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November 13, 1998/ 24 Cheshvan 5759, Vol. 51, No. 8
Gospels repeat scroll ideas
'Common ground' may help foster interfaith ties
ANNE BRADY
Associate Editor
Many of the ideas and literary devices used by the writers of the Christian Bible's New Testament, including words attributed to Jesus, actually reflect those found in recent times in Jewish texts that pre-date Jesus, but that likely were known to him and his followers.
That was the message at a Dead Sea Scrolls seminar held in Scottsdale on Saturday, Nov. 7, that focused on writings found in caves near the Dead Sea community of Qumran.
And local Rabbi Albert Plotkin, who himself teaches a class on the scrolls at Phoenix College and who is planning to host a Dead Sea Scrolls seminar at Temple Beth Israel in 1999, agreed wholeheartedly in an interview this week.
"Absolutely - Jesus said nothing original. There was nothing new under the sun," said Plotkin, who is hopeful that finding these links between early Christian teachings and those of the Qumran Jews will aid in Jewish-Christian dialogue, improving interfaith relations.
"The early Christians picked up a lot of Qumran theology," said Plotkin. "Early Christianity was an offspring of this group, or very like it."
For example, Peter Flint, co-director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Institute at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia, pointed to a section in the Qumran scrolls that speaks about how people who seek after wisdom are blessed. The section includes a series of eight short sentences beginning "Blessed is" and concludes with a longer "Blessed is" passage. This echoes the "Beatitudes" prose attributed to Jesus and included in the Gospel of Matthew's "Sermon on the Mount."
"Jesus is being Jewish here," said Flint. "The Jews had done this before."
But the Rev. Culver H. Nelson, retired pastor from the Church of the Beatitudes in Phoenix and a local expert on the historic Jesus, said it is likely that it was the gospel writers and other early Christians who borrowed from Qumran-rooted theology and literary devices, rather than Jesus himself.
For example, it was the "Qumran covenanters," the writers of the scrolls, who first viewed their community as a temple, which was an idea adopted by the early Christians after Jesus died, Nelson said.
Still, Nelson agreed with Plotkin and the scroll scholars that "Jesus wasn't as radical or unique as historians have liked us to believe he was."
Flint further offered his theory that the scrolls prove that Jesus did claim to be the Jewish messiah. One of the Qumran scrolls includes a passage on the coming of the messiah that says, "He will release the captives, make the blind see, raise up the downtrodden. ... Then he will heal the sick, resurrect the dead, and to the poor announce glad tidings." This is similar to a passage in Isaiah, but the scroll adds the section about healing the sick and raising the dead.
In the Gospel of Luke, asked whether he is the messiah that John the Baptist spoke of, Jesus is quoted as answering: "The blind see again; the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed; the deaf hear; the dead are raised; the good news is proclaimed to the poor." According to Flint, Jesus was saying he fulfilled the formula for the coming of the messiah as set up in the Qumran texts. Nelson, again, said it more likely was the gospel writer who was referencing Qumran.
Philip Poling, president of Scottsdale-based Scroll & Bible Seminars, said he envisions the Christian gospel writers using the Qumran texts as a veritable library from which to draw.
The scrolls have been dated to the first and second centuries B.C.E. and were first discovered in the 1940s in caves at Qumran, Masada and in between, along the Dead Sea. A complete English-language translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls Bible (a complete Jewish Bible based on the biblical text found among the scrolls) is scheduled to be published and released next year.
Flint and his co-director, Martin Abegg, said the new Bible will not include portions of existing bibles that are conspicuously absent in the scrolls, such as Psalm 32 ("Happy is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered up"), while other newly discovered material, including an explanation of a bizarre incident in Chapter 11 of 1 Samuel, will be added.
Plotkin said he feels that the mere fact that Christian scholars are studying Jewish rabbinical literature is a sign that the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls "has already improved Jewish-Christian relations."
"The scrolls give us a common ground," said Plotkin, who noted he is a friend of both Flint and Nelson.
Nelson, however, said the familiarity can breed problems.
"We have a hell of a lot of fights because we're family," Nelson said. "We hold family relationships with such an intensity and passion, that our differences become exaggerated.
"Whenever we look back to our forebears, we are not looking forward. Yet our great forebears, Abraham and Moses, were always looking forward. People live all their lives as if they were being driven by the past, not pulled by the future. We need to look to our future."
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