QUMRAN EVIDENCE FOR THE RELIABILITY OF THE GOSPELS

Conservative New Testament scholarship is confronted with the view that the canonical Gospels are mainly ficticious creations of second or third generation Christianity. It is held that the earliest Christians were apocalyptically minded, looking for the Messiah to come speedily but placing no emphasis upon the earthly Jesus. Later, when the Parousia did not immediately happen it became necessary to find Messianic sig-nificance in the earthly life of J esus.1 The Gospels are outgrowths of that attempt. We are encouraged to believe that the problem of the "Messianic Secret " is solved when we see that Jesus did not proclaim himself to anyone as Messiah during his earthly life. It was only later that this belief arose. In the "Messianic Secret " of the Gospels then we see a combination of the early belief that Jesus was not Messianically signifi-cant in his earthly life and the later belief that he was. The earliest of the Gospels, Mark, has a pretty strong mixture of both ideas. The later Gospels show the increase of the latter belief, until in John the earlie