Scholars’ Corner: New Testament Illuminated by Dead Sea Scrolls

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In an article entitled “The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament after Thirty Years” (Theology Digest, Winter 1981), Father Joseph A. Fitzmyer of The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., reviews the state of current research.

Fitzmyer observes that fewer than 25 percent of the 15,000 fragments from Cave IV at Qumran have been published, so we are still at the beginning. “The study of the Scrolls and of their relation to the New Testament will continue to be one of the cutting edges of progress in biblical scholarship in this and the coming century,” he says.

Fitzmyer notes that until about 1955, few New Testament scholars worked with the Dead Sea Scrolls because “they simply could not read the texts. The emphasis on the Hellenistic background of New Testament writings, which had been the vogue prior to 1955, usually left little concern for its Palestinian or Semitic background, and even less for the language in which Palestinian literature might have been written.” That is scarcely true today. The Palestinian Semitic background of the New Testament is now a major emphasis—in large part because of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The 27 books of the New Testament have been preserved only in Greek. By contrast, no Jewish-Christian writings of first-century Palestine have been preserved. Ironically, Fitzmyer tells us, the five main books that purport to tell us most about the origins of Christianity—Mark, Matthew, Luke, Acts, and John—are the ones that early ecclesiastical tradition as well as modern scholarly opinion have attributed to the eastern Mediterranean world other than Palestine. Consequently, the origins of Christianity are described in “what was most likely not the dominant language of Jesus of Nazareth, even though he may have on occasion made use of Greek. But what sayings are attributed to him are attributed to him in Greek—in effect, in a translation.”

The earliest Christian writings have thus been heavily affected by Hellenistic language, culture, philosophy, and style of life because of the areas in which most of them were composed. Yet the origin of the Christian movement itself is Palestinian. To some extent these Palestinian origins are reflected in the Greek New Testament itself. But the Dead Sea Scrolls have immeasurably increased our knowledge of Palestine at the time Christianity was born.

The contribution of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the study of Palestinian paleography (or forms of ancient handwriting) has been inestimable. Here the material is not limited to that of the Qumran scrolls, because documents, often dated, from the caves of Murabba’at, 11 miles south of Qumran, have been used as well. To some people, judgments about handwriting seem highly subjective. But careful study of the writing habits of Palestinian scribes in both the formal and cursive types of script (the number of strokes used to compose a given letter, its starting-point and shape, its ductus) has revealed distinctive characteristics that can be and have been used to date the writing with remarkable accuracy and within a quite narrow range. Recognized experts, who have scarcely been working in collusion, have come to remarkably similar conclusions.

Though different students of this Palestinian paleography have used different labels for the classes into which they have divided the handwriting, four basic periods are recognized: (1) Archaic or Proto-Jewish Script (250–150 B.C.); (2) Hasmonean Script (150–30 B.C.); (3) Herodian Script (30 B.C.–70 A.D.); (4) Post-Herodian or Ornamental Script (70 A.D.–second century).

The contribution of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the study of the languages of first-century Palestine has also been incalculable. The Qumran material and the texts from Masada, Murabba’at, and the other caves give clear evidence of the use of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek in Palestine of the first centuries B.C. and A.D.

Finally, the Qumran Scrolls have illustrated abundantly the history and theology of a Jewish form of life that differed considerably from what had often been called normative Judaism at the turn of the era. Whether one accepts the identification of the Qumran sect as Essene or not, the Scrolls have revealed to us a community of Palestinian Jews that existed from roughly 150 B.C. to 68 A.D. This pre-Christian community led an ascetic communal type of life; at least some of its members were celibate. Antecedents of later Christian monastic discipline have come to light in this community of Palestinian Jews.

Was there Christianity at Qumran? The answer is no. There is—to date at least—no awareness in the Qumran scrolls of Jesus of Nazareth, of the Apostles, or of the Christian Church. Nor is there a hint of such a figure as John the Baptist.

In 1972 a Spanish papyrologist named José O’Callaghan turned to the 19 papyrus fragments of Qumran Cave VII and startled the scholarly world and the public at large with the announcement that some of the fragments were actually New Testament texts. He claimed 7Q4 to be 1 Timothy 3:16; 4:1, 3; 7Q5 as Mark 6:52–53; and other 7Q fragments as texts of Acts, Romans, James and 2 Peter. His announcement was at first modestly made. Various communications media picked up the news, however, and made a sensation out of it. Attention was concentrated on 7Q5, alleged to be a copy of Mark 6:52–53, to which a date between 50 B.C. and 50 A.D. had already been assigned, completely independently of and prior to O’Callaghan’s supposed identification. The conclusion: The Marcan Gospel, usually regarded as the earliest of the canonical gospels, was actually composed and copied prior to 50 A.D.! The magazine Eternity (of Philadelphia) devoted most of an entire issue to O’Callaghan’s announcement, “Could One Small Fragment Shake the World?” The title referred, of course, to the “world” of historical and literary criticism of the New Testament, which had dated Mark at least 20 years later.

Alas, reputable New Testament scholars across the world came out against O’Callaghan’s identification. The fragments are all so small and contain so few Greek letters that their identification is uncertain. In particular, 7Q5 has subsequently been identified with a number of passages in the Greek Old Testament (with no certainty either), and the likelihood is that the rest of them as well belong to the Greek Old Testament.

O’Callaghan writes on, however, undaunted; Fitzmyer has found 15 articles and one small book that O’Callaghan devoted to the identification of the scattered letters on these tiny papyrus fragments. The debate is not yet over, but most New Testament scholars have lost interest in it. The only reason that Fitzmyer mentions O’Callaghan is to put to his readers the question that O’Callaghan failed to put to himself: How can one account for the presence of papyrus copies of such New Testament writings as Romans, Mark, 1 Timothy, Acts, James, and even 2 Peter in a Qumran Cave that was almost certainly sealed off by 68 A.D.? The likelihood of such Christianity being at Qumran is nil.

In details, Qumran texts cast much new light on difficult passages or concepts in the 008New Testament. For example, it has long been contended that the christological title Kyrios (in its absolute sense as “Lord” or “the Lord”) does not come from early Palestinian Christian proclamation, but, rather, was borrowed from contact with the Hellenistic world of the eastern Mediterranean. However, we now have evidence from Qumran texts that shows that there was an incipient custom among Palestinian Jews in pre-Christian times to refer to God absolutely as “(the) Lord” both in Aramaic and Hebrew.

Without going into detail, we may also say that the mode of interpretation—the exegesis and hermeneutics—at work in the use of the Old Testament in the Qumran writings provides a remarkable parallel and background for the interpretation of the Old Testament by New Testament writers. In this lies the greatest contribution to the study of the New Testament derived from the study of the Qumran scrolls. This is not to belittle the many specific parallels or contacts; but the overall question of the type of Old Testament interpretation in the New Testament has been illustrated in a way that we would never have suspected before Qumran.

Although the Qumran community and the early Christians who produced the New Testament were two types of eschatological communities, both were precisely alike in insisting that they were the Old Testament come alive (the “New Covenant”), that they were the true continuity of the People of God. They not only argued this in similar ways, but also based their arguments on authoritative parts of the Old Testament. Both turned back to the exilic period as the rock from which they were hewn; they differed in details and in the passages of the exilic period from which they drew their proofs. Each in its own way emphasized certain parts of the Old Testament. In the Qumran literature, the writers expressed the feeling that the Teacher of Righteousness was the key to the understanding of Scripture. Early Christians argued similarly, insisting that Jesus was the key to the Scriptures. Each community was convinced that its key provided the means to see clearly, through the Scriptures, what God was doing in its day. Each thought of itself as the New Israel, but, admittedly, in a different sense.

Despite the generic conviction of both groups that they were somehow living in the end of clays, and that what had been revealed by God in former times to Biblical writers had now taken on a new significance, there was a basic difference between the Qumran community and the Christians, especially in their eschatological thinking. There are no fulfillment quotations in the Qumran literature; they were mainly used by Matthew and John in the New Testament. This reveals a basic difference in outlook between the two groups.

Although some New Testament writers are very forward-looking, their writings also evince a pronounced backward glance; the Christ-event had already brought about a change—salvation had in a sense been achieved for mankind “once and for all” (ephapax, Romans 6:10; Hebrews 7:27; 9:12; 10:10). This was hardly true of the Qumran community.

The Eridu Genesis

Everyone knows about the Gilgamesh Epic, the Mesopotamian tale which contains a flood story considered a source for the later Biblical flood story.

In a recent issue of the Journal of Biblical Literature, prominent Harvard scholar Thorkild Jacobsen (see “God Before the Hebrews,” BAR 08:05, by Tikva Frymer-Kensky), analyzes anew other Mesopotamian texts which in the aggregate contain a creation story and a flood story. Jacobsen calls these texts the “Eridu Genesis.”^a

The “Eridu Genesis” is recorded in three related but slightly differing texts contained on cuneiform-inscribed clay tablets. One is a tablet found at the turn of the century at Nippur; another tablet comes from Ur; the third from Nineveh. The first two tablets date to about 1600 B.C., the third to about a thousand years later, although it obviously records part of the same story. The first two are written in Sumerian, the third in both Sumerian and Akkadian. All are fragments only. Still, enough is here to piece together the story of the creation of man, the institution of kingship, the founding of the first cities, and the great flood.

Jacobsen calls the story the “Eridu Genesis” because that is the name of the first city. (In the Bible, the first city is created by Cain’s son Enoch [Genesis 4:15].) Although the details of the story told here differ greatly from the Bible stories, Jacobsen finds a remarkable similarity in structure. In both the Biblical account and the “Eridu Genesis” we are told first of the creation of man and animals, then of the leading figures after creation and their establishment of cities (in the Bible it is the pre-flood patriarchs with the years they lived; in the Mesopotamian story, it is the city-rulers with their reigns); and finally we learn of the flood. In both the Bible and the Eridu Genesis, the three parts are arranged along a timeline. Moreover, both the Eridu Genesis and the Bible are concerned about chronology; both give precise figures, respectively, for the lengths of reigns and the lifespans of the persons listed, and in both, the figures are extraordinarily large (the reigns in the Eridu Genesis vary between 10,800 years and 64,800 years).

Another similarity involves the kings’ apparently slow development to adulthood. They lived long, but they took a long time to grow up. From a list of the kings of Lagash, we learn that the kings after the flood “spent a hundred years in diapers” (literally, “in ‘bits’ of the wash”) and another hundred years without being given any work to perform. According to Jacobsen, the pre-flood patriarchs in the Bible, as well as the immediate descendants of Noah, also took their time growing up. This may explain the otherwise puzzlingly high age they reached before they were able to beget children. Methuselah, for example, was 187 years old when he begat his firstborn, Lamech, and Lamech was 182 when he begat Noah.

Jacobsen says the stories in the Eridu Genesis probably served as a model for the Biblical writer rather than as a source of direct borrowing. Jacobsen concludes:

“If we accept—as I think we very clearly must—a degree of dependency of the Biblical narrative on the older Mesopotamian materials, we must also note how decisively these materials have been transformed in the Biblical account, altering radically their original meaning and import.

“The Eridu Genesis takes throughout, an affirmative and optimistic view of existence; it believes in progress. Things were not nearly as good to begin with as they have become since; and though man unwittingly, by sheer multiplying, once caused the gods to turn against him, that will not happen again. The gods had a change of heart, realizing apparently that they needed man.

“In the Biblical account it is the other way around. Things began as perfect from God’s hand and then grew steadily worse through man’s sinfulness until God finally had to do away with all mankind except for the pious Noah who would beget a new and better stock.

“The moral judgment here introduced, and the ensuing pessimistic viewpoint, could not be more different from the tenor of the Sumerian tale; only the assurance that such a flood will not recur is common to both.”

In an article entitled “The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament after Thirty Years” (Theology Digest, Winter 1981), Father Joseph A. Fitzmyer of The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., reviews the state of current research.