Jamal Hopkins
He spends his professional life inside the Dead Sea Scrolls, and he can hand you a manuscript older than Christ that says God blessed Noah's sons. Which means the curse of Ham does not just misread the Bible. It contradicts the oldest commentary we have on it.
Dr. Jamal-Dominique Hopkins. Associate Professor of Christian Scriptures at Baylor University's George W. Truett Theological Seminary, where he also directs the Black Church Studies Program. PhD, University of Manchester; MA in biblical studies and theology, Fuller Theological Seminary; BA, Howard University. Author of Cultic Spiritualization: Religious Sacrifice in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Gorgias Press, 2022). His research works at the intersection of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Qumran studies with biblical literature and Black religious thought.
Also anchors session 1.3 of the learning path
Who he is
Jamal-Dominique Hopkins teaches Christian Scriptures at Baylor's Truett Seminary and directs its Black Church Studies Program. He took his doctorate at Manchester, and he wrote Cultic Spiritualization: Religious Sacrifice in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
That specialty is why he is here and why nobody else in this archive can do what he does. Most people answering the curse of Ham argue from Genesis. Hopkins can go one step further back and hand you the manuscripts that sat alongside Genesis in the Second Temple period, and show you what the people closest to the text actually understood it to say.
What you are getting in this dossier
Physical evidence from the Qumran burials that nobody expects. The manuscript that ends the curse of Ham argument, and where the curse actually came from, century by century. A tool for reading the Bible that resolves most of the slavery objection on its own. The Ethiopian in the chariot, described the way an actual scholar of the period would describe him. A Jewish temple in Egypt, and the priestly line that connects it to the Dead Sea Scrolls community. Why the earliest Gospel may have been written by an African. And a genuinely uncomfortable section about Martin Luther King.
The burials at Qumran
He begins where his own expertise begins, with a body of Jewish literature from roughly 200 BC to the first century, and then does something more interesting than quote it. He digs.
"The anthropological reports are very sketchy, so they don't necessarily explicitly say who these people were that resided there. But we know something from their archaeological discoveries, particularly the burials, the archaeological burial remains."
The rest of this dossier is part of Unspoken
2,962 more words and 11 more clips of him making the case, including the three objections he answers and the place he refuses to flatter his own argument.
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