Written by What 4Q246 Reveals About Divine Sonship in the World Before Christianity
By Diesel the Magus | eFireTemple Research Series | November 2026
Before the Gospels were written, an Aramaic manuscript already described a mysterious figure using the titles Son of God and Son of the Most High.
The manuscript is called 4Q246.
It was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran Cave Four.
Often called the Aramaic Apocalypse or Son of God Text, it contains language that would later become central to Christian descriptions of Jesus.
For the Father-of-Aša investigation, it offers another window into the religious vocabulary of the Second Temple period.
But the question is what it actually establishes.
1. A pre-Christian manuscript
4Q246 survives as a fragmentary Aramaic text arranged in two preserved columns.
Scholars commonly date the surviving manuscript to approximately the late first century BCE, although the underlying composition may be older.
Its narrative concerns a visionary or apocalyptic setting involving kingdoms, conflict, and divine authority.
Within this context appears a mysterious figure bearing titles translated as Son of God and Son of the Most High.
These are not modern Christian additions to the manuscript.
They belong to the ancient Aramaic text.
This means terminology closely associated with later Christian accounts of Jesus was already circulating within Jewish apocalyptic literature before the composition of the Gospels.
2. The relationship to Luke
Compare the language in Luke 1:32–35.
In Luke’s annunciation narrative, Jesus is described as great, receives the title Son of the Most High, and is called Son of God.
The resemblance to 4Q246 is striking.
It does not, by itself, establish that Luke copied the Qumran manuscript.
Both texts could draw upon a broader vocabulary already available in Jewish religious literature.
Indeed, the Hebrew scriptures contain earlier forms of divine sonship language, especially in royal and covenantal contexts.
The important point is that the titles were not created from nothing when Christianity emerged.
The conceptual vocabulary already existed.
3. Who was the Son of God in 4Q246?
This is one of the manuscript’s most debated questions.
Some scholars have interpreted the figure as a foreign ruler claiming extraordinary authority.
Others have seen a positive messianic or heavenly figure.
Michael Segal has argued that the text should be read through Daniel 7 and Psalm 82, identifying its mysterious figure in relation to the heavenly representative of a kingdom.
The manuscript’s fragmentary condition prevents the identity question from being resolved simply by quoting its titles.
The original figure should not automatically be called Jesus.
Nor should it automatically be called a Persian savior.
Such identifications require evidence beyond the survival of comparable words.
4. The significance for the Persian investigation
The Father-of-Aša Dossier examines how concepts of divine authority, final judgment, spiritual conflict, and salvation developed in Jewish literature during and after the Persian period.
4Q246 contributes evidence about the religious vocabulary circulating in the centuries before the Gospels.
It is relevant to the wider environment of Danielic and apocalyptic thought.
But it does not independently establish Iranian authorship or influence.
The Persian connection must be evaluated through evidence specific to transmission, chronology, and comparable theological structure.
The most defensible approach is to place 4Q246 alongside the other witnesses without making it carry an argument it cannot support.
Behistun documents an Iranian royal proclamation.
The Elephantine papyrus documents its Aramaic transmission.
4Q550 provides evidence for a Persian court tradition surviving within the Qumran collection.
The Community Rule presents a developed Jewish system of opposed spirits, Truth and Deceit, and Light and Darkness.
4Q246 demonstrates that exalted divine-sonship language was also circulating in this wider literary world.
These texts are related to the investigation, but they do not all prove the same proposition.
5. Return to the question of the Father
In the Gospel of John, Jesus repeatedly directs attention toward his Father.
The Father sends the Son.
The Son speaks of the Father.
Jesus challenges those who claim divine knowledge while rejecting his testimony.
For Diesel the Magus, these passages raise a question of identity: whether the Father described through Jesus’s teachings and works is better understood through the Gathic profile of Ahura Mazda, the Father of Aša.
4Q246 does not answer that question.
What it demonstrates is that the language of divine sonship had a history before the Gospel writers put it to use.
That history deserves investigation without assuming that the earliest surviving parallel must be the source of every later expression.
Conclusion: The words had a history
The emergence of Christianity did not occur in an empty theological world.
Long before its canonical Gospels were composed, Jewish literature was developing language about heavenly beings, divine sonship, future kingdoms, judgment, and salvation.
4Q246 is one of the physical witnesses to that development.
Its presence among the Dead Sea Scrolls gives us a manuscript against which later claims can be examined.
The Son of God was a phrase with a history.
The identity of Jesus’s Father remains the question under investigation.
The strength of the argument depends on keeping those two findings distinct.
Research references
- 4Q246, also known as the Aramaic Apocalypse or Son of God Text.
- Michael Segal, Who Is the Son of God in 4Q246? An Overlooked Example of Early Biblical Interpretation, Dead Sea Discoveries 21, no. 3 (2014), 289–312. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685179-12341328
- Luke 1:32–35.
- Daniel 7; Psalm 82; 2 Samuel 7:14; Psalm 2:7.
- John 8:19–55.
Related eFireTemple reading: The Truth/Lie Bridge: Aša, the Two Spirits, and John.