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

DONALD H. JUEL 71
Dead Sea community provides to the Johannine community. I suggest it
is quite close. The Johannine community stands at a crossroads; confessing
Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of God” is creating a rift that will become
an unbridgeable chasm. But it is still on the other side of the crossroads.
The bitterness of the anti-“Jewish” polemic still belongs within a family
struggle over the rights of inheritance.
The difference between the first-century Palestinian Jesus Movement,
broadly defined, and the Qumran Community is not that one was
“Jewish” and the other “Christian.” Both were Jewish; to varying degrees,
both experienced intense opposition from others within the family to the
point of calling into question their status as the people of God; both
argued their case, for insiders at least, by drawing on Israel’s scriptural
heritage interpreted in light of their distinctive history. And both communities
sketched a world in which opposition from members of the
same family was one of the most significant—and intense—features of
authentic religious life. The Fourth Gospel reflects a later stage in the life
of Israel, after the destruction of the Temple, when new lines were drawn
and identity reconstructed. How the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls
would have fared in the changed environment is something we will never
know. They disappear from the pages of history. So too does the
Johannine movement disappear as a Jewish expression of the Palestinian
Jesus Movement. It has left only a literary deposit that, as part of
“Christian” Scriptures, has become something new.
RESULTS
The discovery and processing of the Essene writings from Qumran have
provided a new layer to explore, to use the archaeological image, or new
pieces from which to form a mosaic of our religious past. The Qumran
Scrolls provide insight into a crucial period in the religious history of Jews
and Christians. We should not overlook what the scrolls may contribute
theologically. They offer another example of what it means to believe in
the God of Israel, of how faith takes shape. They indicate the rootedness
of faith in the concrete, everyday realities that include concern about
boundaries, the ordering of everyday life, and hopes for the future, sometimes
in the context of hostility and fierce disagreement. They provide
evidence of the difficult task of speaking together about deep issues.
From my perspective as a student of the New Testament, the scrolls
offer a glimpse of a common heritage as well as a particular embodiment