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

460 DEAD SEA SCROLLS AND THE NEW TESTAMENT
overlook the linguistic differences between the Hebrew or Aramaic of the
majority of the Qumran texts and the Greek of the New Testament, and
theoretically, Greek texts have to be understood in Greek terms. But
“earliest Christianity” is a tradition that goes back to the linguistic milieu
of first-century Palestine. The mother tongue of Jesus and his disciples
was Aramaic, and Paul was familiar with Hebrew and probably also
Aramaic. For the authors of the Fourth Gospel, Revelation, and other
New Testament texts, the same is quite probably true. Therefore, the
Hebrew and Aramaic documents from the time before 70 C.E. provide
an important key for understanding the language of the New Testament
authors and grasping the concepts behind the words and phrases they use.
In any case, it is necessary to determine the proximity of the correspondence
and—if possible—the peculiar tradition from which the parallels
are taken. Additionally, we must compare the parallels from the Dead
Sea Scrolls with other parallels from the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint,
the targumic tradition, the Pseudepigrapha and the early rabbinic traditions,
the writings by Josephus and Philo, as well as with parallels from
the Hellenistic-Roman world. Only by such a wide range of research is it
possible to decide on the derivation and semantic field of a certain New
Testament phrase and its underlying concepts.
4. A religious and interpretive reevaluation. The history of scholarship
demonstrates that the discovery of the Qumran library was a decisive
turning point for the religio-historical classification and interpretation of
the New Testament. Before the Qumran finds—or even before the
publication of a sufficient amount of texts—many elements of early
Christian tradition were viewed as un-Jewish, perhaps resulting from a
Hellenistic or syncretistic influence on early Christianity. Based on the
earlier view that there was a kind of “normative Judaism” in Palestine
before 70 C.E., scholars could assume this for a great number of phrases
and concepts to which the Hebrew Bible does not attest, the major
pseudepigrapha, and the early rabbinic writings. In the light of the Dead
Sea Scrolls, we can see that Judaism of that time was characterized by a
greater diversity, and that concepts such as the notion of the sinful
“flesh,” predestination, or cosmic dualism were developed within pre-
Christian Palestinian Judaism.
5. A rediscovery of the Jewishness of Jesus and early Christianity. The Qumran
library has, therefore, changed our view of early Christianity considerably.
It has shown its rootedness within contemporary Judaism and its many
and diverse traditions. One could say, therefore, that the Qumran texts
have served to rediscover the Jewishness of Jesus and early Christianity