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

114 A STUDY IN SHARED SYMBOLISM AND LANGUAGE
“applied to some human being in the apocalyptic setting of this
Palestinian text of the last third of the first century B.C.” He continues by
judging that these titles “will have to be taken into account for any future
discussion of the title used of Jesus in the NT.” 55
Obviously, the Fourth Evangelist inherited the titles “the Son,” “Son of
God,” and “Son of the Most High” from Palestinian Judaism and also
from early sources related to Jesus, both oral and written; but he placed
his own creativity upon them. The 4Q246 fragment cautions us about
our knowledge of pre-70 terms and their use. We must be careful about
arguing over what was not known in first-century Judaism. It urges us,
further, to ponder how and in what ways the Fourth Evangelist and others
like him were influenced by ideas such as the following:
[But your son] shall be great upon the earth. [O King! All (men) shall]
make [peace], and all shall serve [him. (col. 2) He shall be called the son of]
the [Great [God], and by his name shall he be named. He shall be hailed
(as) the Son of God, and they shall call him Son of the Most High. As
comets (flash) to the sight, so shall be their kingdom. 56
This text is not necessarily messianic; at least, “the Messiah” is not mentioned
in what has been preserved from this document. However, the
phrase “all shall serve him” is reminiscent of another text, On Resurrection
(4Q521), in which we read that the heavens and the earth shall obey (or
serve) “his Messiah” (wxy#ml).
The Qumran Community, like the Johannine community, was exclusivistic.
The word “all” appears with more frequency in the Qumran
Scrolls than in any other biblical or parabiblical works. This term, in
Greek, appears twice in the previously quoted pericope from the Fourth
Gospel (“all who believe” [3:16] and “all who do evil” [3:20]), which
reflects two distinct opposites in humanity. It is an anthropological
dualism. In the Fourth Gospel the word “all” appears infrequently—only
63 times, in contrast (for example) with Matthew and Luke, in which it
respectively appears 128 and 152 times. These statistics indicate that the
word “all” may appear in the Fourth Gospel in sections where Qumran
influence has been detected, since the word is not typically Johanine.
55. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, A Wandering Aramean: Collected Aramaic Essays (SBLMS 25;
Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1979), 92–93 (see also 90–91, 102–7); idem, “The
Aramaic ‘Son of God’ Text from Qumran Cave 4,” in Methods of Investigation of the Dead
Sea Scrolls and the Khirbet Qumran Site (ed. M. O. Wise; Annals of the New York Academy
of Sciences 722; New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1994), 163—78. Milik lectured
on this text at Harvard as early as 1972.
56. Fitzmyer’s translation; for text and translation, see his A Wandering Aramean,
92–93.