John, Qumran, and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Sixty Years of Discovery and Debate.

• Author: Elledge, C.D.
• Position: Book review

John, Qumran, and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Sixty Years of Discovery and Debate. Edited by MARY L. COLOE and TOM THATCHER. Early Judaism and Its Literature, vol. 32. Atlanta: SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE, 2011. Pp. xiii + 228. $28.95 (paper).

This collection of essays surveys the past and continuing relevance of the Dead Sea Scrolls for addressing a number of critical problems in the study of the Gospel of John. Contributions originally arose from a 2007 joint meeting of the "John, Jesus, and History Group" and the "Johannine Literature Section" of the Society of Biblical Literature. After a history of interpretation of both the Scrolls and their use in Johannine interpretation, six articles address a variety of concerns in the contemporary interpretation of the Fourth Gospel.

Assessing developments in Qumran Studies from 1997-2007, Eileen Schuller argues that in light of the newer manuscript publications of the 1990's, conversations between John and Qumran should be updated to reflect the complex redactional activity that is exhibited in multiple manuscripts of documents like the Rule of the Community and Thanksgiving Hymns', moreover, the future study of the Scrolls themselves should benefit from an array of more literary and sociological approaches to the collection (pp. 8-14). Paul Anderson's survey of the varying roles Qumran has played in the study of John highlights and categorizes several areas of importance, including John's dualism, Christology, sectarianism, and its Jewishness within its first-century History of Religions context (pp. 16-17); he further cites seven areas for further investigation. These include the figure of John the Baptist himself as a possible link between Qumran ideology and the formation of the Johannine movement; the variety of messianic figures in the Scrolls and the varying Christological assumptions of John; the sociological roles that dualism played within the two communities; the adversarial relationships between the two communities and the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem; and literary parallels with the Scrolls that may help to explain the peculiar features of John's own redactional complexities (pp. 45-50).

After these programmatic introductions, more specialized studies treat particular problems in the Fourth Gospel by utilizing the Scrolls. Building upon contemporary discussion of the "mystery to come" (rz nhyh) in writings like lQMysteries and 4QInstruction, John Ashton pursues the theology of the...