This study originated in a short paper which I presented to Professor W. D. Davies' seminar on the Epistle to the Hebrews in 1968 which dealt with the relationship between Qumran and Hebrews. That paper dealt at length with a fragmentary document from the Dead Sea which treated Melchizedek as a divine figure, and at the time the parallels between Hebrews and that document seemed irresistible to me. To find a definite parallel to Hebrews at Qumran which was not also to be found in other forms of the Judaism of the period opened the possibility for a new way of understanding Hebrews and suggested some new answers to old questions about the origin and background of the Epistle.

The first task, it seemed to me, was to establish the parallel between Qumran and Hebrews as to Melchizedek, and it was to this task that I turned when I began research for this present work which was to be my dissertation. In the fall of 1969 I presented another paper to the Biblical Studies Seminar at Duke University in which I attempted to give further evidence for the association of Hebrews and Qumran on the basis of the Melchizedek fragment from Qumran. Simply to have expanded this study, however, would have been to assume the correctness of my assumptions, and it was for that reason that I decided that I should attempt to show the development of Melchizedek speculation through the early centuries of the Christian era in an effort to relate Hebrews to an independent development of thought.