Historicity of Jesus - 2

[acharya]

http://www.burningcross.net/crusades/jesus...ea-scrolls.html

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->To summarize, Professor N.S. Rajaram in his book “The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Crisis of Christianity” the contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls challenged the two most fundamental beliefs of Christianity: the uniqueness of Jesus Christ and Christianity as the embodiment of the message of Christ. Both these beliefs are put in jeopardy by the Dead Sea Scrolls and thus it becomes understandable why the Catholic Church procrastinated in making the Dead Sea Scrolls available to the world.



First, the scrolls make no specific mention of Jesus or that the ‘Jesus message’ originated with him. According to the emerging picture from the accounts of the times in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jesus would at best have been one among many “teachers of righteousness” that were part of an ultra conservative messianic Jewish movement based in Qumran going back at least 100 years BCE.



Dead Sea Scrolls parchmentThe Dead Sea Scrolls further reveal that many of the practices that people now regard as Christian innovations — like the Lord’s Prayer and the Lord’s Supper — can be traced to the Qumrans, also going back at least one century before the birth of Christ. Additionally, the Dead Sea Scrolls give us a picture that the early Christian movement was by definition ‘an Apocalyptic cult’ waiting to do battle with the forces of evil in which righteousness would prevail. The early Christians at Qumran concentrated on personal purity [ritual bath, complete obedience, abstinence, prayer, study and communal meals, etc] and made themselves ready for the great battle in which they firmly believed that the forces of evil would die upon the blazing spears held by the hands of the ‘Sons of Light.’

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