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

54 THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS
Israelite traditions. 34 Anthropologists use the distinction between the
“great tradition” and the “little tradition” to comprehend such a difference.
The Torah and other literature that became the Hebrew Bible were
produced largely by scribal-priestly circles connected with the Davidic
monarchy and especially with the Second Temple high priesthood.
Popular legends, customs, and traditions were incorporated and probably
transformed according to the interests of the dominant circles, along
which lines the Torah and other protobiblical literature were produced.
Those popular legends, customs, and traditions, however, continued to
function orally in the villages of Judea. The same traditions and others,
moreover, continued among the northern Israelites and were almost certainly
alive among their descendants, who comprised the Galileans at the
time of Jesus. There was regular interaction between the official tradition
and the popular tradition. Josephus writes that at the Hasmonean
takeover of Galilee, the people were allowed to continue in their land if
they agreed to abide by “the laws of the Judeans.” And presumably representatives
of the official tradition based in Jerusalem, such as “the
scribes and Pharisees,” on occasion pressed upon locals in Judea and perhaps
also in Galilee the importance of observing requirements of the official
law. Along with and indeed as a presupposition of such interaction,
however, the popular tradition continued to inform local community life
parallel to the operations of the official tradition in scribal and priestly circles
in Jerusalem.
The Qumranites may well be the community of Western antiquity
that was the most focused on the “great tradition” of its culture in literary
form as well as the most literarily productive. From their scrolls of
prophetic books, we know that they possessed many texts; and we know
from the pesharim they left behind that they studied at least those
prophetic texts and cited them carefully in their extensive attempts to
shed light on their own historical situation. How unusually “bookish” or
“scrollish” they were stands out by comparison with later rabbinic circles,
in which rabbis studied and taught Torah orally, including chains of halakic
rulings. But, of course, once they abandoned their former roles in the
Jerusalem temple-state and its cult, what they had left was the literate
(and oral) “great tradition” of Jerusalem.
Jesus-and-movement, on the other hand, worked out of the Israelite
popular tradition that had presumably been cultivated for generations in
34. On the following see the provisional sketches in Horsley, Jesus and the Spiral,
129–31; idem., Galilee, 46–52, 147–57; and idem., “Israelite Traditions in Q,” 94–122.