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61 CHAPTER THREE THE FUTURE OF A RELIGIOUS PAST: QUMRAN AND THE PALESTINIAN JESUS MOVEMENT Donald H. Juel I came to the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS = Qumran Scrolls) as a student of the New Testament. This remarkable set of documents played a major role in the way Early Judaism took shape and came alive for me. One fragment in particular, 4Q174 (= 4QFlor) Florilegium, came to play a crucial role in my doctoral thesis. When I finally traveled to Israel and stood next to the Qumran ruins and the series of caves, I was unprepared for the sense of disappointment: everything seemed so small. That experience was, I believe, a salutary taste of reality. Scholarly interests may give false impressions of how things really are. The significance of the scrolls has little to do with the size of the community or the splash it might have made in its day. Nor can the significance of the scrolls have much to do with the immediate future of that little community, since it had none—at least until 1947, when some of its secrets were unearthed. The significance of the community and its literature is for us on whom the end of the ages has dawned. The discoveries have provided a perfect example of what postmoderns know and moderns suspect: our world is a construct that rests uneasily on a religious, political, cultural, and intellectual consensus. One of the great fictions is that we can achieve a measure of stability by locating foundation stones in the past on which to build a present and a future. The reality is that there are no such stones—only layers beneath which we may find something new and surprising, whose artifacts may be fashioned into new mosaics. “The country with an unpredictable past” is what a former member of the Soviet Union and his schoolmates used to say about their homeland when one new history of the Soviet Union after another would appear. We might well say the same about our own conception of our past as Christians and Jews. Old stereotypes vanish, and we find ourselves in a somewhat unfamiliar and awkward situation of knowing less clearly exactly who we are. 62 THE FUTURE OF A RELIGIOUS PAST That is not the popular view. People are fascinated with the scrolls because they imagine they hold some secret that will unlock the mysteries of the past (and present). Ordinary people in congregations still flock to adult forums on the Dead Sea Scrolls. And it is not just the uninitiated to Qumranology who have such hopes and expectations.1 There are still a good number among the learned community who pore over the remaining fragments, convinced they will find evidence that there really was some expectation of a suffering, dying, and rising Messiah—and that such a find will settle some ancient disputes and provide something substantial on which to construct a faith and a theology. What has occurred is the opposite: the more we have read, the more impressed we have become by the strangeness of these ancients and how poorly they fit some of the portraits we have sketched of our ancestors. CONSTRUCTING THE PAST Such portraits are constructs, assembled from available data by each generation of architects of the past, that play a crucial role in determining how we make sense of our Scriptures and our religious heritage. While in biblical studies during the last decades there has been a protest against collapsing literature into its context, all reading presumes a setting . I recall one of my teachers, Jacob Jervell, insisting on this point as we proposed interpretations of Luke-Acts that resulted “simply” from our engagement with the narrative. He demonstrated how completely our reading was dependent on a particular sketch of early Christianity, which was in turn derived from a reading of postbiblical Jewish history.2 It is now interesting to me that we even use “early Christianity” in reference to the first century C.E. The term “Christian” appears only three 1. Don Juel passed away before he could polish or update his paper. I have kept and protected the integrity of his work, and (besides the usual editing of a chapter) have added only some notes that draw attention to more-recent publications. I often think of Don; he was a close colleague and we greatly admired each other. For the last part of his life he took over my PhD seminar on “First-Century Judaism,” which I now teach...

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