Footnote 5 – The Baptism of Jesus and a New Dead Sea Scroll

This assumes that the Messianic Vision fragment is Jewish, not Christian. To judge from his other publications, Robert Eisenman may dispute that. But I am sure that the majority of scroll scholars will concur with my assumption. The text itself is not explicitly Christian in any particular. More important, in the judgment of nearly all the experts, no other Dead Sea Scroll has yet been shown to have been composed by followers of Jesus. Even if one were to hold that the new text is Christian, however, the interpretive implications would be very much the same. We would still have new first-century evidence for a creative application of Genesis 1:2 that largely coincides with what many modern commentators have found in Mark 1:10, Matthew 3:16 and Luke 3:22.