18 Qumran Texts

The intellectual inheritance of the Qumran texts has suggested numerous hypotheses since their discovery. Some scholars pretended to find a relationship with Christian groups, others shed light on the links with Jewish groups. This chapter deals with a new approach to the transmission of the Qumran texts. Three levels of transmission are considered: (1) the “narrow” transmission of the Qumran manuscripts; (2) a “broader” definition of the transmission concerns the Qumran texts; it means the Essene compositions with some interrogations for several documents excavated in Qumran caves; (3) and the “broadest” definition of Qumran manuscripts and of their transmission needs to consider not only the Essene compositions but also the Scriptural manuscripts and the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha—that is, the whole preserved Qumran texts.