Q, the Essenes, and the Dead Sea Scrolls: A study in Christian origins

This project is a comparative, transdisciplinary study of the Sayings Gospel Q, the Essenes and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Q is the collection of two hundred and thirty five verses found in both the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark. The Essenes are an ancient Jewish community-network that lived in first century Palestine. The scrolls are the mostly fragmentary remains of a collection of ancient Jewish manuscripts found in the Judean desert near an ancient ruin called Khirbet Qumran. To date, no comparative work on Q, the Essenes, and the Dead Sea Scrolls has been conducted.;The purpose of this study is to (1) perform a careful comparison of a select number of texts from these two textual traditions; (2) examine the historical and ideological subtexts underlying debates over Q, the Essenes, and Christian origins; and (3) question how these debates create and perpetuate an ancient and contemporary politics of (Christian) identity.;The texts selected for this study include (1) Q 6:20-23 & 4Q525; (2) Q 7:22 & 4Q521 2 ii; (3) Q 16:18 & CD 4.20-21-5.1-2/11QTemple 57; and (4) Q 14:5 & CD 11.13-14. These texts have been selected because they represent seminal moments in the construction of Christian identity (within the cultural matrix of Second Temple Judaism) and because they represent particularly acute problems of similarity and difference. This study will utilize (1) specific comparative criteria to investigate the possibility of literary dependence; (2) the cross-cultural rubric of "scriptures" for comparative social psychological analysis; and (3) social identity theory as the intellectual framework facilitating the analysis of identity construction and inter-group conflict. The purpose of this study, therefore, is not only to compare ancient texts, but to locate these texts, and by extension the comparative process itself, within the interpretive communities that comprise the contested and conflicted field known as Christian origins.