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Response To "New Documents: Qumran And Gnostic Writings" By Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Jr., Sidnie White Crawford

Department of Classics and Religious Studies: Faculty Publications

In my response, I will discuss three points raised by Professor Fitzmyer: the identification of the Qumran sect as the Essenes, Jerome Murphy-O’Connor’s hypothesis of the Babylonian origins of the Qumran sect, and the impact of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls on Old Testament textual criticism.

I would suggest that the group of Jews who inhabited Qumran may have evolved over time, from a group with deep roots in Palestinian Judaism, who split with other Jews over such disputed things as law and calendar, to a sect with highly developed doctrines of, for example, predestination and angelology, which …