In our reading this week Luke follows his account of the
birth of John the Baptist and Zechariah’s prophecy with a peculiar statement:
“The child [John] grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the
wilderness until the day he appeared publicly to Israel” (Luke 1:80). Why would
John’s parents have allowed him to go off into the wilderness like this?
Exactly how young was he? With whom did he stay? While Luke leaves all these
questions unanswered, modern speculation found inspiration in a collection of
texts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered in the late 1940’s
near the banks of the Dead Sea near a settlement called Qumran.
In the years following the discovery of these scrolls,
scholars identified their probable authors as a Jewish group called the Essenes
and noted the scrolls’ potential for illuminating our reading of the New
Testament, particularly our understanding of John the Baptist. There are indeed
many points of continuity between John and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Both John and
the authors of these texts found inspiration in Isaiah 40:3: “A voice cries
out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the
desert a highway for our God,’” (see Luke 3:4; also cited in a Dead Sea Scroll
called the Community Rule).
Moreover, just as John baptized and prophesied a
future baptism in the Holy Spirit, the Dead Sea community appears to have
practiced regular ritual immersions and associated them with a cleansing by the
“spirit of holiness.”
Some have also noted a passage in the Jewish historian Josephus
that may shed light on Luke’s tradition that John went into the wilderness as a
youth. Josephus reports that the Essenes—who may have authored the Dead Sea
Scrolls—were known to “adopt other men’s children, while yet pliable and
docile, and regard them as their kin and mold them in accordance with their own
principles” (Jewish War II.8.2).
Does this answer the questions raised by Luke 1:80? Perhaps,
but we are far from certain, and contemporary scholarship continues to debate
whether the Essenes actually authored the Dead Sea Scrolls. At the very least,
the similarities we see between John and the Dead Sea Scrolls remind us that
John and Jesus didn’t appear out of nowhere. Their teachings, practices, and
traditions were deeply rooted in the fertile soil of first-century Judaism. |
