The Dead Sea Scrolls and Early Christianity: Part One

Almost from the moment the first Dead Sea Scrolls came under scholarly scrutiny, the question of their relation to early Christianity became a key issue.

The early days of Qumran^a research produced some spectacular theories regarding the relationship among Jesus, the first Christians and the Qumran community. In 1950 the French scholar André Dupont-Sommer argued that the Teacher of Righteousness—the founder and first leader of the Qumran group according to the scrolls—had a career that prefigured and paralleled that of Jesus: