"Dead Sea Scrolls at Seventy" by Timothy Lim

[StephenGoranson]

http://www.christianorigins.div.ed.ac.u ... t-seventy/

[John2]

That is a good article. Thanks, Stephen. I generally enjoy your links and comments.

This part stood out to me:

Fourth, the religious ideas of the sectarian communities were drawn from what I have called the “sectarian matrix” of ancient Judaism. The sectarian communities reflected in the Dead Sea Scrolls are not to be identified with the earliest followers of Jesus and the early church. However, the use of so many of the same or similar terminology and ideas in their writings suggests a connection between them that is difficult to deny. The identification of the Essene Gate and quarter in Jerusalem is consistent with the view that the communities likely interacted with one another.

The theory of the sectarian matrix posits that the Essenes and the followers of Jesus came upon the same biblical texts and distinctive ideas, but drew different lessons from them. These ideas were absent or ignored in Judaism of the period. For instance, the sectarians and early church were the only ones to have used the concept of “the new covenant” from the prophecy of Jeremiah. Other Jews did not comment on “the new covenant” nor did they use it in their writings. The sectarians of the scrolls, Paul and other Christian authors of the New Testament drew on this religiously significant notion of a new covenant in the prophetic writing, but they understood “newness” differently. The covenanters took newness to be a renewal of the old covenant, whereas Paul and the author of the epistle to the Hebrews saw in the Jeremianic prophecy a new dispensation in the life and death of Jesus. The sectarian matrix is a subset of ancient Judaism with distinctive and overlapping ideas. It is the well from which the Essenes, Christians and other sectarians drew their inspiration.

Regarding the statement that, "The covenanters took newness to be a renewal of the old covenant, whereas Paul and the author of the epistle to the Hebrews saw in the Jeremianic prophecy a new dispensation in the life and death of Jesus," I suspect that pre-70 CE Jewish Christians (and some post-70 CE) may have also "took newness to be a renewal of the old covenant," given their emphasis on observing the Torah.