April 5, Jack Levison, Professor of Old Testament Interpretation and Biblical Hebrew in the Perkins School of Theology at SMU Dallas, for a commentary examining biblical and extra-biblical excerpts about Jesus’ ability to overcome death. Published in People Newspapers under the heading: Holy Scriptures and Dead Sea Scrolls Proclaim a Messiah Who Conquered Death for Himself, Others: https://tinyurl.com/57uyb35j This piece was later published in The Dallas morning News under the heading: Did ancients expect resurrection from the Messiah? https://tinyurl.com/23rynp4u
You may have heard someone, maybe a preacher, ask on Palm Sunday, “What did the crowds waving palm branches expect when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey?” And you may have heard a dozen different answers. What, in fact, did the crowds expect?
Well, one answer occurs in the Dead Sea Scrolls, an amazing cache of scrolls that a Bedouin boy discovered in 1947 in caves along the edge of the Dead Sea, about 20 miles east of where Jesus rode that donkey into Jerusalem. It’s quite an ancient Jewish library, written in the centuries before Jesus’ birth, containing some of the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible — the Christian Old Testament — ever found. It also contains scrolls documenting the beliefs of a small community of people clustered in a football-field-sized site known as Khirbet Qumran.