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153 CHAPTER SIX THE IMPACT OF SELECTED QUMRAN TEXTS ON THE UNDERSTANDING OF PAULINE THEOLOGY Heinz-Wolfgang Kuhn The following “parallels” have been collected and selected by the Munich project “Qumran and the New Testament,” which I brought into being and which I later confined for my own work mainly to Qumran and the authentic letters of Paul.1 “Parallels” can be correctly understood only when they are interpreted in their individual contexts. This can, of course, only partly be done in this paper, but the reader is requested to consider more of the contexts than are quoted. Indeed, the user of a collection such as this, even when its author tries to avoid any misleading , should always be aware that the greater context, beginning with the writing itself, is important. It will also not be possible to go into Qumran 1. On the occasion of forty years of Qumran research, I gave a lecture at the Qumran Symposium at the Universities of Haifa and Tel Aviv in 1988, where I chose from my collected material the “top ten” passages in the authentic letters of Paul on which the Qumran Scrolls throw light; see Heinz-Wolfgang Kuhn, “The Impact of the Qumran Scrolls on the Understanding of Paul,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Forty Years of Research (ed. D. Dimant and U. Rappaport; STDJ 10; Leiden: Brill, 1992), 327–39. In this chapter, first prepared in 1997 and 1998 in connection with a symposium held at Princeton Theological Seminary (November 1997) and updated in the winter of 2004–5, I present nineteen Pauline passages where the comparison with the Qumran texts is of interest for an understanding of the apostle’s theology. All ten passages from the former paper are included here; these are, according to the numbering in this chapter: A 1; B 1, 2, 3; C 1, 3, 6, 7; D 1, 3. In 1999 I published a paper with eight parallels that show a rather close relationship to the Qumran community (here esp. A 2, 3; B 1; C 4; D 3; further B 2, 3; D 1); see Heinz-Wolfgang Kuhn, “Qumran und Paulus: Unter traditionsgeschichtlichem Aspekt ausgewählte Parallelen,” in Das Urchristentum in seiner literarischen Geschichte (ed. U. Mell and U. B. Müller; ZNWBeih 100; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 228–46. Cf. also my six papers on 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, and 1 Corinthians (listed in the bibliography). I selected works that focus fully or partially on Paul and the Qumran texts; though some of these works have not been cited in the present chapter, all of them appear in the general bibliography at the end of this volume. I thank Dr. Almut Koester for correcting my original English manuscript and Alison Deborah Sauer for correcting the final English version. My collaborator Jacob Nordhofen was of great help in preparing the final manuscript. 154 IMPACT OF QUMRAN TEXTS ON PAULINE THEOLOGY research in any detail, for example such questions as the problem of dualism, or to delve further into New Testament research, e.g., the problem of Paul’s understanding of Jewish Law. For a critical evaluation of “parallels,” we even sometimes have to transgress the borders of Paul and other early Christian writers or the borders of Qumran and its early Jewish context (I gave an example of this in my paper on “The Qumran Meal and the Lord’s Supper” [see n46, below]). Since general statements about two areas of religious matters, which are supposed to have some kind of similarity in a number of subjects, often tend toward quite subjective interpretations, it is the goal of this project to look especially for literal correspondences between the Qumran texts and New Testament writings, in this case the authentic letters of Paul. It is certainly not always easy or even possible to escape the traps of Strack-Billerbeck or the Neuer Wettstein,2 especially since the Qumran writings are not only of different ages, but also of different origins . “Parallelomania,”3 of which some scholars seem to have great fear, would help nobody, but leaving the correspondences aside would help even less. The conclusions at the end of the paper have more weight when they are reached by research of literal details and not only by general assertions. Out of an already large collection, here I select interesting “parallels” between Paul in seven authentic letters and the Qumran library (whether the writings originated in Qumran or not). I speak of “parallels” in a...

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