within the documents from Qumran, this view has completely
changed. Now we can see that there was no normativity but rich diversity
in Palestinian Judaism before 70 C.E. It is, therefore, possible to
describe Jesus and primitive Christianity not only in contrast to some
“normative” type of Judaism, but also within the wide matrix of
Palestinian Jewish traditions. Many New Testament terms earlier thought
to be influenced by non-Jewish, Hellenistic, syncretistic, or gnostic ideas
can now be explained from the multitude of Jewish traditions, as evident
within the Qumran library.
123. Thus, e.g., George F. Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era: The
Age of the Tannaim (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927), 1:3, 236; cf. Joseph
A. Fitzmyer, “The Qumran Scrolls and the New Testament after Forty Years,” RevQ
13 (1988): 609–20, esp. 609–10.