Dead Sea Scrolls

DevonMcBride,

This is a subject I've discussed for years on the ANE forum. (Ancient Near East.) I just love discussions of that time period, so I'll have to stop myself when I go overtime here.

The WT can accept the the scrolls (DSS), because there is nothing in them about Jesus being part of the Essene tribe. There is nothing about Jesus in them. Also there is no specific connection between the Essenes and the practice of Kabbalah. For that matter, there is no necessary connection between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Essenes, either. In fact there is not necessarily any connection between the Dead Sea Scrolls and Christianity - though I believe there is a small one. If the book calls the Essenes a tribe, there's another reason to dismiss it. (Essenes more likely took in people from unrelated families, just as some Catholic monestaries took in "trainees.")  In fact, if the book says anything about the DSS that you've said above, then the book doesn't sound useful or truthful.

That said, there is a great deal of information in the DSS that sheds light on what a certain Jewish messianic group would have thought about the world, mainstream Judaism or other Jewish groups. More important is what the writings reveal about the way they thought about the Bible through their commentary methods. Any of those contributions alone would make them quite valuable for studying the world and thinking that also influenced Christianity. Josephus and Philo (Jewish writers who were contemporaries of Christian Bible writers) had already highlighted the importance of the Essenes, yet we had no physical evidence from them for 2000 years. To Josephus, the Essenes were on par with the Pharisees and Sadducees. It was tempting, therefore, to attach this discovery of the DSS to Essenes. Today, however, there is even talk among a few scholars that the DSS were just as  representative of ideas coming from Jerusalem's mainstream Temple Judaism, but which seem so foreign to what we now think about 1st century Temple Judaism that we need to assign the DSS to a "cult" status.

Also, their location and some of their beliefs made it tempting to believe John the Baptist may very well have been, not an Essene necessarily, but a member of the DSS group whose writings are represented in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls may have nothing to do with the buildings found nearby the caves where the scrolls were found. Even if they did, scholars are now believed to have been much too anxious to read into those Qumram buildings whatever they needed to associate the scrolls with Essenes. Those early diggers would have been ready to see an Essene monestary in a Roman fort. Any physical connection to Essene life is now dismissed by many, if not the majority of, new DSS scholars.

I believe there is a very high probability of a connection between early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is hardly the direct type of connection that a lot of writer's try to pull off to sell a book, though. Paul's Gentile Christianity renders most of those early connections moot today. But they might shed light on some quotes and ideas here and there. I believe there is evidence that there was once a stronger relationship between at least one early version of Jewish Christianity and the religion of John the Baptist. The people behind the DSS were more likely a messianic cult that had similarities and differences between themselves and a lot of other messianic cults (like Christianity must have appeared). No doubt, from our own historical perspective, the similarities seem greater to us, but among themselves, they must have seen their differences as greater.

Whoops, I see I went over by about 20 minutes.