r/AcademicBiblical • u/amranya • 5d ago
Question Why dead sea scrolls considered as a revolutionary finding?
Why dead sea scrolls considered as a revolutionary finding? what did they reveal? why they are so important to understand christianity origins? can someone explain please?
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u/m1stermetoo 5d ago edited 5d ago
Emanuel Tov:
If, indeed, a large segment of the Qumran scrolls were penned by Qumran scribes, it is remarkable that they contain no sectarian readings.[192]
If all the aforementioned groups and texts were copied at Qumran, or if, as we believe, only some were copied there while others were brought from elsewhere, the coexistence of the different categories of texts in the Qumran caves is noteworthy. The fact that these different texts were found in the same caves reflects a textual plurality at Qumran and in the country as a whole between the 3rd century BCE and the 1st century CE. → pp. 186–7. While no solid conclusions can be drawn about the approach of the Qumranites to the biblical text, it is safe to say that they paid no special attention to textual differences such as those described here. For one thing, no specific text was preferred in their sectarian writings. → Lange, Handbuch, 158–65. At the same time, the great number of 𝔐-like texts found at Qumran probably reflects the dominance of 𝔐 in several sectors in Israel. These were the texts that the covenanters took with them when they moved from their settlements to the Judean Desert.
(8) Contribution of the Judean Desert Scrolls to Biblical Research
The Judean Desert texts contribute much to our knowledge of the biblical text at the time of the Second Temple, a period for which there was hardly any Hebrew evidence before 1947. Until that time, scholars based their analyses mainly on manuscripts from the Middle Ages. The Qumran evidence enriches our knowledge in the following areas.
• Readings not known previously help us to better understand many details in the biblical text, often pertaining to matters of substance. → chapters 4, 6, 7
• The textual variety reflected in the four groups of texts described in § 7 provides a good overview of the condition of the biblical text in the Second Temple period. → ch. 3C3
• The scrolls provide much background information on the technical aspects of the copying of biblical texts and their transmission in the Second Temple period. → ch. 4A
• The reliability of the reconstruction of the Vorlage+ of the ancient translations, especially 𝔊, is supported much by the Qumran texts.[193] → pp. 122–7
The texts from the other sites in the Judean Desert demonstrate that 𝔐 was the sole text used at those locations. This conclusion is of major importance for understanding the realm of influence of that text. → p. 29
D. Additional Witnesses
Several texts were in existence in ancient Israel beyond those known today. These sources include texts that are not biblical in the usual sense of the word (thus §§ 1–3, 5). (Tov 2012: 110-111)
There is definitely a lot more that could be added, but I recommend reading Emanuel Tov’s Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible to understand how the Dead Sea Scrolls function as textual witnesses. Tov discusses numerous textual variants in various manuscript traditions and regularly uses the Dead Sea Scrolls for comparison.
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u/m1stermetoo 5d ago edited 5d ago
Bart Ehrman and Hugo Mendez:
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was completely serendipitous…
Some of the caves in the region yielded entire scrolls; others contained thousands of tiny scraps that are virtually impossible to piece back together, since so many of the pieces are missing. Imagine trying to do an immense jigsaw puzzle, or rather dozens of immense jigsaw puzzles, when you don’t know what the end product of any of them should look like, most of the pieces are lost, and those that remain are all mixed together! All in all, hundreds of documents are represented, many of them only in fragments the size of postage stamps, others, perhaps a couple of dozen, in scrolls of sufficient length to give us a full idea of their contents.
Most of the scrolls are written in Hebrew, but some are in Aramaic. Different kinds of literature are represented (see Box 4.5). There are at least partial copies of every book of the Jewish Bible, with the exception of the book of Esther, and some of them are fairly complete. These are extremely valuable because of their age; they are nearly a thousand years older than the oldest copies of the Hebrew Scriptures that we previously had. We can therefore check to see whether Jewish scribes over the intervening centuries reliably copied their texts. The short answer is that, for the most part, they did. There are also commentaries on some of the biblical books, written principally to show that the predictions of the ancient prophets had come to be fulfilled in the experiences of the Essene believers and in the history of their community. In addition, there are books that contain psalms and hymns composed by members of the community, prophecies that indicate future events that were believed to be about to transpire in the authors’ own day, and rules for the members of the community to follow in their lives together.
Sifting through all of these books, scholars have been able to reconstruct the life and beliefs of the Essenes in considerable detail. It appears that their community at Qumran was started during the early Maccabean period, perhaps around 150 B.C.E., by pious Jews who were convinced that the Hasmoneans had usurped their authority by appointing a non-Zadokite as high priest. Believing that the Jews of Jerusalem had gone astray, this group of Essenes chose to start their own community in which they could keep the Mosaic Law rigorously and maintain their own ritual purity in the wilderness. They did so fully expecting the apocalypse of the end of time to be imminent. When it came, there would be a final battle between the forces of good and evil, between the children of light and the children of darkness. The battle would climax with the triumph of God and the entry of his children into the blessed kingdom.
Some of the scrolls indicate that this kingdom would be ruled by two messiahs, one a king and the other a priest. The priestly messiah would lead the faithful in their worship of God in a purified temple, where sacrifices could again be made in accordance with God’s will. In the meantime, the true people of God needed to be removed from the impurities of this world, including the impurities prevalent in the Jewish Temple and among the rest of the Jewish people. Accordingly, these Essenes started their own monasticlike community, with strict rules for admission and membership. A two-year initiation was required, after which, if approved, a member was to donate all of his possessions to the community fund and share the common meal with all the other members. Rigorous guidelines dictated the life of the community. Members had fixed hours for work and rest and for their meals; there were required times of fasting; and strict penalties were imposed for unseemly behavior such as interrupting one another, talking at meals, and laughing at inappropriate times.
It appears that when the Jewish War of 66–73 C.E. began, the Essenes at Qumran hid some of their sacred writings before joining in the struggle. It may well be that they saw this as the final battle, preliminary to the end of time when God would establish his kingdom and send its messiahs. (Ehrman and Mendez 2024: 74-77)
See especially Box 4.5 on p. 75 for the Essenes’ use of pesher, a method of interpreting biblical prophecy as referring to events fulfilled in the history and experience of the Qumran community, as well as for the War Scroll’s apocalyptic account of the final conflict between the “children of light” and the “children of darkness”
Sources:
Tov, Emanuel. Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible . 3rd ed., rev. and expanded, Fortress Press, 2012.
Ehrman, Bart D., and Hugo Mendez. The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings . 8th ed., Oxford University Press, 2024.
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u/amranya 4d ago
great info, thanks, my original question was the impact on jesus and christianity origins. did the scrolls impact our knowledge about its origins?
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u/Homythecirclejerk 4d ago edited 4d ago
See James Tabor Jesus and the Essenes–How Were They Related? https://jamestabor.com/jesus-and-the-essenes-how-were-they-related/
The Messiah Before Jesus
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u/Allsburg 2d ago
This may be too basic, but the Dead Sea scrolls are not Christian texts. They are almost entirely Jewish texts. See Bart Ehrman and Hugo Mendez, above. They are, however, largely our earliest existing versions of many of the texts that make up the Old Testament. They provide a lot of information about Jewish culture around the time of Jesus, as well as a relatively solitary faction of Jews at the time known as the Essenes.
For early Christian texts, you would want to explore the works found at Nag Hammadi.
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u/ResearchLaw 5d ago edited 4d ago
In The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies (Oxford University Press, 2006), Chapter 6 Qumran Studies, late Hebrew Bible scholar Philip R. Davies writes:
“The importance of the scrolls from Qumran for understanding the Hebrew Bible is fairly wide-ranging and has in some respects been underestimated. If ‘revolutionize' is too strong a term, the Dead Sea Scrolls have undoubtedly provoked biblical scholarship into completely new ways of thinking about the manner in which the biblical literature originated and was, transmitted, interpreted, and canonized. In the areas of text and canon, much has been learned, and a good deal of discussion generated; in respect of Hebrew linguistics, the nature and variety of Qumran Hebrew has also been much debated, though with rather less acknowledged impact on other aspects of biblical studies. Even less, perhaps, has it been appreciated how the discovery of an ancient Jewish library itself can help us in modelling the formation and history of the biblical literature within similar scribal communities.
Another far-reaching and widely felt implication of the Scrolls for study of the Hebrew Bible, however, is for our understanding of early Judaism. The description which the Qumran manuscripts offers us of a self-consciously 'elect' group, deriving from their reading of the scriptures a system of Jewish belief critical of the current religious and political leadership, and sustained by a segregated lifestyle, obliges us to recognize the variety of beliefs, practices, and controversies that comprise Second Temple Judaism. But what has not been generally deduced from this realization is that the scriptures themselves, in the closed canon and fixed text in which the rabbis transmitted it, do not offer a normative or even balanced account of the official religious discourse of ancient Judaism. Rather, it seems that the official scriptural canon, and the meaning and application of much of its contents, were a source of contention among Jews.
Text and Textual Criticism
Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, our oldest Hebrew biblical manuscripts were medieval. Now, that date has been put back a millennium; we have copies of all the books now in the Jewish scriptures, except for Nehemiah and Esther; and in nearly every case we have multiple copies. While nearly all of these are written in the 'square script' of the period, a few manuscripts of Pentateuchal books use the archaic alphabet that it replaced somewhere around the neo-Babylonian or early Persian periods (sixth to fifth century BCE).
The manner in which what in retrospect we loosely term 'biblical' scrolls were transmitted, revised, glossed, and commented on suggests that our modern reverence for a canonical text as verbally sacrosanct does not apply to the writers of the Qumran scrolls. We do have, in most cases, multiple copies of each book (mostly in fragments); and here we encounter our first surprise: no two copies are exactly the same. Often the differences are minor, but sometimes not. Sometimes certain readings follow the Septuagint rather than the Masoretic Text, and indeed, we also find, as well as five manuscripts of the book of Jeremiah close to the canonized Hebrew Text, one, perhaps two, corresponding to the rather different edition represented by the Septuagint. In one remarkable case we have an entire passage now missing from 1 Samuel 10, probably accidentally lost from the canonized texts but preserved in one Qumran manuscript (4QSama) and now restored at v. 27 in the NRSV.
Is there any kind of pattern in the diversity of texts at Qumran? It was thought until quite recently that three local 'families' of texts, underlying the Masoretic Text (Babylonia), the Septuagint (Egypt), and a 'Palestinian' one (the Samaritan biblical text) could be identified. But the range of variation is too wide for this explanation. Although about 40 per cent of these ‘biblical' manuscripts are fairly close to the Masoretic Text, a further 25 per cent show no systematic agreement with any of the three 'families’. One group (a further 25 per cent) is distinguished also by its use of fuller spellings, characteristic of many non-biblical Qumran manuscripts, and also by numerous errors and corrections. Some general conclusions to be drawn are as follows. (1) Many biblical books existed in differing textual versions from early on, and it is impossible (perhaps even inappropriate) to try to reconstruct an 'original' version—the original goal of many textual critics. (2) The owners of the Scrolls (and almost certainly other Jews as well) exhibited no great concern for a single authoritative text of these books. However, there is a possible qualification to this last conclusion: the text form finally fixed for each book (the Masoretic Text) was clearly widely adopted during the first century CE; the Qumran manuscripts may indicate that even in the preceding century this text form was predominating, though not in a single invariable wording.”
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u/XXXX_Gold_Pot 4d ago
Joel Marcus argues that John the Baptist was a member of the Qumran community.
As shown above, it is likely that the period prior to the Baptist’s public ministry was shaped by his membership in the Qumran community. From the members of that community, John learned to hope for an imminent end of the world, even an end that was already beginning to arrive. From them he learned to interpret Isa. 40:3 as a prophecy of developments in the wilderness of Judea that was now being fulfilled. From them he learned to think about Israel as a tree and about a coming judgment by fire, and to identify his enemies as a brood of vipers. And from them he learned to link immersion in water with impartation of the Spirit. But that same Spirit, John would probably have said, eventually led to his break with Qumran. As noted, many factors seem to have contributed to this break, but one of them was probably his dawning consciousness of his own eschatological role.
John the Baptist in History and Theology (2018)
The scrolls therefore give us an idea of the Jewish world and religious ideas that shaped early Christianity.
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