Why Do the Dead Sea Scrolls Matter for Understanding Jesus?

[00:00:01] Why do the Dead Sea Scrolls Matter for Understanding Jesus? [00:00:06] Written by Bart Ehrman Read by Ken Teutsch Many people assume that somehow or other the Dead Sea Scrolls matter for understanding better who Jesus was and what he preached. But how? [00:00:21] In this post I'll give a fairly succinct answer to that question. [00:00:26] I should begin by stressing that the scrolls are mainly important for understanding early Judaism and only secondarily for understanding early Christianity. Even so, they are highly important for Christianity as well, though not in ways you might suspect, especially if you acquire all your historical knowledge from random searches on the Internet. If I were to do the one sentence version of why they matter for understanding Jesus, the shortest iteration I can come up with is that the Dead Sea Scrolls are texts written and or copied by Jews living at about that same time and about the same place as Jesus, and so inform us about the milieu out of which his ministry and the earliest Christian church emerged. [00:01:13] The first thing to stress is that the scrolls are thoroughly Jewish in every sense. There is nothing about Jesus in them, and nothing about John the Baptist and nothing about any of the early followers of Jesus. [00:01:26] They are Jewish texts through and through, from beginning to end. They are of greatest value for those interested in the text of the Hebrew Bible. Since some 200 of the scrolls contain portions of the Hebrew Bible, every book is represented at least in part, except Esther, and these copies are fully 1,000 years earlier than the otherwise earliest copy that we previously had. [00:01:50] And for those interested in early Judaism, since they were written by, for and about early Jews, some of the scrolls contain psalms used in the worship of the group. Some of them contain descriptions of their communal life together, how their community was organized, what its members were to do, what penalties there were for breaking the rules. Some of them contain interpretations of their sacred scriptures, commentaries on books such as Habakkuk, in which the words of the prophets were interpreted as applying to the sect's own experiences in their own day, and so on. [00:02:26] Jesus and his followers were Jews at about the same time that this community was thriving. And if you don't understand Judaism in the days of Jesus, there is no way to understand Jesus. And if you don't understand Jesus, there is no way to understand the religion that came to be based in some sense on his life and teachings, even if ultimately he came to be a religion focused even more on his death and resurrection. [00:02:52] The overwhelming consensus is that Jesus never had anything to do with this sect. The very strong majority of scholars continues to think that they were Essenes, but they were Jews with A very similar view of the world. [00:03:06] In 1906, Albert Schweitzer, at a young age, wrote his magnum opus and and now true classic, the Quest of the Historical Jesus. In it he argued that Jesus is best understood as a Jewish apocalyptic prophet. Schweitzer was not the first to come up with this view, but he was the one who popularized it and showed its persuasive force. How persuasive was it? It has been the majority view among critical scholars, that is those who are not driven by a conservative theological agenda in Europe and North America to this day. [00:03:41] Schweitzer's knowledge of apocalypticism was based on his reading of slim portions of the Hebrew Bible, especially Daniel, but more importantly on intertestamental Jewish literature, such as the apocalypses that came to be popular in the early centuries BCE and ce. [00:03:59] What he would have given to have his hands on the Dead Sea Scrolls. For among these writings were sectarian texts that explained the beliefs and worldview of the Jewish sect that produced them. [00:04:11] These sectarian texts, ones that are commentaries on Scripture, one that describes the future end of time, war soon to come, and so on, are strongly apocalyptic in nature. The apocalyptic worldview was a distinctive element of Judaism at the turn of the era, and it appears to have been held by a wide stream of Jewish thinkers and presumably regular Jewish people. It appears to have been a view held by Pharisees in contradistinction to the Sadducees. And now we know that the Essenes, accepting the view that some of them produced at the scrolls, had it in spades. [00:04:51] This is a view that maintained that the world we live in is in the present age controlled by forces of evil that have empowered the enemies of the people of God to wreak havoc on on the earth. There are earthly and cosmic battles between the forces of good and evil. But these battles are to be brought to an end when God intervenes in the course of history and overthrows everything and everyone who is opposed to him, to give his good kingdom to those who are on his side. [00:05:21] And this climactic moment in the history of the world was going to happen very soon, when it does not only the obvious enemies of God, for example those hated Romans will be destroyed, but also all the Jews who have lined up on the wrong side, for example, the leaders of the Jewish temple. [00:05:39] Jesus too held to this view, but as I said, there is little to suggest that he had anything to do with the Essene community at Qumran, and much to suggest that he did not. It looks like I couldn't squeeze this bit into the post, so I will devote the next post to exploring it.