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

RICHARD A. HORSLEY 55
Galilean village communities. 35 For example, Jesus countered “the traditions
of the elders” pressed by the scribes and Pharisees with the age-old
basic “commandment of God” from the Mosaic covenant (Mark 7:1–13).
His dynameis (acts of power) reenacted or acted in reminiscence of the
actions of Moses and Elijah of old (Mark 4:35–8:26). In the first long discourse
in Q, Jesus has such command of particular Mosaic covenantal
forms and exhortations that he can reconfigure them into an offer of new
life as well as a reconstitution of cooperative village community (Q/Luke
6:20–49). Jesus patterned his demonstrative entry into Jerusalem according
to a prophecy of how a popular messiah, relying on a peasant mode
of transportation, as opposed to a war chariot, would arrive on the scene
(Mark 11:2–8; cf. Zech 9:9; 2 Kgs 9:11–13). And he performed a
prophetic demonstration condemning the temple and its operations with
clear allusion to Jeremiah’s condemnation of Solomon’s temple (Mark
11:15–17). In contrast with the scribal Righteous Teacher and other
Qumranites who applied old prophecies to new situations, moreover,
Jesus pronounced new prophecies, patterned creatively after the traditional
prophetic forms such as lament and woes (Q/Luke 13:34–35;
11:37–52).
PROPHET, PRIEST, KING, ONCE AGAIN LITERATE SCRIPTS
AND POPULAR SCRIPTS
Finally, I want to suggest a way in which the DSS may prove helpful for
a previously unexplored approach to the historical Jesus. If we were
attempting to write about “the historical Abraham Lincoln” we would
hardly focus almost exclusively on his “pithy” sayings and clever “aphorisms,”
as recent treatments do for the “historical Jesus.” If anything, we
would give priority to his performance in public roles and offices as
lawyer and president in the particular context of U.S. history in the mid-
1800s, with special attention to the great issues of U.S. society at the time,
particularly slavery and the survival of the Union. Ancient Judea and
Galilee under the Roman Empire, of course, were not analogous to the
nineteenth-century United States. The ruling temple-state in Jerusalem
included offices such as the high priest and the temple captain, and the
priestly aristocracy was assisted in its governing by scribes, among whom
were leading Pharisees. Among the peasantry, who lived in hundreds of
villages of varying sizes, however, there were no formal offices to which
35. On the following, see the fuller sketch in Horsley, “Israelite Traditions in Q.”