Qumran Evidence For The Reliability Of The Gospels -- By: Larry W. Hurtado

Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 11:4 (Fall 1968)
Article: Qumran Evidence For The Reliability Of The Gospels
Author: Larry W. Hurtado


Qumran Evidence For The Reliability Of The Gospels

Larry W. Hurtado, M.A.*

[*Associate Pastor, First Assembly of God Church, Akron, Ohio]

Conservative New Testament scholarship is confronted with the view that the canonical Gospels are mainly ficticious creations of second or third generation Christianity. It is held that the earliest Christians were apocalyptically minded, looking for the Messiah to come speedily but placing no emphasis upon the earthly Jesus. Later, when the Parousia did not immediately happen it became necessary to find Messianic significance in the earthly life of Jesus. 1 The Gospels are outgrowths of that attempt. We are encouraged to believe that the problem of the “Messianic Secret” is solved when we see that Jesus did not proclaim himself to anyone as Messiah during his earthly life. It was only later that this belief arose. In the “Messianic Secret” of the Gospels then we see a combination of the early belief that Jesus was not Messianically significant in his earthly life and the later belief that he was. The earliest of the Gospels, Mark, has a pretty strong mixture of both ideas. The later Gospels show the increase of the latter belief, until in John the earlier belief is almost entirely absent.

Bultmann believes that the process of increasing attention to the earthly Jesus in later Christianity was continued in the apocryphal Gospels. 2 In these works, names are supplied for anonymous people of the canonical Gospels. Other details are added and there is evidence for the creation of tradition about events in the life of Jesus. Believing that these apocryphal Gospels are a continuation of the process which produced the canonical Gospels, he postulates that the father back we go toward earliest Christianity the less interest there is in Jesus of Nazareth. The full conclusion is that most of the Gospel material is a fabrication. We cannot then know very much of Jesus at all.

Until the discovery at Qumran we had little evidence that this could not have been the situation in Chrisianity. The scrolls are of great importance in showing us the beliefs and practices of a group very similar to early Christianity and from about the same period. In this paper the writer hopes to show that the Qumran sect was a group that combined belief that history was significant with a strong hope for the future. This combined attitude can be shown to be similar to that displayed in the Gospels. The import of this is that we now have a precedent for believing that the earliest Christians could have had both strong apocalyptic hopes and an interest in the historical Jesus. This means that the Gospels

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