ההלכה בספרי הבשורה שבברית החדשה ובמגילות מדבר יהודה

From the earliest reports of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, indeed even from the discovery of the Zadokite Fragments in the Cairo Genizah, there have been persistent claims that the scrolls were in some way closely related to early Christianity. Scholarship has pointed to the many ways in which the scrolls found at Qumran, along with the previously known apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, illumine the background of earliest Christianity, located as it was in the "matrix" of Second Temple period Judaism. However, it has somehow escaped the attention of scholars that the study of the legal material in the scrolls is significant for understanding the connections of the scrolls to the later development of Christianity. Indeed, the study of the halakhic views ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels, in relation to those of the Pharisaic-rabbinic tradition and those of the authors of the various Dead Sea Scrolls, reveals that nascent Christianity defined itself very differently from the scrolls' sect and their teachers. This study examines a number of specific examples of halakhic matters discussed in the New Testament which are also dealt with in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It compares and contrasts the rulings of these two traditions, showing that the Jewish legal views of the Gospels are for the most part lenient views, to the left of those of the Pharisees, whereas those of the Dead Sea Scrolls represent a stricter view, associated by some scholars with the Sadducean tradition, to the right of the Pharisaic views. Ultimately, in the halakhic debate of the first century CE, the selfunderstanding of the earliest Christians was that of insiders.