A Pre-Christian “Son of God” Among the Dead Sea Scrolls - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > June 1993

A Pre-Christian “Son of God” Among the Dead Sea Scrolls

By John J. Collins

The Dead Sea Scroll Son of God text from Qumran Cave 4 has attracted attention both in scholarly publications and in the press because it contains remarkable parallels to the annunciation scene in the Gospel of Luke. The Aramaic text has been known for 20 years, since J. T. Milik presented it orally in a lecture at Harvard in December 1972. Milik, however, failed to publish it. Part of the text, based on Milik’s lecture, was published by Joseph Fitzmyer, S.J., in 1974.1 Fitzmyer also set out the parallels between this text and Luke in his monumental commentary […]

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Endnotes

1.

Joseph A Fitzmyer, “The Contribution of Qumran Aramaic to the Study of the New Testament,” New Testament Studies 20 (1973–1974), pp. 382–407, reprinted in his A Wandering Aramean. Collected Aramaic Essays (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1979), pp. 85–113.

2.

Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I–IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), pp. 205–206, 347–348.

3.

Emile Puech, “Fragment d’une Apocalypse en Araméen (4Q246 = pseudo-Dand) et le ‘Royanume de Dieu,’” Revue biblique 99 (1992), pp. 98–131.

4.

The messianic interpretation was first proposed by Frank Moore Cross. I am grateful to Professor Cross for sharing with me the notes that he compiled after Milik’s lecture in 1972.

5.

David Flusser (“The Hubris of the Antichrist in a Fragment from Qumran,” Immanuel 10 [1980], pp. 31–37) argued that the Son of God figure was the Antichrist or anti-Messiah. But the Antichrist, conceived as a mirror-image of Christ, is a Christian idea and unattested in pre-Christian Judaism.

6.

Fitzmyer, A Wandering Aramean, pp. 92–93.

7.

Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, p. 206. Fitzmyer adds that “the title ‘Son of God’ was as much at home in Palestinian Judaism as in the contemporary Hellenistic world.”

8.

For an excellent, full treatment of this complicated issue, see Raymond Brown, The Birth of the Messiah (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977).