0swy

I've established through a little research that a) there are no known contemporaneous accounts of Jesus (Christian or non-Christian) and b) that the Gospels are generally agreed to have been first written down at least several decades after the time in which he is alleged to have lived.

But what about these Dead Sea Scrolls which I've had some Christians citing as evidence of a contemporaneous source? Is that what they really are? Do they change anything?

Are there any experts/enthusiasts on this who'd offer their opinion?

vid

They offer "payrus 7Q5" as possible part of gospel of matthew. But that claim is very far stretched, just google it.

Also, there is also a "signs of messiah" scroll 4Q521, that could (or not) list ressurection as one sign. But that again is disputed. If it is right, it shows another yet-unknown traditional expectancy from Messiah, which Jesus very explicitly fulfills in gospels. Nothing so much ground-breaking, IMO.

Apart from that, I am not aware of any extraordinary links to christianity not present in other jewis writings.

mountainman

Dear 0swy,

The general consensus of opinion is that there is no relationship whatsoever between the dead sea scrolls and christianity.

If you are looking for the first, in a chronological sense, of archaeological finds which in some known manner are related to christianity have a look at the Nag Hammadi codices.

Best wishes,


Pete

Toto

IIRC, the Dead Sea Scrolls have been carbon dated to the first century BCE. (There is an article here that might be of interest.)

The DSS can be dated to before 70 CE, when the Roman armies swept through the area, so the best you can say is that they might have been in use about the time that Jesus is supposed to have been alive. But if they were, they provide no support for the existence of Jesus or Christianity.

This has not prevented lots of marketing hype about Jesus and the Qumran community.

Minimalist

That upsets the fundies.

mountainman

Dear Minimalist,

Better yet will be the day when it is widely recognised that the Nag Hammadi tract NHC 6.1, "The Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles" is a satire of the christian religion of the fourth century. And that all the docetic references to Jesus in the apochrypha are simple pagan satire (written by the [ascetic*] greek academics/priests being oppressed by Constanianism):

I look at it as if these authors (ie: the authors of the non canonical texts) set out to exceed Eusebius in their storytelling.

Best wishes,


Pete

PS: * There are many ascetic references in the non canonical literature.

Lord Emsworth

What I have seen apologist's do is use the DSS as a means to knock over a totally untenable strawman position. It runs a little like this:

First they bring in the usual messianic prophecy schtick. (You know, X-thousand Y-hundred and a few fulfilled prophecies, which only has a probability of 1 to Z-trillion of happening by chance. )

Then they make up possible counterarguments. One of which would be, that OT passages were subsequently altered or added in order to conform to the NT Jesus.

And then they bring up the DSS to prove that this is not so.


At least this is some kind of argumentation where Jesus shows up in conjunction with the DSS. And, it might just happen that a poor, eyewashed Christian fundy bring them up as if they meant anything wrt Jesus.

Roger Pearse

A couple of questions that might help you.

1. What do we mean by "contemporaneous" -- written by people alive when Jesus was alive, or written at the time when he was alive?

2. Never mind Jesus; whichever definition we use above for "contemporaneous", can you say what accounts exist for the same area and period that meet that definition?

If not, we might be in the position of a man complaining that Julius Caesar never lived because there is no video footage of his murder. It is curious to argue from the non-existence of video footage that Caesar only never existed, when in fact the same argument would dispose of everyone in antiquity.

This relates to a scroll which some scholars have thought might be a fragment of a gospel. Of course it's possible; after all, the gospels certainly existed by then. However the opinion of the informed has generally been that there isn't enough evidence that the fragment *is* actually from a gospel, and I would (in my ignorance) tend to concur.

Of course it would have been quite extraordinary if part of a copy of a text composed 10 years earlier had been found; centuries between composition and first witness are normal.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

dog-on

Except, I would say, if the composition is to be used as part of an overall marketing effort, like for instance, a religion.

Roger Pearse

No doubt you would. But I would suggest that inventing stories like this about how texts are preserved is in the interests of no-one.

All the best,

Roger Pearse