Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 01:3 (Summer 1958)
Article: The Dead Sea Scrolls And The Formation Of The Canon
Author: Francis I. Andersen

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BETS 1:3 (Summer 1958) p. 1

The Dead Sea Scrolls And The Formation Of The Canon

Francis I. Andersen

It is now twelve months since Dr. J. Philip Hyatt, in his Presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis reviewed the progress of the study of the Dead Sea materials.1 He expressed one of his challenges in these words: “The whole question of canonicity, and the date of fixing the canon, will have to be restudied.” The aim of this paper is to indicate, in a tentative way, some of the matters that might be involved in such a line of study. The time has scarcely come for aiming at final conclusions, and they will be avoided here. For one thing, the dust of misleading controversy has scarcely subsided, and further, all the relevant materials are not yet fully published. Textual criticism is an exacting discipline, and it will be some time before its results are certain. And even now the literature has become so extensive that only a specialist could hope to do it justice.2

The situation may be clarified and the difficulty of the task indicated by stating simply that the Qumran discoveries and related finds have not thrown any direct light on the history of the formation of the canon of the Old Testament. That is, there is no explicit discussion of the formal concept of canonicity, and certainly no lists of canonical books. The light that they throw is indirect, but none the less valuable and significant for that — the danger is that being less tangible, more elusive, it is more open to misconstruction and misinterpretation, as we shall see.

It has been fully recognized that these sources help to fill in the background of New Testament times, supplying needed information about pre-Christian and pre-rabbinic Judaism. As such their importance cannot be exaggerated. In relation to the canon they show us what scriptures existed, and in what tests, and, more appositely, how they were regarded and used by a community of Jewish sectaries of those days. Not much attention seems to have been paid to the problem of what (tacit) doctrine of scripture was held by the covenanters of Qumran. The importance of this for the study of New Testament backgrounds is obvious, yet most writers who have treated this subject have been content to list numerous parallels between the N. T. and the DSS, and to evaluate the evidence for a closer or remoter connection between them. While it is important that these small details be clarified early in our research, the broader and deeper theological issue of revelation and authority within the two movements needs to be examined. Gaster, for instance, does not include such a point in his list of similarities between the N. T. and the DSS.

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