New Perspectives on the Significance of the Scrolls for the New Testament and Early Christian Literature

This article places the contributions of the thematic volume in the larger research context where the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Christian source texts have been juxtaposed and compared with each other. Whereas earlier scholarship was keen on identifying direct links and dependencies or, alternatively, underlining dissimilarities between the Scrolls’ Judaean priestly movement and the Galilean non-elite Jesus movement and its diaspora follow-up, this thematic volume represents more nuanced attempts to contextualise the similarities and differences in appropriate ways and find new ways of thinking that illuminate both textual corpora.