New Perspectives on the Significance of the Scrolls for the New Testament and Early Christian Literature

Abstract

This article places the contributions of the thematic volume in the larger research context where the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Christian source texts have been juxtaposed and compared with each other. Whereas earlier scholarship was keen on identifying direct links and dependencies or, alternatively, underlining dissimilarities between the Scrolls’ Judaean priestly movement and the Galilean non-elite Jesus movement and its diaspora follow-up, this thematic volume represents more nuanced attempts to contextualise the similarities and differences in appropriate ways and find new ways of thinking that illuminate both textual corpora.

Is Ancient Jewish Studies (Still) Postmodern (Yet)?

“…Brooke 1997, 1998). The earlier of these two essays explores a shared ‘canon within the canon’ of key texts (Genesis, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and the Psalms), whose use in both the scrolls and the New Testament allowed their communities ‘to justify their positions as the true representatives of Israel’ (1997; updated in Brooke 2005a: 50-51). More explicitly theoretical is Brooke 1998, where Kristevan intertextuality provides a new means of understanding shared textual citations and interpretations.…”

“…More explicitly theoretical is Brooke 1998, where Kristevan intertextuality provides a new means of understanding shared textual citations and interpretations. ‘Attention to intertextuality shows the distinctiveness of each set of writings but also that much in the New Testament is the common stock of eschatologically oriented first-century Palestinian Judaism’ (1998; updated in Brooke 2005a: 94).…”

“…In his more recent work, Brooke has brought critical attention to both scholarship on ancient scriptural texts and our understanding of the texts themselves (note esp. two collections of essays, 2005a, on the scrolls and the New Testament; and 2013a, comprising a collection of ‘Essays in Method’). His treatment of ‘The Qumran Scrolls and the Demise of the Distinction between Higher and Lower Criticism’ (2005b), argues that scholars must ‘abandon canonical lenses’ (p. 40) and ‘end and transform the distinction between higher and lower criticism’ in light of the evidence of the scrolls (p. 41).…”

Jewish Law in the Gospels in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls

“…Many comparisons have been made between the Dead Sea Scrolls, on one hand, and the New Testament and early Christianity, on the other (Braun 1966; Brooke 2005; Pate 2000). From the earliest reports of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, indeed even from the discovery of the Damascus Document (then called the Zadokite Fragments) in the Cairo genizah , there have been persistent claims that the Scrolls were in some way closely related to early Christianity.…”