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

RICHARD A. HORSLEY 53
5Q13). 28 Even the penal code at Qumran was closely coordinated with
purity concerns. 29 And the stress on repeated ritual purification by water
certainly attests the heavy emphasis on purity and anxiety about defilement.
By contrast, Jesus-in-movement was virtually unconcerned about
purity and boundary maintenance, for the lines of opposition between
the wealthy and powerful rulers and the productive peasantry were long
since drawn in the fundamental political-economic-religious structure of
the Judean temple-state and the Roman Empire.
Consideration of the different social locations and interests of Jesusand-movement
and Qumran may make the most difference with regard
to how they drew upon Israelite (biblical) traditions. Working out of the
prevailing Christian construction of the “religion” of “(early) Judaism,”
scholars commonly declare that “the Qumran community and Jesus basically
agreed with one another in their acceptance of the Torah as the central
and decisive authority for their beliefs.” 30 Then the authors of the
scrolls are grouped with the Pharisees into the Christian other category
of “legalistic religion.” 31 One of the principal results of discovery of the
DSS, however, has been the realization that there was no standard version
of the Torah as text in Roman Judea, even among scribal circles. 32
And since most communication in late Second Temple Judean society
was oral, 33 even among literate scribes, oral Torah was almost certainly
considerably different, area by area, and group by group.
Far more significant than the variation of Torah traditions among
scribal groups would have been the difference between the form in which
literate scribal circles, such as those at Qumran, and illiterate villagers,
such as Jesus and the Galileans in his movement, would have known
28. Michael Newton, The Concept of Purity at Qumran and in the Letters of Paul
(SNTSMS 53; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 116.
29. Lawrence H. Schiffman, Sectarian Law in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Courts, Testimony, and
the Penal Code (BJS 33; Chico: Scholars Press, 1983).
30. Hartmut Stegemann, “Some Aspects of Eschatology in Texts from the Qumran
Community and in the Teachings of Jesus,” in Biblical Archaeology Today (ed. J. Amitai;
Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1985), 408–26, esp. 418.
31. Cf. Charlesworth, “The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Historical Jesus,” 32.
32. Eugene C. Ulrich, “The Bible in the Making: The Scriptures at Qumran,”
77–93; and Emanuel Tov, “Biblical Texts as Reworked in Some Qumran Manuscripts
with Special Attention to 4QRP and 4QPara Gen-Exod,” 11–34; both in The Community
of the Renewed Covenant: The Notre Dame Symposium on the Dead Sea Scrolls [1993] (ed. E. C.
Ulrich and J. C. VanderKam; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).
33. See the survey of oral communication in connection with the Hebrew Bible by
Susan Niditch, Oral World and Written Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996);
and my survey of oral communication in relation to texts for Palestine and the Roman
Empire generally, in Horsley, “The Oral Communication Environment of Q,” in
Whoever Hears You Hears Me (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1999), 123–49.