Viewing posts from August, 2026

Dead Sea Scrolls: Sectarian Texts

by James Duguid | August 5, 2026

Some of the most interesting documents from the Dead Sea Scrolls are those that describe the founding beliefs and rules of the community itself. These texts give us a window into what this community was all about, and there has been a good deal written about how we should place this community within Judaism on the basis of this evidence. Since they contain reasoning about how to observe the law, they also give us important evidence of debates withing Judaism at the time, and often shed light on similar debates in the New Testament or Rabbinic legal interpretation.

Dead Sea Scrolls: Apocryphal Texts

by James Duguid | August 3, 2026

Congregants in the Presbyterian circles I run in tend to view apocryphal texts with fascination, suspicion, or a mixture of both. We are aware that other branches of Christianity accept books we do not, and that there are even more books beyond that which no major branch of Christianity accepts as authoritative, which are nevertheless out there. I find a couple of insights helpful here: First, a book might be helpful even if it is not canonical or authoritative (a point made by Article 6 of the 39 Articles). Second, we can think of many of these apocryphal works as commentaries – an analogy that comes from Greg Beale. They tell us how Jews of the time were thinking about the Bible, and they can even give us insightful interpretations of Scriptures we consider canonical. Such texts are in any case indispensable for understanding how Jews thought at the time of Jesus. They let us know how Jews at this time were reading the Bible, and they are often a helpful background for understanding the New Testament, especially for eliciting assumptions that lie behind arguments made by the apostles.

The Dead Sea Scrolls: Isaiah and Phylacteries

by James Duguid | August 2, 2026

The final rotation of Dead Sea Scrolls is on exhibit at the Museum of the Bible in DC. This blog post will cover the biblical material that is here this time: a copy of Isaiah, and a phylactery. For an introduction to the topic, see my first post here.