The Dead Sea Scrolls Illuminate Scripture

Announcer:

Welcome to The Table Podcast, where we discuss issues of God and culture, brought to you by Dallas Theological Seminary.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Welcome to The Table, where we discuss issues of God and culture. I'm Mikel Del Rosario, cultural engagement manager here at the Hendricks Center at Dallas Theological Seminary. Our topic on the table today is the Dead Sea Scrolls and how they relate to the Bible. I have two expert guests joining me today. First guest is Craig Evans, who is a Distinguished Professor of Christian Origins at Houston Baptist University in Texas. Welcome.

Craig Evans:

Thanks. Good to be with you. Happy to see all of you and I look forward to our discussion.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah, I'm excited about this one. Second guest, coming to us also via Zoom, is Dr. Darrell Bock, no stranger to The Table Podcast. Darrell is the Executive Director of Cultural Engagement and Senior Research Professor of New Testament here at Dallas Theological Seminary. Welcome back, Darrell.

Darrell Bock:

Good to see you, Mikel. We're a little further separated then we normally are. We're just a couple of offices from one another normally.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah, well, we're going to dive right in to our conversation. Craig, just to set the stage for our conversation, for somebody who has no idea what on earth the Dead Sea Scrolls even are, how would you explain to them what we mean by the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Craig Evans:

I think the easiest way is to say, "Look, it's an ancient library." It's a Jewish library. It dates back just over 2,000 years. The range of the books would be about 300 years from, say, the early decades of the first century AD to all the way back close to 300 BC. Most of these books, and we call them scrolls because that's how the books were, they were just rolled up leather and most of these books would date somewhere around 50 BC to 100 BC, give or take.

Craig Evans:

We call them the Dead Sea Scrolls because they're scrolls and they're found in caves, mostly near Qumran, which is right on the edge, the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. That's where they get the name. The scrolls were not found in the Dead Sea. They were found near the Dead Sea, so they're 2,000 plus years old. They're Jewish and therefore they contain, as you would expect, most of the books of what we call the Old Testament. They contain commentaries and a lot of other writings of interpretation, speculation, prophecy, visions of the future, and a lot of legal text, too, about how you fulfill the law, keep yourself pure, etc.

Craig Evans:

It's a library that sheds light on both Judaism and Christianity. That's why both Jews and Christians are keen to study the scrolls. Obviously, the scrolls shed a lot of light on the Hebrew Bible itself, the text of the Old Testament. That's what it is, in a nutshell. Those are the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Mikel Del Rosario:

All the books of the Old Testament, no Esther. Is that correct?

Craig Evans:

That's right. As far as we know, there's no Esther. It's still kind of the jury is out on Nehemiah, and that's because the Nehemiah fragment that came to light, we're not really sure if it came from Qumran and actually, we're not even sure it's genuine. It's been embarrassing. Scrolls that came to light in the last 15 to 20 years, many of them are forgeries, as it turns out. That has embarrassed some schools and collectors who purchased them. The leather is ancient, but the writing is only 20 years old.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Um-hmm (affirmative.) Tell us briefly the story about how some of the first scrolls were discovered.

Craig Evans:

Well, the story goes, the official version, and you have to put a bit of a grain of salt with it, but the version that circulates is sometime in the spring of 1947, Cave 1 was found. We call it. Cave 1 simply because it was the first cave that was found. It's not actually at Qumran. It's a little bit north. Anyway, the story goes, whether it's chasing down a goat or whatever it is, throwing a rock, whatever really happened, somebody went inside this cave.

Craig Evans:

It was not easy to get into, which is why it wasn't found a long time ago. You had to hoist yourself up. There's a hole now that's lower for us old guys to get in, but he got inside and found some jars and hoped to find valuables. Of course, he did, not the kind of valuables he wanted. He found some old leather rolls and he brought some of them back. Antiquities people saw them, got interested in them and that's how the cave was found.

Craig Evans:

In November of '47, a Jewish scholar saw them and recognized them as ancient, wanted to get them. Of course, Jerusalem was divided in those days. There was the Green Line, Palestinian side, Jewish side. Then in February of 1948, some of these scrolls were taken to the schools of oriental research where John Trever was staying, along with Bill Brownlee, both of them my professors years later at Claremont.

Craig Evans:

They recognized them as ancient. They identified correctly the script as Herodian and so John Trever, who happened to be an excellent photographer, complete with camera, tripod, lots of film, was going to film other things. That's why he was there. He took photographs of four of the scrolls. Of course, then the hunt was on and more caves were found, 11 caves in all, including the 12th not that long ago. The 11 caves produced somewhere in the neighborhood of about 1,000 writings. We're not sure because many of them are in fragments and it's hard to tell when you have a pile of fragments, are you looking at one document or five documents? You just don't know. Anyway, that's what we have and it's the greatest find relating to the Bible ever made.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Wow. Is it true that John Trever actually took the Great Isaiah Scroll back to the hotel and put it on the bed and photographed it?

Craig Evans:

Yeah, he did. I've got even more to tell you. He not only took it back to the room where he was staying, took a photograph, I have the photograph, but Bill Brownlee got permission to take the Great Isaiah Scroll home with him that summer, the summer of '48, and he used it in teaching Hebrew at Duke. He was a brand new appointee, a young assistant professor at Duke in 1948. He was 31 years old and so some of his Hebrew students actually had the Great Isaiah Scroll in class. Of course, it was sent back and just to let you know, and Darrell, listen up. You can't do that now. They don't check it out.

Darrell Bock:

Well, my classes will be very disappointed to hear that.

Craig Evans:

Yeah, I know. I'm sorry. Sorry to break the news to you. One of the really interesting things was that when Bill came back in the summer of '48 and he was at Duke, he didn't have a car. He wasn't married to Louise yet. He didn't even have a place to stay. He stayed on campus in a dorm. One of the grad students there, Emmanuel Gitlin, a Jewish Christian, later ordained as a Lutheran minister, passed away, by the way, just a few years ago in his mid-90s. Anyway, he was a grad student several years younger than Bill.

Craig Evans:

He was there and he had a car and Bill said, "I'm getting asked to speak at schools and at churches because I've got this Isaiah Scroll and this new find. He said, "Well, I'll drive you around." Here they are driving around in this car and in a shoebox, the Great Isaiah Scroll in the trunk of the car. Can you imagine that? Anyway, I'm telling this story about 25 years ago. I was in North Carolina. I was at Wake Forest. There was this conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls and I'm standing up there telling this story about this guy driving around Bill Brownlee and his precious Isaiah Scroll. An elderly gentleman jumped up in my talk and said, "That's me. I'm Emmanuel Gitlin. I'm the guy who was driving him around."

Craig Evans:

We had lunch together. Emmanuel didn't even know Bill had passed away many years ago. I got a photograph of him. We talked. I thought, "This brings closure." I did my PhD under Bill Brownlee and then I met his chauffer years later. That was really a fun experience.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Wow. Well, it's so cool to have you on the show, not only because of your academic work but also your personal connection to the research on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Darrell, let's go back to the person who has no idea what on earth the Dead Sea Scrolls are and they just heard Craig's explanation. He alluded to this a little bit, but how would you, in a nutshell, explain to someone why the Dead Sea Scrolls matter to studying the Bible?

Darrell Bock:

Well, I'm going to get up for a second because I want to show you something. Here are two volumes of Dead Sea Scrolls in parallel lines so you've got the English text on one side, the translation, and then representations of what the texts looked like on the other. I don't know if you can see that very well. I just want people to have a sense of how many texts we're actually talking about here. It isn't like a little bitty book. These are two volumes.

Darrell Bock:

It says Text Concerning Religious Law, Exegetical Text, Parabiblical Text, Calendrical Text. Calendars were a big deal to the Dead Sea Scroll community. Sapiential text, which is just a fancy way to talk about wisdom, Poetic and Liturgical Text, Additional Genres, and Unclassified Text. There's a lot of stuff here and it took a long time for people to appreciate what was going on for a variety of reasons.

Darrell Bock:

These texts are important because they set a religious context for Second Temple Judaism in the time of Jesus. The community existed from the middle of the second century, BC, all the way up through the war with Rome that led to the fall of Jerusalem and then eventually the fall of everything in Israel, extended from '67 to '73. If you want to be really specific, of course, Jerusalem fell in '70.

Darrell Bock:

Because it's a library that represents all kinds of works out of Judaism, you all of a sudden gained a more religious context for Second Temple thinking, theological thinking in the period. Granted it's through the eyes of a separatist sect of some kind, but the amount of information that it gave us about Second Temple Jewish thinking in this period literally, it didn't just revolutionize our understanding of the region and Second Temple Judaism, it also revolutionized the way we think about certain aspects of the New Testament, because all of a sudden, the Jewish backdrop to much of the New Testament, which people understood but perhaps didn't entirely appreciate, became clearer as the result of the finds and the overlaps that people saw between the texts and the New Testament. Craig, I don't know if you have anything you want to add to that summary.

Craig Evans:

That's a very good summary. You hit the nail right on the head. We had precious little information. You go back to the 1940s. We just didn't have a lot of direct information from that period of time. Then it just multiplied it. The scrolls came along and shed light on all kinds of things. You read that table of contents. That was very helpful. You had all these different kinds of genres. Not all of it is sectarian. At Qumran, it isn't just all stuff that they wrote but copies of documents that we already knew about.

Craig Evans:

Of course, now we had Enoch, for example, in Aramaic instead of in Greek translation and Ethiopic translation. Qumran was just a bonanza to help us understand better the kinds of literature available, the kinds of events that were going on at a crucial time, a very crucial time for Christianity.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Um-hmm (affirmative,) so it helps us understand more about life and culture and history and beliefs, things that were being discussed before the time of the New Testament, during the New Testament time and even some after the New Testament time as well.

Darrell Bock:

The use of terminology as well. The way in which the Bible was read, the hermeneutics with which it was read, there's hardly an area of Biblical study that the scrolls don't touch in one way or another.

Mikel Del Rosario:

A bonanza, as Craig said. Very exciting for not only archeology but also New Testament studies and biblical studies in general. Craig, let's talk about the discovery in March, 2021, where there were dozens of Dead Sea Scroll fragments that were found recently. What exactly did they find?

Craig Evans:

Well, this very recent find, maybe I should have said that at the very beginning. When I'm talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls, most scholars when they talk about the Dead Sea Scrolls, they talk about the ones at Qumran and nearby caves that are connected to Qumran. It's 990 or whatever the total number. I don't think we will ever know how many manuscripts actually were recovered.

Craig Evans:

There were other caves farther south at Muraba'at and at Nahal Hever and so the most important ones, from our point of view, are scrolls that date to the Bar-Kokhba Era. These are scrolls that would be at the beginning of the second century. Bar-Kokhba fought his rebellion 132 and 135 [CE], ended in defeat. Bar-Kokhba was his nickname, Son of the Star. The man's real name was Simon Ben Kosiba. There were people who fled, hid in these caves, further south at Nahal Hever.

Craig Evans:

Now these make the Qumran caves look like a walk in the park. These things are cliffs and they're hard to get into, and Yigael Yadin investigated most of this in the '60s. It's been re-investigated 10 years ago and part of Operation Scroll, which has been an effort to systematically look at every single cave in the area on the idea that maybe some of them have things in them and we want to check them out before politically we lose control of this area or looters or whatever, whatever. These caves in and around Nahal Hever have been looked at again.

Craig Evans:

In this most recent effort, more scroll fragments, well, not scroll fragments but really, ancient Greek fragments have come to light. We had from Nahal Hever a Greek minor prophet's scroll that was published 30 years ago by Emanuel Tov. Well, what they have found in what's call the Cave of Horror, where skeletons were found years ago, are fragments of Greek Zechariah and Nahum. And so, what do you know?

Craig Evans:

I think what this tells us is you know what? It's worth looking in these caves. I've had people say, "Well, what's the big deal? Just go in and look at all the caves, with a flashlight and take a look." Well, what you don't know is these caves, a lot of times, are halfway filled up with debris, dust, bat dung, guano and so on and you're crawling around. It's not easy. You don't just walk in like an empty room with a flashlight and say, "Oh, there's nothing here." You really have to excavate it, so it's a lot of work."

Craig Evans:

That's how they found Cave 12 four years ago. They found some leather fragments, no text, but they found scroll jars and so on. That's related to Qumran, but this cave a mile south is not. It's related to the Bar-Kokhba Era and so we have more fragments in Greek of these two minor prophets that I mentioned.

Craig Evans:

The big takeaway for me is you've got Greek translation and yet, you come to the Divine Name and instead of writing it out at "Kyrios," which would be usually what they do in Greek, or even trying to sound it out with Greek letters so it sounds like Yahweh, it actually has Hebrew, the Tetragrammaton, written in Hebrew, "Yahweh." Well, that's very interesting. It switches back into the Hebrew language.

Darrell Bock:

The interesting thing about this, and just to give people a geographical feel, think of the Dead Sea, which is shaped like an oval. Qumran is probably about a 10:00 or 10:30 on your dial and these caves are more than 10 miles to the south, so I don't know, 9:00, 8:30, something like that if you're thinking about an oval that's like a watch dial. What it shows is how dispersed remains are in the area, which helps to make sense of why they are searching literally every open space they can get into for this material. It's a little bit like, "Oh, I found another one, so that means I'd better keep looking." That's the feel of what this is representing.

Mikel Del Rosario:

That's really interesting detail to know about the Divine Name. Does that help us date the scrolls at all?

Craig Evans:

Well, I'm not a paleographer. I suppose it could, but I think given the location and given the fact that it's written in Greek, they can look at the Greek text, not so much the Divine Name, but the Greek text and see if it matches. I'm assuming they've done that. I've looked at some of the images. They do seem to be the same style of Greek that we found in the second century in the same caves, so I'm guessing that probably is a late first, early second century copy of Zechariah and Nahum.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Now you talked earlier about looters. You mentioned looters going into the caves. I've seen pictures of people rappelling down in and heard about drones being used. It's really more involved than most people think. How much of a concern are looters with the caves being so inaccessible?

Craig Evans:

Well, the more inaccessible, the better, in a sense. It would be a very dangerous thing for looters to try to get into these caves. They would have to be convinced that there are valuables in them. Looters aren't interested in work. They're interested in going in and quickly finding something that's easy to find. They might have a metal detector with them or whatever. A lot of these caves, it's just plain hard work. I'll tell you you could kill yourself if you fell off of one of these cliffs. I lecture on archeology also and the dangers thereof. This is very similar to that.

Craig Evans:

People die. It's a little bit of an India Jones thing, but people have fallen to their death by dropping into holes. People have been killed by cave-ins, so this isn't the thing that you just do on a lark. You need to know what you're doing. Looters normally, they go after things that are easy to do, easy to find. Of course, forgery has been the main thing for the Dead Sea Scrolls. It's not looting, really, it's forgery.

Craig Evans:

People get ahold of leather that's ancient. It's not hard to imitate the Herodian script so if you have a piece of leather about that size, you just put it over a real text and get a sense of, "Aha. That's the text that I can now copy here." It's already been scored so you already have the lines impressed in the Hebrew and the Hebrew hangs from the text. English sits on the text or on the lines so you hang your letters. You can make it look really good and a lot of these fakes, they've fooled people out of millions of dollars.

Craig Evans:

One of my own students is one. Kip Davis, Christopher Davis. He's the one that blew the whistle a few years ago in articles that appeared in the Dead Sea Discoveries. He looked at them under the microscope and he realized, "Oh, there's a problem here." The ink was jumping the cracks in the leather, jumping like a bridge. You could see that in the microscope. The ink was going undamaged over abraded, roughed-up portions of leather. The ink wasn't damaged. Then the real tell-tell sign was rock salt still pressed in against the ink. That's what is used to make the ink look old and dusty, the way ancient ink would look. I think that's the real problem. You get people looting these caves, they find some leather and the next thing you know, you get some fakes and somebody naively pays a half million dollars for some pieces of leather.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Wow. Well, Darrell, you mentioned earlier the relevance of these scrolls to the New Testament and the beliefs that were circulating around the time of Jesus, especially. Tell us a little bit about the Messianic expectation that we see leading up to the time of Jesus and during the time of Jesus that we've got from the scrolls.

Darrell Bock:

Well, it's interesting. We've got a variety of things going on. There's at least one scroll that talks about two messiahs, one a priestly messiah, the other a regal messiah. It's important to appreciate the fact that many people think the founding of this community was a reaction to the Hasmoneans holding both priestly and kingship responsibilities. They just fought the Maccabees in war in an attempt to defend the trustworthiness and integrity of the Jewish faith, which had a priestly line and a king line. Now, all of a sudden, you get someone who puts kingship and priest together, even thou gh it was designed to be temporary, and the reaction is that's not biblical; that's not what we fought to defend, so there's a reaction.

Darrell Bock:

At least that's one of the explanations for the founding of the community. There's a two messiah model that we see in some of the texts. The other texts are full of passages that we also see in the New Testament applied messianically. A very famous text called Florilegium has references to 2nd Samuel 7. It has references to Amos 9. You read this and you go, "They must have read the New Testament before the New Testament was written," which is exactly what was going on. There is this messianic expectation that exists.

Darrell Bock:

There has been some debate about whether there are some messianic texts that have suffering attached to them. That's probably less than likely in terms of the location, but that has been at least presented at times as one aspect of the messianic expectation at Qumran. Remember, it's a library so you're not just dealing with the view of the people who took care of the scrolls and that kind of thing. They're actually collecting Jewish texts of all sorts as a part of that library.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Craig, do you have anything to add to that in terms of things that Jesus said or referred to that are illuminated by these scrolls?

Craig Evans:

Yeah, there's one tremendous example. It's probably the most important example that relates directly to one of Jesus' teachings. John the Baptist is in prison. He's discouraged. He sends messengers to Jesus. You have the story in Matthew 11 and Luke 7. The question put to Jesus from John is, "Are you He who is to come or should we look for another?" Jesus then responds by saying, "Well, go back and tell John what you are hearing about and seeing and everything. The blind regain their sight. Lepers are cleansed. Dead are raised up. The poor have good news preached to them." What happened was a text, a fragmentary text. There's a chunk of it and it's 4Q. That means it Qumran Cave 4, document 521. Some call it the Messianic Apocalypse. It reads very similarly.

Craig Evans:

Now what's really interesting about it is Matthew, as Matthew, as the evangelist, he introduces this exchange between John and Jesus as "When John was in prison, heard about the works of the Messiah." That's what he adds to the text. Luke doesn't do this. This is Matthew, his own editorial way of introducing it. There were skeptics and critics who cried foul and said, "This is Matthew trying to bump up this exchange between Jesus and John and turn it into a messianic thing, blah-blah-blah."

Craig Evans:

Well, we get this 4Q521 text published about 30 years ago now and it starts off by saying, "Heaven and earth will obey his messiah." Then everything in them, the holy ones will be respected, and so on. Then it goes on and gives these parallels about the blind regaining their sight and the poor having good news preached to them, the wounded being healed and so on. Guess what? These parallels, these things that Jesus mentioned, that are happening that give proof that He really is the one to come and that John should have assurance and know that, according to 4Q521, that happens when the Messiah shows up. What this shows is not only do we have a parallel with Jesus, Matthew knows what he's talking about. He rightly recognized the messianic significance of both the question and the answer.

Craig Evans:

I think that's a tremendous example and, of course, it gets even deeper because Jesus' reply, you can say every single one of these phrases comes out of Isaiah so there are two or three places in Isaiah and you say, "Oh, this is what Jesus is doing," but the 4Q521 passage not only alludes to these Isaiah passages, but the way it begins comes right out of Psalm 146, verses 6 through 8. "These are the things Yahweh does. He opens the eyes of the blind. He's the one that created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. He does all this stuff."

Craig Evans:

What gets really interesting is that with that in mind, the answer that Jesus gives is basically saying, "I'm doing Yahweh's things. I'm doing the things that the Lord does." You get a very high Christology potential in the backdrop when you go to 4Q521. It actually bumps the Christology high. Well, you think it's Christianity that does that. It's the New Testament that bumps messianism up. Well, man, that is pretty high and so when the messiah comes, according to 4Q521, heaven and earth obeys Him. That's really saying something. That becomes, in my view, the backdrop to like when Jesus stills the storm or He walks on water and the disciples are thunderstruck and say, "Who then is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him?"

Craig Evans:

Well, I'll tell you who He is. He's this messiah figure whom heaven and earth obeys. That's who it is. Qumran, in this sense, sheds light directly on a passage where Jesus replies to John, but it also fills in an important element of backdrop on how the annointed one of the Lord, in a sense, acts as God himself, which that tells you something about the openness at Qumran to a very high Christology. By the way, we don't think Qumran composed 4Q521, but it's not likely they would have a book in their library that they disagreed with, or they wouldn't have it.

Darrell Bock:

Yeah, that passage is interesting for a whole series of reasons. When John is asking Jesus basically to validate himself, he doesn't do it with a claim of something that you can't look at and see. He does it with these eschatological acts out of the language of Isaiah. All those passages in Isaiah come in context in which the deliverance of God is being described and how it's going to impact the people. There is no Old Testament example of a blind person being given sight, so you've got that element of the equation. Even the things that are listed are unusual. Some of the others have precedent in the Old Testament or in the Hebrew scriptures. There's just a lot going on with that passage, Christologically.

Darrell Bock:

Another important fact that we see confirmed at Qumran is the way the sect described itself in terms of a community waiting in the desert for the deliverance of the Lord through the imagery of Isaiah 40, which of course gets applied in the New Testament to the ministry of John the Baptist as a preparation for Jesus. There are all kinds of overlaps like this. I mentioned earlier the hermeneutical overlap, what we call pesher interpretation. This is that interpretation which we see in a text like Acts 2, we also see examples of at Qumran.

Darrell Bock:

There's just lots of touch points here with the way in which things are being summarized. Everyone's wrestling with how do you put the hope of the Old Testament together. How do you put the hope of the Hebrew scriptures together? This gives us a glimpse of how one group, and then the writings associated with the Judaism at the time, attempted to do this in a variety of ways and thus the Dead Sea Scrolls become a fascinating, not just bonanza but literally a mall of interpretations and ways of putting the scriptures together that Judaism is wrestling with this, as it's trying to sort out, all right, what is God going to do one day.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Darrell, how much of this would have been in the background of people's minds when they heard Jesus read out of Isaiah and Luke 4, for example? Did they know that there was more than just Isaiah that had those ideas in it as well?

Darrell Bock:

I think in some cases, that would be the case. The more theologically oriented certain people were, they certainly engaged in these kinds of speculations, that kind of thing. I think it would be hard to say that everybody walking around in Judea at the time had these ideas, but there's no doubt that this is a period starting from, really, 6 AD on of high messianic expectation, the hope of deliverance in one way or another. Two very concentrated periods, one when Rome began to impose taxation on the land and then as the events that led to the war between Rome and Israel that culminated in the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, in those two periods, there were very intense messianic expectations and so people would have been hoping for and longing for the deliverance of God, to be rescued.

Darrell Bock:

The anticipation was they would be rescued from this Roman presence in the Holy Land. That's what they were longing for. You even see hints of that in the way that disciples are reacting to Jesus. In fact, John's question in the passage that Craig mentioned is probably triggered by the fact that Jesus isn't quite the kind of messiah that John was anticipating him being, because He had preached that the ax was lying at the root of the tree as the judgment's right around the corner and Jesus didn't seem to be bringing that kind of anticipated judgment in the way in which he was ministering so it raised the question. "Are you the one to come or should we expect another?"

Mikel Del Rosario:

Um-hmm (affirmative.) Now Craig, you've also talked about a connection between Melchizedek and the forgiveness of sins in connection with the Dead Sea Scrolls. Could you explain that to us?

Craig Evans:

Well, there's another text at Qumran. It's from Cave 11. It's number 13. It's also called the Melchizedek text. It's fascinating. We don't know how big it was originally. We have three columns. Columns 1 and 3 are in very poor condition, but column 2 we can reconstruct. It's about 14, 15 pieces. It's pretty well put back together. It begins with a quotation of Leviticus 25:13, which is the law of Jubilee, where everybody's debts are forgiven. As you know, the Aramaic word for debt is the same as sin. This plays into the idea that your sins against God are like, well, like debts, right? This gets eschatologized and it gets lumped with the very passage that Darrell just mentioned, Isaiah 61. It's part of Jesus' preaching at Nazareth, described in more detail in Luke 4 than in the parallel at Mark 6.

Craig Evans:

These two passages come together, the Jubilee of Leviticus 25 and the promise of healing and restoration and so on through the Lord's anointed in Isaiah 61. We have commentary on that, so it's beautiful. It sheds light on the backdrop for Jesus' preaching in Luke 4, but what's really mysterious about it is it goes on to talk about this Melchizedek figure and, of course we all know who that is, Genesis 14, Psalm 110, but the idea that he's an eschatological figure, in some way represents God, defeats Satan, forgives sin, heals people, it's like, "Wait a minute. This is beginning to sound familiar."

Craig Evans:

Then the breathtaking one, for me, is at one place in column two, it alludes to, as Jesus did, remember he quotes part of Isaiah 61:2 to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, the year of Yahweh's favor, as the Hebrew text actually says. That gets quoted in His sermon. Well, it gets quoted in the Melchizedek Scroll, only it's the year of Melchizedek's favor. To me, that's just mind blowing. Melchizedek is inserted. These guys at Qumran are pretty conservative and they have the highest, loftiest views of God. They're not going to play fast and loose with the Divine Name.

Craig Evans:

I find that just extraordinary. The year of the Lord's favor is also the year of Melchizedek's favor. In some sense, Melchizedek represents the Lord. Now it's no surprise at all the author of Hebrews runs with the Melchizedek image and uses it to develop a very high Christology in his work. Well, that's no surprise. Look how high the Christology is in this Melchizedek document.

Darrell Bock:

One of the things that this illustration points out is a point we were making very early on, which is you come to understand the Jewish background in what I call the cultural scripts that are in the New Testament that the Dead Sea Scroll illuminates, and all of a sudden, what seemed to be rather mundane claims, or could be cast as rather mundane claims, actually end up being very exalted claims in gospels that traditionally have been associated as having a lower Christology than John in John's gospel.

Darrell Bock:

All of a sudden, the background of these texts where you get these associations between God and this figure to be sent, the exalted nature of that shows that some of the Christology that looks rather innocent, or at least doesn't have a lot to say, ends up having a lot more to say than we realized. These texts help to show that sometimes.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Craig, do you have any examples of Dead Sea Scroll material that help us understand Paul or his work?

Craig Evans:

I do. There are a number of places in this Serekh Scroll that talks about the organization of the community and we realize that Paul uses some of that very language in talking about the church, like an overseer or a teacher or referring literally, in the Greek text, to the many, which usually gets translated as "the majority" or something like that. Qumran uses the same language. What that shows is this is not some distinctive ecclesiastical language that the church developed. It's just the language, a fact of the idea that the church of God, the ekklesia tou theou. Well, you have Kahal L, "assembly of God," or something like that in Qumran.

Craig Evans:

The one that's, for me, just tremendous how it solves problems is the Halakhic Letter. There are six copies of it. It's fragmentary but because we have six copies of the same document, we can combine them, collate them and create almost 100% of the original text. It's also called 4QMMT, and the MMT stands for Miqsat Ma'ase Ha-Torah, the key phrase: "some of the works of the law." Now the beauty of this is, for the first time, we have, outside of Paul and before Paul, that expression, works of the law, that clears everything up. If you remember in Galatians, Paul is furious at Peter because he stopped eating with Gentile Christians because men from James had come down from Jerusalem. There's something about food and there's something about works of law somehow that's connected.

Craig Evans:

Then we have the problem with the book of James where he talks about how your faith is dead if there aren't any works. This created a nightmare for Martin Luther. Well, 4QMMT singlehandedly resolves all these problems. It talks about works of law and we have trouble counting them. We're not certain if it's 20 or 22 or however many, but along the way, two or three of them express concerns about impurity from Gentiles. You do not take grain from Gentiles and mix it with pure food. Then we realize, "Oh, this is an elaboration and enhancement of strict Jewish views that you stay away from non-kosher food. You stay away from Gentiles. You don't even eat in their presence."

Craig Evans:

4QMMT is saying that this is one of the "works of the law." Then it goes on to say that, "If you do these works of the law, it will be reckoned to you as righteousness and it will turn out for you well in the end time." Well, we realize, okay, the authors of 4QMMT are clearly on the other side of the issue compared to Paul. When Paul speaks of works of the law, he is talking about the quest for purity. In this particular case, avoiding impure food, Gentile food, don't eat with Gentiles. 4QMMT makes that crystal clear what the debate is and why Paul so sharply disagrees with Peter.

Craig Evans:

At the same time, it helps us understand better that James is not talking about that. James, in James 2, when he speaks of works, he's talking about living up to the command to love your neighbor as yourself and more than lip service. "If your faith does not translate into any kind of mercy, charity or love, it's a dead faith. That kind of faith will not save." Paul wouldn't have any problem with that, but Paul, in Galatians II and in chapter 3 and also in Romans when he speaks of works of law and then links it to Genesis 15:6 about how Abraham believed God and he was regarded righteous because of that, he's talking about the quest for purity, in this case, specifically also food.

Craig Evans:

But one other little footnote, in 4QMMT, when it talks about being reckoned righteous, if you actually look at the Hebrew, the "reckoned" or "regarded", is in a certain form that doesn't actually match Genesis 15:6. It matches the only one other place in the Hebrew Bible where that verb occurs, and it's Psalm 106, verses 30 to 31 in reference to the zealous priest, Phineas, who pinned those people to the wall, remember, in the camp in the wilderness because of their sin, mixing impurity with Gentiles and idols and so on. From Qumran's point of view, he's the template. You want to be reckoned righteous? You'd better be very zealous for the law. For Paul, of course, no, that's not the template. It's Abraham. He had faith in God. That becomes our template. That's how you're reckoned righteous. 4QMMT just helps us in a lot of ways.

Darrell Bock:

Again, this also illuminates and I've got to come to Luke and Luke in Acts, I just want to make sure he gets time in the New Testament. This also illuminates the pressure that Peter was feeling for sitting down and eating a meal with Gentiles right after Gentiles had first received the gospel. This would have been shocking to a law abiding Jew that he would do this. The background of these kinds of texts shows what was at stake because a very deep part of Jewish faithfulness and identity is tied up in this action in the view of a faithful Jew who says, "No non-kosher food and don't eat with Gentiles."

Mikel Del Rosario:

There's a lot of sensationalized news that comes about when the new find came out, people were advertising it as a new Bible was discovered. Far from something that undercuts the Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls actually illuminate things for us that we would never know because we didn't live back them. These things actually help us understand the Bible. Darrell, is there anything else that we need to say about the Dead Sea Scrolls' connection to Jesus and the New Testament before we sign off?

Darrell Bock:

There probably is, but I don't know if I have time. I feel like the beginning of the gospel of John. You could write endlessly. In fact, people have written endlessly about the impact of the Dead Sea Scrolls, not just on Jesus' teaching and ministry but really running through several portions of the New Testament. We're still studying and learning stuff and the interesting thing is that, as you put the Dead Sea Scroll sin the context of other texts associated with Second Temple Judaism, not a part of Qumran, and you begin to see a consistency with which certain things are used, all of a sudden, you do get additional angles on what's going on in certain New Testament passages. That's what makes the study of the New Testament rich, when you put it in its back frame.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah. Craig, with just about a minute left, I'll give you the last word. What should a Christian know and keep in the back of their mind as they see sometimes these sensationalized kinds of reports about the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Craig Evans:

Well, they need to know that the scrolls are a good thing. It's all good news. They shouldn't be put off because crackpots and sensationalists make claims that are irresponsible. I've given many talks on the scrolls. I've had people who are Christians in the audience saying, "Why are you talking about the scrolls? I understand they embarrass Christianity. They say things about Jesus being married to Mary Magdalene or something like that." This is the damage that kind of irresponsible stuff does, so guys like me and Darrell, all of us, we need to weigh in and say, "Hold on a minute. The scrolls don't talk about that stuff. The scrolls are a good thing and they really help us understand scripture better, help us understand Jesus better. There's nothing in the scrolls that embarrasses Christianity or the church."

Darrell Bock:

Yeah, the issue of Jesus' wife is another example of a non-Qumran fraudulent text that was put forward to create a sensational splash that had no connection to reality in terms of Jesus at all.

Mikel Del Rosario:

That's true. That's a very interesting story and our viewers and listeners can look that one up. That's a fascinating story on the supposed gospel of Jesus' wife fragment. Well, thank you so much, Darrell, for being on the show with us.

Darrell Bock:

My pleasure.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Thank you, Craig, for joining us.

Darrell Bock:

My pleasure.

Mikel Del Rosario:

We thank you so much for joining us here on The Table as well. Please do leave us a review on Apple Podcast, and follow us there. Leaving a review really does help people discover our show, so if you like the content, please leave a review and share it with others. I'm Mikel Del Rosario and I hope that you will join us again on The Table, where we discuss issues of God and culture.

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