Who Wrote The Dead Sea Scrolls

Could Computer Analysis Help Date the Gospels?

Following up on my colleague Alex Knapp’s fascinating post on the work of Moshe Koppel and his team in Israel, the question arises, could their computer model for analyzing the books of the Hebrew Bible shed any light on the authorship of the books in the New Testament?

“The same methods could be applied,” Koppel wrote me. “But we’d have to work with the original Greek text, which poses other difficulties.”

But what if there were away around this problem?

Back in 1998 Maurice Casey, a New Testament scholar at University of Nottingham , wrote a book called Aramaic Sources of Mark’s Gospel . Casey had studied the Dead Sea Scrolls extensively, and drew upon them to make the case that most of Mark was written originally in Aramaic.

How? Weren’t the Gospels, as we have them, written in Greek by Greek Christians many decades after the events they purported to describe?

Not originally, according to Casey. The discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls –which date from the period of the time of Jesus–offered scholars a way to ‘test’ the Greek of the Gospels.

The two languages are as different in structure and syntax as can be, and evolved in very different cultures. Theoretically, any document written originally in Greek, would not translate easily into Aramaic or Hebrew. But as a minority of  New Testament scholars have discovered over the years, much of Mark translates easily back from Greek into very good Aramaic.

And it seems to be an Aramaic that fits with that of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And yet, as Casey wrote, it is a remarkable fact that the quest for the historical Jesus has made little use of Aramaic as an investigative tool:

The discovery of the scrolls puts us in a position to alter the nature of this work. Throughout the first century of critical scholarship, the use of Aramaic was beset with such severe problems that most scholars might well feel that it was a specialized area of dubious value….The use of Aramaic of different times and places, the use of only one word at a time, the elevation of supposed puns to the level of  a major tool when they could not be properly verified, all this was enough to keep Aramaic as a specialized area. [p. 253]

The discovery of the scrolls, Casey argued, essentially changed the game. Scholars now have the majority of words that they need extant in Aramaic from the right period to ‘reconstruct’ a large chunk of Mark’s Aramaic foundation.

The Biblical World: Who wrote the Dead Sea Scroll? Loren ...

The video on the Dead Sea Scrolls provides an overview of how the scrolls were discovered and what scholars have learned. One topic that has been argued over the years is who wrote the scrolls. Initially it was supposed that they were written by the Essenes , a Jewish separatist sect. Others, like Norman Golb , have suggested that there is no evidence for the Essene hypothesis.

Who wrote the Dead Sea scrolls?, the search for the secret of Qumran

Who wrote the Dead Sea scrolls?

Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Personages of Earliest Christianity

In the beginning, a short history of the Hebrew language