Justified True Belief

(P1) The Sealed Library: the Dead Sea Scrolls were copied before the church existed and sealed in caves no Christian hand could reach. + The charge is that Christians painted the target after the arrow landed: they invented a Jewish hope for a coming deliverer, the Messiah, so that Jesus could be said to fit it. Answering that takes evidence from before the arrow flew, in a form nobody could have gone back and adjusted. (1) The scrolls went into caves in the first century and came out in 1947. - Bedouin shepherds found the first of them in 1947, in a cave above the Dead Sea, stored in tall clay jars. Almost nine hundred manuscripts eventually came out of eleven caves near a ruined settlement called Qumran, which is why scholars speak of the Qumran library. - The scrolls went into the caves as a Roman army came up the valley, and nobody disturbed them for nineteen centuries after that. Whatever a later reader might have wished these texts said, no hand could reach them to make them say it. - A sealed time capsule is not good evidence because the people who filled it were honest. It is good evidence because nobody could get at it afterward, honest or otherwise. (2) The copies themselves are older than the church. - The three that matter most were dated by the shape of their handwriting: 4Q521 to the first quarter of the first century BC, roughly a century before Jesus was born, 4Q246 to the last third of that same century, and 11Q13 to somewhere within that century. • Those codes are shelf labels and nothing more. 4Q521 is the 521st text catalogued from cave 4 at Qumran, 11Q13 the thirteenth from cave 11. What the scrolls say is the part worth remembering. - Dating by handwriting is not a matter of squinting and guessing. Letter shapes shifted with the generations, much as a letter written in 1890 does not look like one written in 1960, and the scale is anchored to contracts and deeds that carry their own dates. It yields a range of a few decades rather than a year, and radiocarbon tests of the parchment itself have broadly agreed with it. - The scholar who published 4Q521 judged the surviving copy to be itself a copy of something older, which pushes the ideas back further than the parchment they sit on. (3) The men who wrote them were not Christians and had no interest in helping one. - The community at Qumran was a Jewish sect with its own fierce convictions, at odds with the priesthood running the temple in Jerusalem. A Roman army destroyed the settlement in AD 68, with the scrolls already sealed in the caves. • That temple was the second one, rebuilt after Israel came home from exile in Babylon and levelled by Rome in AD 70. Historians call the centuries in between the Second Temple period, and every text quoted here belongs to it. - Had they lived to hear the Christian claim, they would have found it appalling. A crucified deliverer and a table open to Gentiles cut against the whole program of purity and separation these men had gone to the desert to keep. - Evidence kept by people who would have hated the use it is now put to is the most valuable kind there is. A character reference from your mother is worth less than one from the man who fired you. Therefore, whatever these scrolls turn out to say about a coming deliverer, they say it in a voice that cannot have been coached.

(P2) What the Messiah's Coming Would Look Like: scrolls copied before Jesus describe raising the dead, preaching to the poor, and a figure called Son of God. + Three scrolls copied before Jesus was born describe what the arrival of God's anointed one was expected to look like. Their own sentences make the point better than any summary of them would. (1) One scroll lists what to expect when the Messiah comes. - The fragment catalogued as 4Q521, and nicknamed the Messianic Apocalypse, opens: "for the heav]ens and the earth will obey his Messiah, [and all] that is in them will not turn away from the commandments of the holy ones." • Messiah is a job description rather than a name. The Hebrew word means "anointed one," somebody installed in office by having oil poured over his head, and the Greek for it is Christos, which English shortens to "Christ." • The square brackets mark letters lost from the damaged edge of the parchment and supplied by the editors, which is normal in a text that spent two thousand years in a cave. - It then sets out what the Lord will do in the days the Messiah's coming opens: "freeing prisoners, giving sight to the blind, straightening out the twisted," and further down, "for he will heal the badly wounded and he will make the dead live, he will proclaim good news to the poor." • The published translations differ in wording. One has "resurrect the dead" where another has "make the dead live," and "glad tidings" where another has "good news." Either wording carries the same claim. (2) Jesus answers John the Baptist with nearly that list. - John, in prison, sends his disciples to ask whether Jesus is the one they have been waiting for. The reply: "the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them." (Matthew 11:5) - The striking part is the last pair. Isaiah 35 has the blind seeing and the lame walking. Isaiah 61 has good news preached to the poor. No passage anywhere in the Hebrew Scriptures sets the dead being raised immediately beside the poor hearing good news, and the scroll does. - That is a parallel, not a quotation. What is not in dispute is that the combination was in Jewish hands before Jesus used it. (3) A second scroll carries the two titles Gabriel uses. - The fragment catalogued as 4Q246 says of a coming figure: "He will be called the son of God, they will call him the son of the Most High." • It is written in Aramaic, the everyday language of Jewish Galilee and Judea, the language Jesus would have used at home. - Gabriel, the angel sent to tell Mary she would bear Jesus, uses the same two titles a few lines apart, in the other order: "He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High." (Luke 1:32, 35) - Who the fragment is describing is genuinely disputed: the promised deliverer, a boasting foreign king who is overthrown a few lines later, or a figure standing for the people of God rather than any individual. - What matters is narrower, and no camp disputes it: the titles existed in Jewish Aramaic before Jesus was born, so no Christian coined them. (4) A third scroll has a heavenly figure delivering God's people. - 11Q13 takes Melchizedek, the priest-king who blesses Abraham in three verses of Genesis and is never explained, and casts him as a heavenly deliverer who proclaims liberty in the last jubilee and executes judgment. • A jubilee, in the law of Moses, is the fiftieth year, when Israelites sold into slavery went free and land sold in hard times returned to the family that lost it (Leviticus 25:8-13). The scroll expects a final one at the end of history. - It applies Isaiah 61 and Psalm 82 to him, and it does something bolder still with Isaiah 52:7. Where the prophet has a herald telling Zion "your God reigns," the scroll takes "your God" to mean Melchizedek. • Elohim, the ordinary Hebrew word for God, also covers the members of God's heavenly court in the very psalm the scroll is quoting. So Melchizedek is not being turned into the God of Israel. He is a heavenly deliverer described in words normally kept for God, and that is precisely the move Christians are accused of inventing. A Jewish scribe made it before there was a church. - On the rescue itself it reads: "And Melchizedek will avenge the vengeance of the judgements of God... and he will drag [them from the hand of] Belial and from the hand of all the sp[irits of] his [lot]." • Belial is the scrolls' usual name for the chief evil power, the enemy the New Testament calls Satan. - Hebrews 7 argues the priesthood of Jesus along the Melchizedek line, which reads very differently once you know its first readers already had a category for such a figure. Therefore, the vocabulary, the works expected when the anointed one came, and the exalted categories were all in Jewish use before there was a Christian to borrow them.

(P3) More Than One Figure: Israel expected a prophet like Moses alongside the king, which is why John the Baptist was asked three separate questions. + The expectation was not a single slot waiting for a single occupant. The Gospels, as it happens, report it with that untidiness intact. (1) Moses promised a prophet like himself. - Near the end of his life, Moses tells Israel what to expect once he is gone: "The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen." (Deuteronomy 18:15) - Three verses later God repeats it in his own voice: "I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth." (Deuteronomy 18:18) (2) A Qumran scroll collects the passages the community was waiting on. - The scroll catalogued as 4Q175 is usually called the Testimonia, Latin for "testimonies," because somebody copied out, one after another, three promises and nothing else: • The promise of a prophet like Moses (Deuteronomy 18). • Balaam's oracle about a star rising out of Jacob and a scepter out of Israel, which is the language of a king (Numbers 24). Balaam was the foreign seer hired to curse Israel who ended up blessing it. • Moses's blessing on Levi, the priestly tribe (Deuteronomy 33). - The community's own rule book, which scholars call the Community Rule, says the same thing in a single line. Its members are to hold to the first rules until the coming of "the Prophet and the Messiahs of Aaron and Israel," which is three figures in one sentence: a prophet, an anointed priest and an anointed king. - A prophet, a king, a priest. The community was not waiting for one person to arrive. It was waiting for offices to be filled, sometimes for more than one at a time. - Think of a town expecting a new doctor, a new magistrate and a new minister. Three vacancies, three sets of expectations, and no assumption that one man fills them all. (3) The Gospels presuppose exactly that untidiness. - Priests and Levites come out from Jerusalem to question John the Baptist, and they work through the possibilities one at a time: "I am not the Christ. And they asked him, What then? Are you Elijah? He said, I am not. Are you the Prophet? And he answered" (John 1:20-21) - Three separate questions, asked as though the answers could come apart. That conversation is unintelligible unless the categories were distinct, current and widely known. - These are Christian documents, and they are not what puts the expectation on record; the sealed scrolls do that (P1, P2). What they add is a scene no inventor would compose: three titles offered one at a time, with no explanation, to readers assumed to know what each one meant. - An inventor tidies. Somebody constructing a messianic expectation to fit one man afterwards has no reason to leave three competing offices lying around in it. (4) The first Christians identified Jesus as that prophet, by name. - Peter, preaching in the temple: "Moses said, The Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers. You shall listen to him in whatever he tells you" (Acts 3:22) - They were not inventing a category. They were making a claim about a vacancy their hearers already recognized. Therefore, the expectation the Gospels assume is the same lumpy, multi-office expectation the pre-Christian sources actually show.

(P4) Outsiders Noticed: writers in Rome report a Judean oracle that a world ruler would come from that country. + The expectation was known well outside the desert library. Three writers with a Roman readership report that the Jews were expecting a world ruler out of their own country, and report it as a fact about the war Rome had just fought. (1) Three writers from the Roman world report the same oracle. - Suetonius, writing early in the second century, says there had spread over all the Orient an old and established belief that it was fated at that time for men coming from Judea to rule the world. • An oracle is a saying taken to come from God, the kind of thing people repeat as common knowledge long before anyone writes it down. - Tacitus, writing at about the same time, says most people were convinced that the ancient priestly writings of the Jews contained a prophecy that this was the very time when the East should grow strong and that men from Judea would come to power. - Josephus, a Jewish general who surrendered to the Romans and wrote the war up for them within a decade of its end, calls it an ambiguous oracle found in their sacred writings, that about that time one from their country would become ruler of the world. (2) None of the three is helping. - All three take the oracle and hand it to Vespasian, the Roman commander in Judea who was proclaimed emperor while the war was still going on. That is flattery of the ruling house, and it is the opposite of a Christian reading. - What they are explaining is why the Jews fought a hopeless war against Rome, and their answer is that the Jews believed this. A prosecution witness who volunteers something helpful to the defense is believed precisely because he had no reason to say it, and these reports are worth having for the same reason. (3) They may be one witness rather than three. - The two Latin writers may have read Josephus, or drawn on a source he also used, or simply repeated what was being said in Rome after the war. Which of the three it was cannot be settled, so the cautious count is one witness with two echoes rather than three independent voices. - Counted that cautiously it is still a first-century Jewish historian, writing for a Roman audience with every reason to check him, reporting that his countrymen had a scriptural expectation of a world ruler arriving in that generation. - Josephus was a Jerusalem priest and not a man of the desert sect, which is where this evidence earns its keep. It is testimony from a different quarter of Judaism altogether, addressed to readers who had no reason to care what Jews expected except that it had cost them a war. Therefore, the expectation was not a private conviction of one sect. It was well enough known that Rome had heard of it and had an opinion about what it meant.

(C1) Therefore, Jewish expectation of a Messiah already had this shape before Jesus was born. + Before Jesus was born, Jews were already waiting: for God's anointed one, for the works his arrival would bring, for titles like son of God and son of the Most High, and for more coming figures than one. That conclusion rests on strands, and a cumulative case is a rope rather than a chain. A chain fails at its weakest link, so a critic need only break one. A rope holds because the strands are twisted together, and cutting one leaves the rest carrying the load. A jury works the same way: a fingerprint, a receipt, a witness and a motive, none of them conclusive alone, all of them pointing one direction. Strands only compound when they can fail for different reasons, so the honest work is checking whether these can. - Five of the texts came out of one library. 4Q521, 4Q246, 11Q13, 4Q175 and the Community Rule sat on one group's shelf, so counted strictly they are one witness to what those men expected rather than five witnesses to Judaism at large. That is the strictest possible count, and even it is probably too strict, because two of the five do not read like the sect's own work. • The sect's own compositions carry tell-tale words: the sons of light, the Teacher of Righteousness, the yahad or "community" they called themselves. Neither 4Q521 nor 4Q246 uses any of them, which is why many specialists take the two to be texts the community collected rather than wrote. - The evidence from outside that library is what makes the conclusion general. The Psalms of Solomon, a Jewish prayer for a coming son of David, comes from Jerusalem circles rather than the desert (P5), and the reports of a Judean oracle were written for readers in Rome (P4). Neither has anything to do with Qumran. - The Gospels are not counted as a strand. The charge on the table is a charge about them, so leaning on them to establish the expectation would be arguing in a circle. That is a rule forced by the charge rather than a verdict on the Gospels. What they contribute is a fit: the untidy expectation they assume (P3) turns out to match sources no Christian could reach. - The weight is carried by the scrolls. A sealed manuscript describing what the Lord will do when his anointed one comes, copied while the church was still a century away, is the reason the conclusion holds at all. The rest broadens it beyond one sect. The weakest strand is 4Q246, because the identity of its Son of God figure is genuinely contested. Set it aside completely and the case still stands: the works expected in the Messiah's days (P2), the multiple offices (P3), and the reports that reached Rome (P4) all remain. What follows is that the category existed, with roughly this content, before Jesus of Nazareth was born. What does not follow is that he filled it. That is a different question, argued on different evidence.

(P5) What Nobody Was Waiting For: the expectation was diverse and largely royal, and a crucified Messiah formed no part of it. + The honest half of this subject is the half that does not fit, and it turns out to be worth more than the half that does. (1) The mainstream hope was for a king who would win. - The Psalms of Solomon, a Jewish poem written within living memory of the Roman general Pompey marching into Jerusalem in 63 BC, prays: "Look, O Lord, and raise up for them their king, a son of David, to rule over your servant Israel in the time that you know, O God." • The poem is not part of the Hebrew Scriptures, and Solomon had been dead nearly nine hundred years when it was written. Scholars group it with the pseudepigrapha, Jewish writings that circulated under a famous old name. - The psalm goes on to ask that he purge Jerusalem of the nations trampling it and gather a holy people. This is the earliest surviving Jewish text to use "son of David" as a title for the coming deliverer. - That is what the expectation mostly looked like: a king, a throne, and the occupying army gone. (2) The word "anointed one" covered kings, priests, and once a foreign emperor. - Oil was poured over the heads of a good many men in Israel, and the word followed the oil. Isaiah goes so far as to call Cyrus, the Persian king who let the exiles go home, the LORD's anointed (Isaiah 45:1). - As a fixed title for one coming deliverer it is rarer in the scrolls than popular Christian presentations imply. That correction is fair, and it is granted. - What carries the case is content rather than vocabulary. The works, the titles and the offices these texts describe would establish the expectation even if the word itself never appeared, and where a text's meaning is genuinely disputed, as it is for the Son of God fragment, the dispute is granted (P2). - The hope for a son of David, though, is disputed by nobody. It stands written out in so many words, decades before Jesus was born, and even the scholars who pressed the terminological correction hardest grant it. (3) Nothing in this literature is waiting for an executed Messiah. - No pre-Christian Jewish text expects the anointed one to be handed over to the occupying power and put to death by it. Whatever else the sources disagree about, they are silent on that together. - The silence has a reason behind it, and the same caves supply the reason. The law of Moses says that a man hanged on a tree is under God's curse (Deuteronomy 21:22-23), and the Temple Scroll, a rewriting of the law recovered from cave 11, applies that curse to a man who betrays his people to a foreign power: hanged on a tree, cursed by God and men. An executed deliverer was not a hope nobody happened to have. It was a hope the law looked like it ruled out. - Which is exactly why the first Christians had to argue for Isaiah 53 line by line, from the text, rather than simply point at a shelf of Jewish writings that already agreed with them. (4) A fabricator would have matched the expectation, not missed it. - Somebody drawing a target around an arrow already in the wall draws it where the arrow is. He does not draw it three feet to the left and then spend years explaining the gap. - A forger copies the answer key. He does not hand in an answer nobody in the room recognizes, and then spend a generation arguing that the marking scheme was misunderstood. Therefore, the sharpest mismatch between Jesus and the expectation sits exactly where a fabricator would have taken most care to match it.

(C2) Therefore, Christians did not invent the messianic expectation and then fit Jesus to it. + The target was not drawn after the arrow landed. Both halves of the evidence close against that charge, and they close from opposite directions. Where Jesus matches the expectation, the expectation is on record first, in manuscripts copied before the church existed, sealed in caves no Christian could reach, and read for the first time in 1947. Nobody drew that target. It was already on the wall, described by people who would have been horrified to learn what use it would be put to. Where Jesus does not match the expectation, the mismatch is the sort nobody invents. The hope was for a king who would clear the Romans out of Jerusalem, and what the first Christians proclaimed instead was a man the Romans had executed. That is the single hardest thing they could have said to a first-century Jewish audience, and they knew it: writing to Corinth within about twenty-five years of the crucifixion, Paul calls a crucified Messiah "a stumbling block" to Jews (1 Corinthians 1:23). They said it anyway. None of this shows that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, which is a question about him rather than about the category. None of it shows that the expectation was correct, or that the texts behind it were rightly read. What it removes is one particular explanation: that the whole shape of the claim was built backwards from the man. On the evidence of the scrolls, it was not. See also: • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: Were the Messianic Prophecies Written Before Jesus? • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: Who Is the Servant of Isaiah 53? • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: The Messiah Had to Come Before AD 70 • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: Why Do the Nations Worship the God of Israel?