Endnote 12 – The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament

For the view that the text is using the titles for a negative figure, see, for example, David Flusser, “The Hybris of the Antichrist in a Fragment from Qumran,” in his Judaism and the Origins of Christianity (Jerusalem: Magnes Press of the Hebrew University, 1988), pp. 207–213. For the view that the titles are attributed to a messianic figure, see, for instance, John Collins, The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature, Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1995), pp. 154–163. Among the debate issues is whether 4Q246 presents events in a chronological order so that everything before the gap in the text at col. 2, line 4, is negative (including the titles); another concerns the ways in which the titles are used in other texts. For a recent attempt to approach the issue from a different perspective (concentrating on the manner of the naming in the text) and favoring a messianic interpretation, see Tucker Ferda, “Naming the Messiah: A Contriubtion to the 4Q246 ‘Son of God’ Debate,” Dead Sea Discoveries 21 (2014), pp. 150–175.