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

JAMES A. SANDERS 35
basic concept of rabbinic Judaism: a Jew was called to the service of God,
and rabbinic Judaism was the correct way to express that service ((a6vôdâh).
Until the true Messiah came, all speculation about what God would do
next was essentially non-Jewish. Halakah, walking the way of God’s
Torah, walking the talk, one might say these days, was now the essence of
Judaism. Halakah and the ongoing traditioning process, in resistance to
further influence of Greco-Roman culture, were also understood as God’s
Torah in sensu lato. As shown in the acerbic and ongoing Jewish-Christian
debate about which view and interpretation of Scripture was correct, rabbinic
Judaism defined itself in large measure over against Christianity,
which in its view had become more and more pagan, or Greco-Roman, in
its self-understanding and in the churches’ claims of what God had done
in Christ and was doing in the early church. 34
The Renaissance or rebirth of Greco-Roman culture immensely influenced
Christianity in the fourteenth and following centuries, which
helped produce Protestantism in the sixteenth century. The Renaissance
also influenced official Roman Catholicism, but clearly not in the area of
corporate focus on the authority and magisterium of the Catholic
Church. Most forms of orthodoxy were able to resist the individualist
influence of the Renaissance rather effectively, and continue to resist it
today in “fundamentalist” modes of reading the Bible. European Jewry
was able to remain in stasis and resist inroads of the Enlightenment until
the mid-nineteenth century, when the birth of what has come to be
known as Reform Judaism took place in Germany. David Hartman of the
Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem espouses the proposition that
the State of Israel was born not because of the Holocaust, but because
of the Enlightenment’s inroads in European Judaism of the nineteenth
century. Individual Jews, mostly Reform Jews, joined the Society of
Biblical Literature slowly at first, but in increasing numbers early in the
twentieth century. But Roman Catholics, aside from the Dominicans of
the École Biblique in Jerusalem (encouraged, of course, by France’s spirit
of semi-independence from Rome), were not officially encouraged by
their church to engage in the work of the SBL until the Encyclical of
1943 of Pius XII, the Divino afflante Spiritu. Some have described the SBL
as the congregation of those who believe in the Renaissance and the
Enlightenment and use their concept and method in biblical studies. And
so it is, or has been, until the rise of postmodernism, which has called
into question some of the dogmas and tenets of that belief.
34. See James A. Sanders, “The Impact of the Scrolls on Biblical Studies,” in The
Provo International Conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls (ed. D. W. Parry and E. C. Ulrich;
STDJ 30; Leiden: Brill, 1999), 47–57.