From Qumran to Jude: A History of Social Crisis at Qumran and in Early Jewish Christianity

Many have noted the Qumran-like language of Jude. Chris Armitage provides a detailed comparative consideration of the similarities between Jude and the Dead Sea Scrolls peshers in the Hebrew Bible. The writers, in each of these texts, frequently appeal to examples of eschatological punishment for deviant theology and conduct, from the Hebrew Bible.



This study delves systematically into Jude's use of pesher technique-appropriating a Hebrew Bible example of deviant teaching and behaviour and its eschatological consequences and applying it to the present-and shows, across the divide of Koine Greek and Classical Hebrew, that this is same technique as found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Armitage infers that similar socio-theological crises faced Jude's and the Qumran community, requiring each to generate literature containing purity and pollution rhetoric, derived from remodelling Hebrew Bible predictions of eschatological punishment to fit its own time, in order to ensure internal solidarity.