Texts in Conversation
The Dead Sea Scrolls Community Rule describes the Qumran sect as walking in the spirit of truth set against the spirit of injustice. 2 John uses similar language to commend the elect lady because her children are walking in the truth.
Share:
2500 BCE
1000+ CE
1QS
Community Rule
Dead Sea Scrolls
2 These are the counsels of the spirit to the sons of truth in this world. And as for the visitation of all who walk in this spirit, it will be healing, great peace in a long life, and fruitfulness, together with every everlasting blessing and eternal joy in life without end, a crown of glory and a garment of majesty in unending light. But the ways of the spirit of falsehood are these: greed, and slackness in the search for righteousness, wickedness and lies, haughtiness and pride, falseness and deceit, cruelty and abundant evil, ill-temper and much folly and brazen insolence, abominable deeds committed in a spirit of lust, and ways of lewdness in the service of uncleanness, a blaspheming tongue, blindness of eye and dullness of ear, stiffness of neck and heaviness of heart, so that man walks in all the ways of darkness and guile. 3 And the visitation of all who walk in this spirit will be a multitude of plagues by the hand of all the destroying angels, everlasting damnation by the avenging wrath of the fury of God, eternal torment and endless disgrace together with shameful extinction in the fire of the dark regions. The times of all their generations will be spent in sorrowful mourning and in bitter misery and in calamities of darkness until they are destroyed without remnant or survivor.
Date: 160 B.C.E. - 100 B.C.E. (based on scholarly estimates)
2 John 1:4
New Testament
3 Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us from God the Father and from Jesus Christ the Son of the Father, in truth and love. 4 I rejoiced greatly because I have found some of your children living according to the truth, just as the Father commanded us. 5 But now I ask you, lady (not as if I were writing a new commandment to you, but the one we have had from the beginning), that we love one another.
Search:
Notes and References
“... William Sanford LaSor was impressed with numerous phrases unique to Qumran that reappear only in the Fourth Gospel and the Johannine Epistles: ‘to do the truth’ (1QS 1.5; 5.3; 8.2; compare John 3:21); ‘walking in truth’ (1QS 4.6, 15; compare 2 John 4; 3 John 3); and, ‘witnesses of truth’ (1QS 8.6; compare John 5:33; 18:37). As D. Moody Smith correctly reports, ‘[T]hat the Qumran scrolls attest a form of Judaism whose conceptuality and terminology tally in some respects quite closely with the Johannine is a commonly acknowledged fact.’ John Painter also astutely concludes ‘that the context in which the Johannine tradition was shaped ... is best known to us in the Qumran texts.’ Craig Evans rightly judges, ‘The relevance of the Scrolls for Johannine studies can scarcely be doubted.’ ...”
Charlesworth, James H.
"The Fourth Evangelist and the Dead Sea Scrolls Assessing Trends over Nearly Sixty Years" in Coloe, Mary L. and Thatcher, Tom (eds.) John, Qumran, and the Dead Sea Scrolls Sixty Years of Discovery and Debate
(p. 168) Society of Biblical Literature, 2011
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
Your Feedback:
Leave a Comment
Anonymous comments are welcome. All comments are subject to moderation.