QUMRAN BETWEEN THE OLD AND THE NEW TESTAMENT. Florentino García Martínez K.U. Leuven

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1 QUMRAN BETWEEN THE OLD AND THE NEW TESTAMENT Florentino García Martínez K.U. Leuven Upon my arrival at the Catholic University Leuven I started a research project, supported by a grant from the K.U. Leuven Research Fund (BOF) and by a grant from the Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders (FWO-V), intended to explore in detail the relationship between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament. 1 The topic was by no means new, on the contrary. The books and articles dedicated to ascertaining the relationship between these two literary corpora could fill a whole library. 2 But I was convinced that, in spite of these considerable efforts, the research had still not been able to find an acceptable explanation for the common points or for the differences and that a new way to look at the relationship between the two corpora was needed. One of the main reasons the public has been fascinated by the Dead Sea Scrolls since their discovery in 1947 is precisely in the expectation that the new materials could illuminate the dark regions in our knowledge of the origins and development of early Christianity in the second half of the first century. This hope was well founded. Both entities (the group or groups that copied and preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls and the group or groups that produced the New Testament) shared the same general chronologi cal time frame and certainly co-existed until the year 68 of the first century, when the settlement of Qumran was destroyed; they were geographically close: Christianity developed in Jerusalem, about 15 miles from the shore of the Dead Sea, where the settlement was located; both developed in the same Palestinian society in a crisis situation. The New Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls are the product of two similar Jewish reform movements, both guided by a strong charismatic leader, both interpreting 1 Respectively IOT/03.01 of the BOF and G of the FWO-V. 2 See, as an indication, the selection of studies put together by J.A. Fitzmyer, A Guide to the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature: Revised and Expanded Edition (Grand Rapids-Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2008),

2 2 florentino garcía martínez the Scripture in an actualizing way, applying its prophe cies to their present situation, both with very strong es chatological expectations, whose members shared the conviction that they were the chosen remnant of the true Israel, the New Covenant at the end of days. The hope thus that the manuscripts found in caves between 1947 and 1956 could illuminate the origins of early Christianity and the New Testament s formation were logical and well founded indeed. But the results have been disappointing and, in spite of the thousands of books written on the matter during the fifties and sixties, no real consensus among scholars was reached. The quest has been practically abandoned. and the relationship between the two corpora is only sporadically treated. 3 The reasons for this lack of success are not difficult to fathom, since the research until the nineties suffered from three fundamental shortcomings: it was based only upon a small fraction of the manuscripts found at Qumran (basically the manuscripts from Cave 1 and some preliminary publications of manuscripts from Cave 4); it considered all these manuscripts as the product of the Essenes, who were identical with the people of Qumran; and it assumed that there were direct connections between the two literary corpora, the Scrolls and the New Testament, or between the Essenes and the early Christians. Now, the situation is completely different. 4 Since 1992 we are no longer dependent exclusively on the manuscripts from Cave 1, but thanks to the complete publication of all the scrolls we can assess the collection as a whole. 5 The availability of all the scrolls has given rise 3 In the bibliography edited by B. Jongeling, A Classified Bibliography of the Finds in the Desert of Judah (STDJ 7; Leiden: Brill, 1971) a specific section Qumran and the New Testament. Qumran and Christianity took up pages ; in F. García Martínez and D.W. Parry, A Bibliography of the Finds of the Desert of Judah (STDJ 19; Leiden: Brill, 1996) about 70 entries were recorded under the keyword New Testament ; but in spite of the notable increase of studies on the Scrolls recorded in A. Pinnik, The Orion Center Bibliography of the Dead Sea Scrolls ( ) (STDJ 41; Leiden: Brill, 2001) there are only 45 entries under the subject New Testament, and even less in R.A. Clements and N. Sharon, The Orion Center Bibliography of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature ( ) (STDJ 71; Leiden: Brill, 2008). 4 For a summary of the changes in this research, see F. García Martínez, Qumrân, 60 ans après la découverte, The Qumran Chronicle 15 (2007): , particularly The two latest volumes of the DJD Series (Hartmut Stegemann and Eileen Schuller, Qumran Cave 1.III: 1QHodayot a : With Incorporation of 4QHodayot a-f and 1QHodayot b (DJD 40) and Emile Puech, Qumran Grotte 4.XXVII: (4Q550 4Q583) Textes en Araméens, deuxième partie (DJD 37) appeared last November at the Clarendon.

3 qumran between the old and the new testament 3 to a set of questions quite different from those that dominated research until the nineties and has forced us to revisit the different caves and our understanding of their deposits. 6 In the fifties and sixties, scholars, impressed by the contents of Cave 1, assumed without further reflection that the texts found in the caves were all sectarian, and that all the texts were the product of the people who lived at Qumran. Now that the totality of the manuscripts is available to us, however, both these assumptions have been proven wrong. Only a small fraction of the texts can be considered sectarian or pre-sectarian, and only a fraction can be considered as having been penned at Qumran. The majority of the texts representing prayers, hymns, wisdom texts, para-biblical compositions, pseudepgraphic writings, etc., do not have any sectarian characteristics at all. They amount to a total that is roughly equal to or even more than all the biblical and sectarian compositions taken together. Of course, this does not make the collection a random sample of Second Temple literature (since very noticeable absences point to a clear focus in the collection), but its diversity affords us a unique glimpse of the developments that took place in Palestinian Judaism before the first century of the common era in many different strands of thought, and not only within the narrow marginal group represented by the community of Qumran. Many of the theological developments (such as messianic expectations, belief in bodily resurrection, divine sonship, replacement of the sacrificial cult, eschatological scenarios, etc.), a large number of the halachic disputes (on the sabbath, on purity, etc.), and several different structures of community organization, previously attested in Judaism only from within the New Testament, are now documented in these non-sectarian writings. 7 These manuscripts not only alleviate 6 I have done this for Cave 1: Reconsidering the Cave 1 Texts Sixty Years After Their Discovery: An Overview, in E. Tigchelaar (ed.), Proceedings of the Sixth Meeting of the IOQS Ljubljana 2007 (STDJ; Leiden: Brill, 2009) (forthcoming) and for Cave 11: Cave 11 in Context, in Ch. Hempel (ed.), The Dead Sea Scrolls Texts and Contexts (STDJ; Leiden: Brill, 2009) (forthcoming). 7 There were the three main sectors to be investigated in the project as test cases of the core hypothesis. The first has lead to the publication of the monograph by Albert L.A. Hogeterp, Expectations of the End: A Comparative Traditio-Historical Study of Eschatological, Apocalyptic and Messianic Ideas in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament (STDJ 83; Leiden: Brill, 2009), who has worked as a post-doc of the project. The third is dealt with in the dissertation by Dries Somers, Community Functionaries in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the New Testament, which will soon be defended. On Sabbath and Purity see now the contribution by Friedrich Avemarie, Jesus and Purity and by Lutz Doering, Sabbath Laws in the New Testament, in R. Bieringer

4 4 florentino garcía martínez part of our ignorance of Judaism during the Roman period, but they also show us the intersection and interrelation, the appropriation and transformation, of non-sectarian forms of discourse by the sectarian communities. 8 Besides, the different redactions of several sectarian compositions now available reveal to us some of the developments within the group that collected and preserved the manuscripts, and may also help us to grasp the different developments within early Christianity shown in the different writings of the New Testament better. The collection of writings we call the Dead Sea Scrolls appears now as a collection of Jewish religious writings more or less authoritative and possessing a certain coherence, through which, for the first time, we have access to the developments that had happened within Judaism before the birth of Christianity, and we can see how the religious writings that later will become Bible have given rise to other religious writings which would become normative for other communities. 9 And this is the main reason why the students of the New Testament should also be interested in the Scrolls and learn from them. The Dead Sea Scrolls explicitly present themselves as based on the Hebrew Bible but clearly differ from it in a great many theological and legal aspects. It is logical then to consider these differences as documenting the evolution of the theological ideas and the legal norms reflected in the Hebrew Bible that had already taken place within Judaism during the two centuries, at least, which elapsed between the writing of the last book of the Hebrew Bible and the deposit of the manuscripts in the caves around Qumran. Since the New Testament also presents itself as based on the Old Testament but is clearly different in many theological and legal aspects from it, it is logical to consider also these differences as witnesses of the evolution and changes which took place in Judaism during the same period. And since there is no proof of any direct relationship between the two corpora of writings (the core texts of the group that collected Qumran and the writings which form the New Testament), a genetic relationship et al., (eds.), The New Testament and Rabbinic Literature (JSJS; Leiden: Brill, 2009) (forthcoming). 8 The topic on which worked the other post-doc of the Project, Mladen Popović. See now F. García Martínez and Mladen Popović (eds.), Defining Identities: We, You and the Other in the Dead Sea Scrolls (STDJ 70; Leiden: Brill, 2008). 9 See F. García Martínez, Sectario, no-sectario, o qué? Problemas de una taxonomía correcta de los textos qumránicos, RevQ 23/91 (2008):

5 qumran between the old and the new testament 5 or a direct influence of one corpus on the other does not most logically explain the similarities or the differences we find between them. Therefore, I consider the relationship between these two corpora in terms of different evolutionary phases starting from a common ground (the Hebrew Bible) and I see both corpora as different expressions of the multiform reality that was Palestinian Judaism. Both the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament reveal that many and various developments did take place in Judaism and were written from the same basic source: the religious authoritative writings that would later become the Hebrew Bible. And although we will never have a full picture of all these developments because the evidence preserved in the Scrolls is not only fragmentary but partial and purely accidental, we are now able to consider the commonalities and the differences between the two corpora. This is not an easy task, because, as George Brooke says: [c]oncern with differences as well as similarities makes comparison both more complicated as well as in the end more fruitful. 10 In order to analyze and to try to understand both the similarities and differences as evolving from the common shared ground, the Hebrew Bible, I convened an experts meeting in Leuven at which a small group of specialists, interested both in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the New Testament, were to reflect and discuss on the changes that appear, for example, in the use the biblical text itself as a proof text in both corpora; in different legal interpretations explicitly or implicitly deduced from the same texts of the Hebrew Bible; in the biblical foundations of the community structures and functionaries at Qumran and in the New Testament; in the different theological conclusions extracted from the same passages of the Hebrew Bible; in short, on the commonalities and differences between the two corpora when one looks at the common ground from which they developed. The meeting was held in the Theological Faculty of the Catholic University of Leuven on December 3rd to 6th 2007 and produced lively discussions, which were the most fruitful part of the meeting, since they were free from the constrains of a tight time schedule which handicap many such meetings. Both the Dean of the Faculty, Prof. M. Lamberights and the Rector of the University, Prof. M. Vervenne, addressed the 10 George J. Brooke, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), xviii.

6 6 florentino garcía martínez participants at the beginning and the end of the meeting, which was also attended by the colleagues of the Department of Bible of the K.U. Leuven and by some of our doctoral students. 11 The present volume contains a revised form of most of the contributions and the answers of the participants. The voices of the experts are as varied and multiple as are the voices of the Scrolls or of the New Testament. Some of the studies, like the ones by Lim, Brooke, or Jokiranta, are programmatic and propose a general understanding of the relationship. Other studies are more like test cases, which apply the general framework to concrete texts. But all of them clearly follow the directions indicated by George Brook in the conclusion of his Introduction : Those concerned to appreciate some of the exegetical details preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls would do well not to omit the evidence of the New Testament in their search of contemporary Jewish literature which might help in the explanation of challenging fragmentary passages. New Testament Scholars in turn should recognize that the value of the Dead Sea Scrolls for the better appreciation of the Jewish background of much in the New Testament does not lie exclusively in particular matters of organization or messianic belief, but much more broadly in the way in which Jews contemporary with Jesus and Paul constructed their own selfunderstanding and identities through highly intricate and sophisticated interpretations of inherited traditions, interpretations which gave life to texts written in earlier generations. 12 It is hoped that the publication of these studies here will not only prove the well founded hypothesis fundamental to the Leuven research project but help many other scholars of both the Scrolls and the New Testament, to understand the relationship between the two corpora better. 11 I want to thank particularly Sydney Palmer, who has helped to edit the manuscript and has prepared the Indexes. 12 G. Brooke, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament, xxii.