The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Volume 3, The Scrolls and Christian Origins

14: “THE COMING OF THE RIGHTEOUS ONE” IN 1 ENOCH, QUMRAN, AND THE NEW TESTAMENT

381 CHAPTER FOURTEEN “THE COMING OF THE RIGHTEOUS ONE” IN 1 ENOCH, QUMRAN, AND THE NEW TESTAMENT Gerbern S. Oegema INTRODUCTION This essay1 aims at a study of the tradition- and reception-historical context of the expression h( e0leu/sij tou= dikai/ou, “the Coming of the Righteous One,” found in Acts 7:52, the only passage in the New Testament where it is found—by comparing its use in 1 Enoch, in Qumran, especially in 4Q215a and 4Q252, and in other early Jewish writings—to shed light on its origin and meaning. Apart from the expression itself or parts of it as well as its possible equivalents, I also look at the wider context in which we find it: literary, cultic, historical, eschatological, messianic , or other context. I begin with the latter. 1. CONTEXT 1.1. Summaries of the History of Israel The first context or framework, in which the expression h( e0leu/sij tou= dikai/ou appears, is in that of a literary genre. Acts 7:52 is found in one of the two main historical accounts in Luke-Acts, in Acts 7:2b–53, where 1. Paper read at the Third Enoch Seminar in Camaldoli, Italy, June 6–11, 2005, and partly based on a paper presented at the seminar “The Pseudepigrapha and Christian Origins,” at the annual meeting of the Studiorum Novi Testamentum Societas, Barcelona, Aug. 3–7, 2004. My thanks go to James H. Charlesworth for inviting me to read the first version of the paper, and to him and Gabriele Boccaccini for welcoming me to the Enoch Seminar. I further thank Jim Charlesworth for his many useful suggestions to improve both papers, and I thank my assistant Sara Parks for polishing my English and checking the bibliography. 382 “THE COMING OF THE RIGHTEOUS ONE” the author in writing to Theophilus takes up the well-known literary genre (or subgenre) of the “summary of the history of biblical Israel,” as it is also found in such texts as 1 Sam 12:8–13; Deut 26:5–10; Ps 105:7–45; Ezek 20:5–29; and 1 En. 85:3–90:38. The frameworks of the most important parallels to Acts 7:52, found in 1 En. 89:52 and 4Q252 5.3, also appear to summarize the history of Israel, as shown below. Joachim Jeska, who has done a study of the genre of the “summary of the history of Israel,” lists in total twenty-seven of these passages from biblical and postbiblical books and divides them into five different genres: speeches, prayers, hymns, visions, and prophetic speeches.2 In his study, Jeska shows that most of the “summaries of the history of Israel” contain actualizations of history rather than historical reports or accounts, whether in the form of evaluative comments on past events or in the form of a continuation or finalization of the past. The purpose is largely to make a connection between Israel’s history and the narrative context of the author’s work, and to interpret the present and future of the author and his audience. Furthermore, as Jeska shows in his treatment of the examples of Deuteronomy 26, Joshua 24, 1 Samuel 12, Judith 5, and Josephus’s J.W. 5 §§ 379–412, there is a wide variety of concepts of history with no predefined model; yet also we can find a certain “canon” of events or narratives in them. Authors seem to be relatively free in choosing from this canon and using various interpretive models. Therefore, portrayals of history are never neutral or without a tendency. History is not simply documented or archived, but actualized and rewritten.3 1.2. The Speeches in Acts 7:2b–53 and 13:17–25 Let us, therefore, turn our attention to Acts 7:2b–53 and 13:17–25, which in the speeches of Stephen and Paul present two summaries of the history of Israel, according to the first and most important early-Christian theologian -historian, Luke-Acts to Theophilus. According to Jeska, we can only partly prove the assumption that one can differentiate between tradition and redaction in both texts, an approach largely based on the 2. See Joachim Jeska, Die Geschichte Israels in der Sicht des Lukas: Apg 7,2b–53 und 13,17–25 im Kontext antik-jüdischer Summarien der Geschichte Israels (FRLANT 195; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001). 3. Ibid., 115–18, 254. GERBERN...