rty acclaimed him as in some sense a Messiah, or
anointed leader of the nation.

The other Messiah, the Teacher of Righteousness, must then be Jesus. That
he appeared twenty years after John, so far from being an argument against
this identification, would relieve the difficulty of trying to crowd
John's whole history into little more than a year. "It is surely not
necessary to defend the Lucan tradition on this point at all hazards, and
it seems quite likely that the newly discovered document has at last given
us the right perspective of events."

If these identifications are correct, the "man of scoffing," or
Belial,(100) who is sent to pervert the nation and turn it from the law,
can be no other than the Apostle Paul, and it is noted for confirmation
that "the period here assigned to his activity and that of his immediate
following is about forty years, a space of time not far removed from the
result of recent critical computation."

The New Covenant so often referred to in the texts is clearly to be
connected with the identical conception and expression in the New
Testament, nor does it seem to be accidental that the Teacher of
Righteousness is several times spoken of as the "only" or "unique" one.

Mr. Margoliouth presents his complete hypothesis as follows:--

The natural and apparently inevitable conclusion of the whole
matter, therefore, is that we have here to deal with a primitive
Judaeo-Christian body of people which consisted of priests and
Levites belonging to the Boethusian section of the Sadducean
party,(101) fortified--as the document shows--by a considerable
Israelitish lay element, besides a real or contemplated admixture
of proselytes. They acknowledged, as we have seen, John the
Baptist, as a Messiah of the family of Aaron, and they also
believed in Jesus as a kind of second (or, perhaps, as
pre-eminent) Messiah whose special function it was to be a
"Teacher of Righteousness." Paul they abhorred; and they strove
with all their might to combine the full observance of the Mosaic
Law, as they understood it, with the principles of the "new
covenant," again as they understood it. On the destruction of the
Temple by Titus, finding that it would not serve any good purpose
to linger in Judaea, they determined to migrate to Damascus,(102)
intending to establish their central organization in that city,
and to found communities of th