A Study of Paul’s Intellectual relationship With Dead Sea Scrolls andQumran Community

The discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls from 1947 on has immensely sharpened and renewed our knowledge of Ancient Judaism in late Second Temple Judaism. These documents generated great interest immediately on their discovery, because they raised the hope that they might shed new light on the appearance of Christianity in the first century CE. Since then research has been pursued for more than fifty years, and there is no doubt that this additional documentation has overturned many paradigms in the study of ancient Judaism and early Christianity. Pauline studies have also been affected, for Paul’s letters occupy a crucial position inside the relevant literature, since they represent the earliest writings from the new movement that will become Christianity. Soon after the first discoveries, similarities in Paul and Qumran drew researchers’ attention. This attention given to the Dead Sea manuscripts in Pauline research has been a major stimulant to better understanding of Paul’s Jewish identity. So that, this research show, although Paul was an original and revolutionary thinker, but his thinking did not emerge out of nothing. So at the beginning of this thesis we introduce the Dead Sea Scrolls and their relation with early Christianity, especially Paul. The second part of the treatise deals with the passages of Paul’s letters and their relationships with the discoveries of Qumran. For this, I utilization the lectures that were given during the Second International Symposium on Jewish and Christian Literature from the Hellenistic and Roman Period, held at the University of Lorraine, published in 2013 by Brill under the title The Dead Sea Scrolls and Pauline Literature.