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15. Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls:Context Terence L. Donaldson The new surge of popular interest in the old question of the historical Jesus has emerged in parallel with an equally intense public fascination with the Dead Sea Scrolls. The phenomena are not unrelated. The fact that the scrolls have achieved a firm hold on public awareness, while the Nag Hammadi documents—discovered at the same time and of equal importance—have not, is undoubtedly due to the fact that the scrolls emerge from the same era and environment as Jesus himself. In return, a significant factor in the recent growth industry of Jesus research has been the belief that the scrolls shed invaluable light on the social and religious environment in which Jesus is to be located, and that they are able to open up fresh angles of vision on his life, program and impact. To be sure, this assessment of the scrolls' significance is not universal. Influential scholars, some of whose voices can be heard elsewhere in this volume, would disagree with Wayne McCready's assertion that Jesus likely understood himself within an eschatological prophetic tradition, one shared by the community of the scrolls. Still, a sapiential and non-eschatological Jesus, located within a Cynic-like tradition, has certainly not yet carried the day—which means that it is important for a volume such as this to contain an assessment of the significance of Qumran for the historical investigation of Jesus. This is the issue to which McCready addresses himself in his informative, richly-documented study. Ever since their discovery, the Qumran scrolls have been used in a range of ways to illuminate the figure of Jesus. At one end, there have been those, such as Andre Dupont-Sommer and Edmund Wilson in the early days and Robert Eisenman and Barbara Thiering more recently, who argued for some direct connection between Jesus and Qumran—the Jesus movement overlapping somehow with the group reflected in the scrolls, or the distinctive features of early Christianity being derived in some way from Qumran. Such approaches have received public attention out of proportion to their scholarly support, and McCready, quite properly, dismisses them with only brief discussion. At the other end of the range, the scrolls have been used more generally as a means of illuminating the environment from which Jesus emerged. The assumption is that while there may not have been any direct connection between Jesus and the Qumran community, they nevertheless shared a common social and religious milieu, and represent distinct yet parallel responses to the same set of historical factors. As a result, various elements of Jesus' language, message and activity can be given clarity and nuance by comparing them to similar elements in the scrolls. For the most part, this is the approach taken by McCready. The major portion of the paper is given over to a discussion of Dead Sea Scrolls: Context 189 similarities and differences between Jesus and the scrolls, the purpose of which is to sharpen the profile of Jesus as he is presented in the Gospels. But there is an additional element in McCready's stance, representing a position somewhere between the two approaches discussed to this point. While he rejects the notion that there was any direct connection between Jesus and Qumran, he follows Flusser in believing that Jesus "likely was aware of Essenism in its widest definition," and that some of his sayings are to be understood as explicit responses to Qumran positions. This theme runs through the section in which he discusses various "factors of dissimilarity between Jesus and Qumranites." One final observation is in order here. For the most part, the discussion of "Jesus and Qumran" has tended to proceed on the assumption that Qumran is a known quantity, a secure observation point from which the more indeterminate terrain of the Jesus movement can be viewed. But more recent scrolls scholarship has had the effect of calling this assumption into question. In part this has to do with the reopening of issues once widely seen to be settled; the relationship between the Qumran community and the Essenes, and the archaeological assessment of the ruins, are two cases in point. In part, this has to do with the appearance of hitherto unavailable documents, such as 4QMMT with its intriguing calendrical and halakhic material. With one exception, this new state of ferment in Qumran studies is not thematized in McCready's paper; aspects of it are merely touched on here and...

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