Qumran and Early Christianity

I have to admit I have always avoided integrating the Qumran texts with theory about Agrippa for very specific reasons. I simply don't feel comfortable enough to make any assessment about what the Qumran community's relationship was with ol' Marcus Julius Agrippa. In the immortal words of Wittgenstein "

Of course I had a revelation today about the relationship of the DSS and Marcion of all things.

So there I was in the basement of my house with my son. We have a large screen TV and he was shouting 'Max and Ruby! Max and Ruby!' as an indication he wanted to watch his favorite show. As I flipped through the channels I saw Lawrence Schiffman of all people giving a lecture on the Qumran concept of predestination. He was citing 1QS III.15, a text I had read a hundred times but never fully realized its importance to my understanding of the beliefs of the Marcionites. The words appeared on the screen as I listened to him in his thick Brooklyn accent explain the concept of free will in 'rabbinic Judaism and Pauline Christianity.'

The words which stood out like a sore thumb in the passage were:

He [God] created man to rule the world, and he assigned two spirits to him that he might walk by them until the appointed time of His visitation

I know these words are hardly new to any of us but they are surprisingly significant when you study early Christianity and Marcionitism in particular.

For normative Christianity presents a scenario where Jesus is God because the womb of Mary became inseminated somehow with the divine seed. Yet the original sectarian interpretation certainly did not involve a virgin birth. It was uncannily familiar with what the Marcionites must have held.

As I have been reconstructing the whole idea of 'God on the Cross' I have struggle to make sense of how any contemporary Jewish community could have ended up venerating a torture instrument. I have to admit I always found the other side of the equation equally problematic as a Jew. How could God come down to earth and make a prolonged 'visit' to humanity? It just didn't seem very 'Jewish' forgetting of course that the kind of Judaism I was familiar with undoubtedly underwent continual refinement in the years since the introduction of Christianity and Islam in order to allow for itself to be presented as a form of 'pure monotheism.'

Whatever the case, the seemingly ridiculous idea of God coming down to visit humanity is explicit in this seminal text in the first century sectarian community.

I leave aside the whole issue of how God could be thought to be crucified for the moment. The fact is that it was refreshing to be reminded how my presuppositions needed fine tuning.

The point again is that this concept in the Community Rule has nothing to do with the Virgin Birth. It must have been identical with the seemingly absurd Marcionite contention that Jesus was God who came down to earth at the beginning of the gospel only appearing to have human form.

While Irenaeus and later Church Fathers make it seem as if these ideas just sprang into the imaginations of 'heretics' like Marcion, the Community Rule makes clear this was not so. It must have been a very 'Jewish' concept - albeit one which became buried after the rise of Christianity - that God would visit humanity at the end of times.

Of course some out there could split hairs and say that the DSS doesn't make explicit that God did not have material form or only came in the appearance of man. Nevertheless it seems hardly likely that Jews would have argued that God could have assumed 'real material' form.

I can't offer proof for my hunch. I have after been proven wrong before, as you have just seen. Yet it seems the most likely scenario that the Marcionites and the Qumran sect shared a parallel notion that God descended from the heavens in order to visit mankind still retaining his spiritual perfection. This appearance on earth has nothing do with a gnostic 'fall from grace.' God is just announcing himself at the end of times all. If you were a Marcionite Christian you just thought that this God appeared in the form of man named Jesus.

Indeed you probably also thought this was the re-appearance of the heavenly column of glory which accompanied Israel at the Exodus. It was for this reason that the Marcionites called him Jesus Chrestos.


Stephan Huller's Observations by stephanhuller.blogspot.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at stephanhuller.blogspot.com.