Jesus, John the Baptist, and the Dead Sea Scrolls

I’ll never forget the time I was at a party, I introduced myself as a guy doing a PhD in New Testament, and the guy turned around and said, “I thought the Dead Sea Scrolls have disproved all that stuff.” I made a scrunchy face and then asked if he had ever read the Dead Sea Scrolls, because it was obvious he hadn’t.

Have you ever wondered about the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), what they are, when they were found, and their relevance for the study of ancient Judaism, Jesus, and early Christianity?

Well, Prof. Jodi Magness was interviewed on The Ancients podcast and she did two very good episodes explaining the DSS and what they mean.

Let me clear one thing up for you.

The DSS nowhere mention Jesus and Jesus is unlikely to have encountered anyone from the Qumran community where the DSS were found.

However, John the Baptist was baptizing at a place not too far from the Qumran settlement, and some things he said and did are analogous to the Qumran community.

As I’ve argued previously:

A number of scholars have proposed that John the Baptist was a one-time member of the sect of Judeans who lived on the shores of the Dead Sea at Qumran. Such a relationship is certainly possible for a number of reasons.

First, John’s ministry on the Jordan took place in an area that was at best a day or two’s walk from the Qumran settlement. Luke reports that as a child John grew up in spiritual strength and “he was in the wilderness until the day he appeared publicly to Israel” (Luke 1:80), and we know from Josephus that the Essenes often adopted children and trained them in their customs (Josephus, War 2.12).

Second, if we compare John as he is portrayed in the Gospels with themes and motifs drawn from the Dead Sea Scrolls, then a number of striking similarities emerge. Both John and the Qumranites practiced a form of ritual baptism, both separated themselves from ordinary Palestinian life, both practiced a form of religious devotion independent of the institutions of Judaism such as the temple and its cultus, both pronounced woes of judgment upon their contemporaries for moral laxity, both looked ahead to God’s imminent and dramatic intervention in Israelite history to effect deliverance, both possessed an apocalyptic worldview with messianic themes about coming deliverers, and – most importantly of all – both saw in Isa 40:3 the task of their calling as preparing the way for the Lord out in the wilderness.

However, a number of key differences are apparent as well.

John’s ministry was public, whereas the Qumranites were largely secluded.

The character of John’s ministry was prophetic, while the Qumranites were largely priestly.

John interacted with persons who would have been regarded as morally and ceremonially impure by the Qumranites (e.g., ritually unclean Jews, non-Jews, prostitutes, tax-collectors).

The baptism of John was for eschatological preparation, while baptism at Qumran was part of initiation into the community and part of a daily regime of purity and ritual.

The “stronger one” spoken of by John was a dispenser of the Spirit, whereas the messianic figures attested in the Qumran writings are davidic and priestly.

John looks to the deliverance of all of Israel, while the Qumranites anticipate only a remnant of themselves being saved.

“John the Baptist,” in Jesus Amongst His Friends and Enemies, eds. Chris L. Keith and Larry Hurtado (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2011), 60-80.