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

262 RESURRECTION: THE BIBLE AND QUMRAN
But is the solution so simple? Should one have more trust in a Jewish
historian at the end of the first century after Christ, who, however, is
writing for a particular audience in Rome, than in Hippolytus, a champion
slayer of heresies, from the beginning of the third century after
Christ, who, a priori, would not have to present them in the light of
“orthodoxy,” thus rendering them irrelevant to his topic? In fact, would
it not be surprising that upon the subject of conceptions of the life after
death, a current of Jewish belief as conservative as Essenism should allow
itself to be won over by the Greek influence it combated so vigorously
elsewhere? It is important, then, to interrogate the manuscripts from
Qumran—they have the advantage of not containing interpolations by an
outside hand, expunging or christianizing—in order to get a somewhat
more precise idea concerning the subject and to know which of the two
authors had intentionally changed certain elements of the sources and to
what end.
Contrary to the Sadducees who limited themselves to the Five Books
of Moses, the Qumranites copied and read a great variety of books, more
extensive than the list defined afterward as canonical by the rabbis, taking
them as a source for inspiration and meditation. Were they influenced
by these writings and did they accept the conceptions of the future life
that they conveyed? Indeed, it is more than probable that the Essene
movement emerging within the contexts of the middle of the second century
B.C. did not cut off its Jewish roots and that all this literature so
extensively collected, copied, and transmitted, to which its rich library
gives witness, must have effected in some manner, its conception of the
future life, at least in the main outlines, even sometimes in a rather precise
manner. Such a conclusion is logically compelled to the extent where
this conception appears to be coherent and does not show any obvious
contradiction. Heirs of the Hasidic movement of the beginning of the second
century B.C., 17 the Essenes should have, unless there is some indication
to the contrary, espoused its conception of a life after death, which
is none other than the biblical conception, such as it was transmitted in
the canonical books and the Apocrypha of the Old Testament and treated
in the above discussion along its major lines.
17. We have demonstrated the soundness of the etymology of dysx (in Hebrew) =
hsx = essene (in Aramaic), as advanced by Emil Schürer among others a century
ago, persistently pushing aside all other hypotheses. See La croyance des Esséniens, 21–24.