Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 01:3 (Summer 1958)
Article: The Scrolls And The Scribes Of The New Testament
Author: Joseph H. Dampier

---

BETS 1:3 (Summer 1958) p. 8

The Scrolls And The Scribes Of The New Testament

Joseph H. Dampier

Johnson City, Tennessee

The finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls has brought with it an intense interest in the Essenes. That the existence of this party or confraternity which is designated by Josephus as a philosophic sect must have continued in Palestine with the Pharisees and Sadducees into the period described in the Gospels is almost universally taken for granted. Then why are there no Essenes in the New Testament?

The Qumran Community must have existed near the Dead Sea from at least 100 B.C. to 68 A.D. It is not mentioned in the Gospels. The size of the cemetery would indicate a sizable membership.

The solution most generally accepted is that the Essenes and the Qumran convenanters were the same people and, if not identical, were so closely identified that the one is a part of the other.

This does not answer the question of the silence of the New Testament on these contemporary religious movements or sects. A possible solution to this problem is that Qumran and/or the Essenes may have been known under more than one name and that they are present in the New Testament under a different name than in Josephus and Philo.

The Qumran sectaries (perhaps known in Josephus as the Essenes) are known in the New Testament as the Scribes. The Qumran Community hid a library of Biblical and non-Biblical manuscripts, and the ruins of the monastery has a scriptorium with desks still in place. It is rather obvious that they were scribes.

Qumran was a community of scribes, but were the Scribes of the Gospels connected with the Qumran Community? Or, were they, in some way that we do not yet understand, indirectly related?

The Manual of Discipline and some other references in the Dead Sea Scrolls form the connecting link of evidence which shows us the same sect. While the New Testament never uses the term ‘Essene’, Josephus is almost equally silent about ‘Scribes’, for with the exception of “holy scribes” in Jewish Wars and a single use of grammateus in Contra Apion where it is not translated Scribe he makes little use of the term.

The first question that must be answered is whether the Scribes were a party or a profession. In the Old Testament the Soferim were writers, keepers of the records, and in some cases evidently official recorders. The LXX translated this as Scribe grammateus. By the time the New Testament was written, writing must have been a more general skill, and the word ‘scribe’ had taken on other meanings. That some had become teachers and lawyers and doctors of the law is not to be denied. But, that the word did not have a single meaning is indicated b...

visitor : : uid: ()