This week in our seminar on Wisdom and Apocalyptic with Boustan, we read about and discussed apocalyptic thought in Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. There were a couple quotes from our readings that stood out to me as the New Testament guy in the seminar:

The last days are thus a period already started but not yet completed, somehow coextensive with the present of the community. As CD 4:4 put it: “the sons of Zadok are the chosen of Israel, ‘those called by name’ who stood up at the end of days.”

(Florentino García Martínez, “Apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, vol. 1, pg. 175)

And then, this one . . .

This community’s wisdom texts, listed above, seek the proleptic realization of the future through wise actions. The sectarians believe that by their ritual purity and ethical behavior they are able to live eschatological reality into existence and to participate in the transformation of the new creation.

(Leo Perdue, Sword and the Stylus, 384)

Sounds pretty New Testamenty to me. An intriguing line of thought.