OK, let's just frame this for a second. Imagine
you're a historian and there's a black hole in
your knowledge, a huge one, a 1000 year gap.
Not just any gap, a gap in our understanding
of how the most foundational religious texts
of Western civilization were. Well, how they
survived. Exactly. For centuries, the oldest
complete versions of the Hebrew Bible we had
were the Masoretic texts, and they dated to the
10th century, the 10th century CE. Which means
for a full millennium before that, we were basically
flying blind. We had later copies, translations,
but the Hebrew source, it was a dark age, textually
speaking. And then almost overnight, that thousand
-year void gets filled. And that's what we're
diving into today. the Dead Sea Scrolls. And
this isn't just about finding old documents.
You said it before we started. It's like history's
greatest shortcut. It really is. So let's be
precise. When we say Dead Sea Scrolls, what exactly
are we talking about? Right. So in the strictest
academic sense, we're talking about the Qumran
Cave Scrolls. It's this incredible, just mind
-boggling collection of 981 distinct texts. 981.
Ancient Jewish manuscripts. And they give us
this perfect snapshot of a forgotten world dating
from... uh roughly the third century bce so well
before the time of jesus oh absolutely about
250 years before and they go all the way up to
the first century ce so they bracket this incredibly
pivotal period in religious history and the location
where they were found i mean it's just the stuff
of legend it really is they were found over about
a decade between late 46 and 1956 in a series
of caves, originally 11, now we know of a 12th.
And these are all clustered around the Dead Sea.
Right, near a place called Ein Feshka on the
northern shore of the Dead Sea in what's now
the West Bank. And the critical thing, the thing
you have to remember, is that they're right next
to this ancient settlement called Kerbet Qumran.
And that's where the big mystery comes in, right?
That's the million -dollar question that we are
definitely going to get to. So our mission today
is to trace that entire story. We're going to
start with the, frankly, unbelievable story of
their accidental discovery. Unpack what's actually
in them, the different kinds of texts. Then wade
into the fierce, and I mean fierce, academic
debates about who wrote them. And finally, bring
it into the modern era. The fights over publication,
the tragedy of their decay, and the political
battle over who actually owns them today. Okay,
so this is where the story stops being about
dusty academic timelines and turns into a real
adventure story. And the heroes aren't scholars,
they're shepherds. That's what makes it so perfect.
The protagonists are three Bedouin shepherds.
Teenagers, really. Mohamed Edib, his cousin Juma
Mohamed, and Khalil Musa. And the discovery itself
between late 1946 and early 1947 is pure chance.
It's the classic anecdote of how history turns
on a dime. The story that's been passed down
is that they were out in the cliffs just looking
for a lost goat. As one does. Exactly. And one
of them spots an opening to a cave way up high.
But as Mohammed Edib, who, depending on the version
you hear, was either curious enough or clumsy
enough to be the first one to actually get inside,
he literally fell into history. He falls into
cave one. And what's in there? It's incredible.
He finds these tall, cylindrical clay jars, and
inside them are the first scrolls. And these
weren't just, you know, minor fragments to start.
No, this was the motherlode right out of the
gate. It was. He pulls out the Great Isaiah scroll,
almost perfectly complete, the Habakkuk commentary,
and the Community Rule. These are some of the
most famous and important texts in the entire
collection, found on day one. By accident. Which
leads to the part of the story that just makes
every curator and historian on the planet break
out in a cold sweat. Their early treatment. It's
terrifying, to put it mildly. They had no idea
what they'd found. So they take these 2 ,000
-year -old manuscripts, the oldest biblical texts
in existence. And do what with them? And hang
them on a tent pole in their camp while they
figure out what to do. On a tent pole? Yes. And
we know for a fact that during this time, the
Community Rules Scroll, which was one single
document, was actually torn in half. Split right
in two. The two pieces were separated for years
because of that casual handling. It's just wow.
It really highlights the gap between what they
were and what people thought they were. I understand
they tried to sell them at first and were told
they were worthless. That's right. The first
dealer they took them to just dismissed them,
said they were nothing. So eventually they made
their way to a man named Kondo Khalil Iskander
Shaheen, who was an antiquities dealer and of
all things. a cobbler in Bethlehem. And he's
the one who brokers the first sale. He is. After
a lot of back and forth, they finally agree on
a price for three of the first scrolls. And let's
just pause on this. The price for these texts,
which are now, you know, priceless national treasures
insured for stattering amounts, what did they
sell for? Seven Jordanian pounds. Seven. Seven.
If you do the math, adjusting for inflation to
today, that's somewhere around... Maybe 400 U
.S. dollars. $394. I looked it up. It's just
it's unbelievable. A collection that would redefine
an entire field of study. But that tiny transaction,
that's what kicked everything into motion. It
got the scrolls into hands that could eventually
recognize them. So how does the academic world
finally get wind of this? Who is the first person
to look at these and say, wait a minute, this
is something big. So the scrolls start to move
through this network of dealers and religious
figures. And the key moment comes in 1947. A
man named Mar Samuel, who is the Syrian metropolitan
at St. Mark's Monastery in Jerusalem, he buys
four of the scrolls. Okay. And he shows them
to a scholar named John C. Trevor, who is at
the American Schools of Oriental Research. And
Trevor does something brilliant. He compares
the script, the actual style of the Hebrew letters,
to the Nash papyrus. Which at that time was the
oldest biblical manuscript known to exist. It
was the gold standard for antiquity. And Trevor
looked at the scroll and the papyrus and he saw
not just a similarity. He saw a style that was
clearly just as old, if not older. That was the
eureka moment. That's the confirmation. That's
the moment they knew these were genuinely ancient.
The problem, of course, was the timing. This
is 1947. The 1948 Arab -Israeli War was about
to break out. So the whole area becomes a conflict
zone. Exactly. Any kind of large -scale, organized
archaeological search was impossible. It just
put everything on hold. But eventually the conflict
subsides enough for a proper search to begin.
It does. By 1949, the government of Jordan gives
the green light for the Arab Legion to go search
the area. And that's when Cave 1 is officially
rediscovered on January 28, 1949 by a couple
of captains. And that kicks off the first official
dig. Led by two giants in the field, Gerald Lancaster
Harding and Roland DeVoe. And once the scholars
were on the scene and once the Bedouins realized
that these things were actually worth a fortune.
It becomes a race. It becomes an absolute frenzy.
What we call the Qumran Cave Explosion from 49
to 56. It was a mad dash. The academics versus
the Bedouins to find the next cave. So what did
they start turning up? Well, Cave 2 was found
in 1952. It gave us about 300 fragments from
33 different manuscripts. And importantly, that
included bits of non -canonical books like Jubilees
and The Wisdom of Sirach, both written in Hebrew,
which was a big deal. And then came Cave 3, which
had something totally unique. Right, just a month
later. That's where they found the famous Copper
Scroll. And it's unique because, first, it's
not parchment or papyrus. It's literally etched
onto copper sheets. And the content is different,
too. It's not a religious text. Not at all. It's
a list. A list of 64 locations where a massive
treasure of gold and silver is supposedly hidden.
It is, for all intents and purposes, a treasure
map. Has anyone ever found the treasure? No.
And scholars are deeply divided on whether it's
a real literal list or if it's some kind of symbolic
or allegorical text. It's a complete outlier.
Now, amid this cave explosion, one cave stands
out. It's the big one. Cave four. Why was that
such a goldmine? Cave four is the heart of the
collection. And part of the reason is that it
was obvious. It's actually two smaller man -made
caves, 4A and 4B, and you can see them from the
Kunran settlement plateau. So it was easy to
find, which probably means it was looted first.
Relentlessly looted. But even so, it was the
most productive site by an astronomical margin.
The numbers I've seen are just staggering. They
are. 90%. 90 % of all the fragments ever found
came from Cave 4. We're talking about 15 ,000
fragments, something like 500 different texts.
500 texts from one location. It's unbelievable.
It had, I think, 10 different copies of the Book
of Jubilees. It had religious items like tefillin
and mizzo. It was clearly a major, major repository,
whether it was a library or a Geniza, a sacred
storage site. So after this massive haul from
Cave 4, did things start to slow down? They did.
The last of the original Kermarang caves to be
found was Cave 11 in 1956. And it had some of
the best preserved scrolls of all, including
the longest one, the Temple Scroll. But the story
doesn't end in 1956. We're still finding things,
right? There was the discovery of Cave 12. Exactly.
In 2017, archaeologists announced they'd found
a 12th cave. Now, it was empty of scrolls. It
was a dud. Not at all. Because they found broken
storage jars. just like in the other caves. And
they found pickaxes from the 1950s. It was the
smoking gun that proved there had been widespread
looting back in the day and that there were probably
more scrolls out there that were lost to the
black market. And it also proves the practice
of storing scrolls was more widespread. Right.
And they did find one piece of rolled up blank
parchment ready to be written on. So it was absolutely
a scroll cave. And then even more recently, the
finds in the Cave of Horrors, that's a name that
gets your attention. It's a grim name. It comes
from... the dozens of skeletons of people who
were hiding from the Romans that were found there
decades ago. But in 2021, archaeologists found
new things. More biblical texts? Dozens of new
fragments. And this is fascinating. They contain
texts from the biblical books of Zechariah and
Nahum, but written in Greek. In Greek? Yes. And
the crucial part is the dating. These are believed
to have been hidden much later than the Qumran
scrolls, during the Bar Kokhba revolt against
Rome, around 130 to 136 CE. So what does that
tell us? It tells us that hiding sacred texts
in these desert caves wasn't a one -off event
by one weird community. It was a well -established
Jewish tradition, a Geniza practice, used during
times of crisis to protect their scriptures.
It provides a much broader historical context
for everything found at Qumran. Okay, so we have
tens of thousands of fragments pulled out of
caves, now sitting in labs. Before we can even
read the words, we have to understand what they
are physically. What were these things made of
to survive for two millennia? Well, their survival
is a combination of the materials and that incredibly
dry, stable desert climate. But the materials
themselves are key. The vast, vast majority,
somewhere between 85 and 90 percent, are parchment.
Which is basically animal skin. Exactly. Processed
animal hide or vellum. Then you have a smaller
chunk, maybe 8 to 13 percent, that's papyrus,
which is made from reeds. And then there's that
one oddball. And then the 1 .5 percent, that
is the copper scroll. Which is, you know, thin
sheets of metal, about 99 % copper, 1 % tin.
A completely different category. And those physical
materials, the animal skins, have opened up a
whole new field of research thanks to modern
tech. I'm talking about DNA analysis. This is
one of the most exciting new frontiers in scrolls
research. It's a huge leap forward. You know,
for decades, putting the fragments together was
like the world's hardest jigsaw puzzle. You'd
use paleography. Handwriting. Right, trying to
match the handwriting style. But DNA analysis
goes a layer deeper. Scientists can now extract
DNA from the parchment itself. From the animal
it came from. Precisely. So if you have two fragments
and the DNA shows they came from the same individual
sheep or goat, you have a very strong indication
they belong together. It's a powerful tool for
reassembly. But it also gives us cultural clues,
right? It's not just about the puzzle. That's
the really fascinating part. It seems to suggest
a kind of hierarchy of texts. The DNA analysis
has shown that certain texts, often the ones
scholars consider more central or important,
tended to be written on the hides of domesticated
animals like goats or calves. Whereas other,
perhaps less central texts, were written on the
hides of wild animals like gazelles or ibex.
So it's possible the community saw the texts
on calfskin as being more... I don't know, significant,
more core to their collection. That's the implication.
It's a remarkable insight into how they might
have categorized their own library, an idea we
could never have gotten just from reading the
words. It comes from the very fabric of the scrolls.
Speaking of what's on the fabric, the ink. How
did they write on these things? The ink is remarkably
consistent. All the black ink is what we call
carbon black. It's basically soot. Soot from
what? most likely from burning olive oil in their
lamps. They would collect the soot and then mix
it with a binder. It could have been honey, oil,
or just water to get the right consistency to
use with their reed pens. And I heard that color
was almost never used. Vanishingly rare. We've
only found red ink in four instances across the
entire collection. Four. And what was it made
of? It was made from cinnabar, which is mercury
sulfide, a difficult and, frankly, toxic material
to work with. The fact that it was used so sparingly
tells you something. That color was reserved
for something incredibly special. Exactly. They
were following a very strict scribal tradition.
Any deviation from black ink was a major, major
decision. So once they have the fragments, the
very first question has to be, are these real?
How did they establish their age? It was a two
-pronged approach initially. First, as we mentioned,
was paleography, the study of the handwriting.
Scholars like Frank Morecross were masters at
this. They could look at the shape of a letter,
the way a scribe made their stroke, and trace
its evolution over time. And just by looking,
they could date them. They could get a pretty
good range. They placed the bulk of the material
between about 225 BCE and 50 CE, which was a
stunning claim at the time. But a claim that
needed scientific backup. Absolutely. The scientific
slam dunk was radiocarbon dating, C14 dating.
This is what blew all the theories about them
being medieval forgeries out of the water. What
were the results? The very first test, back in
1950, was on a piece of the linen wrapping. It
came back with a date of 33 CE, plus or minus
200 years. So a huge range, but it firmly placed
it in the right period. Later tests have refined
that, confirming that most scrolls are from the
last couple centuries BCE and the first century
CE. But now, even that technology is being superseded.
We're in the age of AI. We are. The problem with
C14 is that it's destructive. You have to burn
a piece of the manuscript, and it can be imprecise.
So now we're seeing this incredible new approach
using artificial intelligence to refine the dating.
Tell me about this AI Enoch. I love the name.
It's very appropriate, isn't it? Enoch is a new
AI model that doesn't look at chemicals. It looks
at handwriting in a way humans can't. You feed
high -resolution images of fragments that have
already been securely dated by radiocarbon. So
you train it on known data. Exactly. It learns
the microscopic, subtle tells of a scribe's hand,
the pen pressure, the angle of a stroke, things
the human eye just glazes over. It creates a
digital fingerprint for handwriting from a specific
microperiod. And what is this AI telling us?
Is it changing the dates? It is. In some cases,
dramatically. For example, there's a key fragment
of the Book of Daniel. Enoch's analysis dates
it to between 230 and 160 BCE. That's a full
60 years earlier than the previous consensus.
Wow. That's a big shift. It's huge. But what's
even more revolutionary is what it's telling
us about scribal practices. Scholars used to
think of handwriting styles as evolving in a
straight line. You know, one style neatly replacing
the next. The Hasmonean style gives way to the
Herodian style. Right. But the AI shows that
the date ranges for these styles overlap far
more than we thought. The Herodian style seems
to start way back in the second century BCE.
It means these different styles were being used
at the same time. So it wasn't a clean evolution.
It was a more complex, messier picture. A much
messier, more human picture. It complicates our
neat little theories, which is what good science
does. So we have the materials. We have the dates.
What about the language? What are these texts
written in? It's a linguistic mosaic, which is
exactly what you'd expect from that period. The
overwhelming majority, about 76 to 79 percent,
is Hebrew, mostly in that familiar square. Blocks
script. And the rest. About 16 to 17 % is Aramaic,
which was the common spoken language of the region.
There are even different dialects of Aramaic.
Then you have about 3 % in Greek. Greek. All
the way out in the Judean desert. Yep. Which
tells you how pervasive Hellenistic culture was.
And then you have tiny, tiny traces of texts
in the ancient Paleo -Hebrew script. A beautiful
but archaic form of writing. Okay, so let's get
to the content. Scholars have this handy 40 -30
-30 breakdown to understand this massive library.
Let's start with the biggest piece, the 40%.
Right, so 40 % of the collection is biblical
texts. These are copies of the books from the
Hebrew scriptures, what Christians call the Old
Testament. And this is the part that was the
real bombshell. Because it pushed the clock back
a thousand years. Instantly. Suddenly, scholars
had copies of Isaiah, of Deuteronomy, of Psalms.
that were a millennium older than anything they
had before. It was an unprecedented window into
the state of the Bible before it was standardized.
And famously, they found copies of every book
of the Hebrew Bible except for one. That's right.
Every single book was found in at least fragmentary
form, except for the book of Esther. We'll have
to circle back to why that might be. So that's
40%. What's the next 30 %? The next 30 % are
deuterocanonical or extra -biblical texts. These
are books that were clearly important and widely
read in the Second Temple period, but for whatever
reason, didn't make the final cut into the official
Hebrew canon. So this is stuff like the Apocrypha.
Exactly. This is where you find the incredible,
sprawling, apocalyptic visions of the Book of
Enoch. You find the Book of Jubilees, which retells
Genesis and Exodus with a focus on a... very
specific solar calendar. So it's like the B -sides
of the Bible, the popular tracks that weren't
on the final album. That's a great way to put
it. You have wisdom texts like Tobit and Sirach,
extra psalms like Psalm 151. Their presence proves
that the idea of a fixed, closed Bible hadn't
happened yet. the library was much more fluid
and expansive. Which brings us to the final 30%.
And this to me is the most fascinating category
because these are texts that were completely
unknown to history. This is a real treasure trove
for understanding the community itself. 30 %
are sectarian documents. These are the internal
documents, the rule books, the manifestos, the
unique beliefs of the group or groups who collected
this library. This is where we get a look inside
their heads. A direct look. You have the community
rule, which is basically their constitution.
It lays out the rules for joining the group,
for sharing property, for their communal meals,
how to expel someone. It's incredibly detailed.
And then you have the more apocalyptic stuff.
Oh, yeah. You have the war scroll. Which is a
literal, detailed battle plan for the final cosmic
war between the Sons of Light, that's them, and
the Sons of Darkness, which is everyone else.
It describes military formations, trumpet signals,
the types of weapons to be used. It's a manual
for the end of the world. It's just incredible
to have that kind of direct insight. Now, among
all these texts, there are a few standouts. The
Celebrity Scrolls. We mentioned the Great Isaiah
Scroll. Found in Cave 1, almost perfectly intact.
It's the superstar. A complete book of a major
prophet, a thousand years older than we had before.
A miracle of survival. And then there's the giant
of the collection, the Temple Scroll. The big
one from Cave 11. It's the longest scroll ever
found, over 26 feet long. And it was probably
even longer originally. And its content, which
is all about how to build and run the ideal Jerusalem
temple, it sparked a huge scholarly fight. It
really did. It came down to how important this
scroll actually was to the community. The great
Israeli scholar Yigael Yadin, he saw it as central.
He called it the Torah, according to the Essenes.
He thought it was basically their alternative
sixth book of Moses. Their own special version
of the law. Exactly. But another major scholar,
Hartmut Stajman, pushed back hard against that.
What was his argument? Stajan pointed out something
very simple. For a text that's supposedly so
central, it's never quoted or even mentioned
in any of the other sectarian documents from
Qumran. Not once. So he saw it as just another
book they had in their library, not their foundational
text. Precisely. Maybe it was an important book,
a respected one, but not the book. And that debate
perfectly illustrates how even with a nearly
complete scroll, its actual meaning and function
can still be a source of intense disagreement.
So the contents show us what this community was
reading, what they valued, but that just leads
to the biggest question of all. Who were they?
Who were the people who wrote, collected, and
painstakingly hid this incredible library? That
is the central enduring mystery. And it's a question
that has fractured. Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship
for 70 years. Because when you look at the evidence,
it's complicated. You have this huge diversity
of thought in the texts, from mainstream biblical
books to really extreme sectarian rules. There's
a huge diversity of handwriting. A staggering
diversity, which makes the idea of a single,
small, isolated group being responsible for all
of it difficult. So the field has basically shaken
out into three major theories about who these
people were. Okay, let's break them down. Let's
start with theory number one, the classic traditional
view, the Qumran -Essene hypothesis. This was
the consensus view for decades, almost universally
accepted until the 1990s. It's the idea that
the scrolls were the library of a community of
Essenes, a well -known ascetic Jewish sect from
that period who lived at that nearby settlement
of Kerbet Qumran. So the monks in the desert
theory. That's the popular version of it, yes.
The idea is that this Essene community wrote
their own sectarian texts, copied the biblical
ones, and then when the Roman armies were invading
around 68 CE, they hid their precious library
in the caves for safekeeping and fled. What's
the best evidence for this theory? What connects
the scrolls to the Essenes at Qumran? There are
really four strong pillars supporting it. The
first is textual. The descriptions we have of
a scene life from ancient historians, especially
Josephus, match up remarkably well with the rules
you find in scrolls like the community rule.
Things like sharing property, strict initiation
rites. All of it. The communal lifestyle, the
emphasis on purity. It's a very strong correlation.
The second pillar is the archaeology at Qumran
itself. Right. What did they find there? The
excavators found a room with plastered benches
and tables, which they interpreted as a scriptorium,
a room for writing. They also found two inkwells
there. The smoking gun, a place where they were
physically writing scrolls. That was the interpretation.
They also found numerous mikah, or Jewish ritual
baths, which points to a community obsessed with
ritual purity, just as the S were described.
And finally, you have a geographical reference
from a Roman writer, Pliny the Elder. What did
he say? Writing just after the war, he describes
a community of Essenes living in the desert on
the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, away from
the noxious air. The location he describes is
a perfect match for Qumran. Okay, so that's a
pretty compelling case. But then we have theory
two, which is a variation on this theme. The
Qumran sectarian idea. It keeps the scrolls at
Qumran, but questions if they were strictly Essene.
Right. This theory says, OK, there was definitely
a religious sect at Qumran and they were responsible
for the scrolls. But maybe Yassin is too broad
or even the wrong label. Maybe they were a specific
radical offshoot of the Yassins. Or in another
group entirely. Or another group. The most prominent
version of this theory comes from the scholar
Lawrence Schiffman. He argues that the community
was led by a group of Zadokite priests. So Sadducees.
Or at least a group with Sadducean leadership.
A group with strong Sadducean leanings, yes.
And his key piece of evidence is one of the most
important sectarian texts we have, a document
known by its code, 4QMMT. MMT, what is that?
It stands for Missat Ma 'az HaTorah, which translates
to Some Works of the Law. And it's basically
a letter, a legal manifesto from the leader of
the Qumran group, probably the figure they call
the teacher of righteousness, sent to the religious
establishment back in Jerusalem. And what's in
the letter that points to Sadducees? It lists
about two dozen points of religious law where
the Qumran group disagrees with the Jerusalem
priests. And the specific legal positions they
take on, things like how ritual impurity is transferred
through liquids, are identical to legal positions
later attributed in rabbinic literature to the
Sadducees. Wow. So it's a direct textual link.
It's a very direct link. The letter also promotes
a solar calendar for festivals that aligns with
seduction principles, not Pharisaic ones. So
it suggests that this community, whatever you
call them, was born out of a priestly seduction
conflict with the Jerusalem temple authorities.
Which brings us to theory three. And this one
throws the whole Qumran -centered idea out the
window. This is the Jerusalem origin theory.
This is the major competing paradigm. It was
first proposed by Karl Heinrich Ringstorff and
is now most famously championed by Norman Gold.
And their argument is simple. The scrolls are
not the library of one small fringe desert sect.
They're what then? They are the rescued libraries
of Jerusalem. Plural. The idea is that when the
Romans were sacking Jerusalem in 70 CE, priests
and scribes grabbed everything they could from
the temple library, from other synagogue libraries,
from private collections, and fled into the desert
to hide them. And Qumran was just a convenient
hiding spot. Exactly. It's on a major road from
Jerusalem down to the desert. It was a known
area with lots of caves. It was a desperate act
of cultural preservation by the mainstream of
Judaism, not the work of a tiny sect. And their
main argument against the Qumran theory is just
the sheer scale and diversity of the collection.
That's the core of it. The math just doesn't
work for them. Paleographers have identified
the handwriting of more than 500 different scribes
in the Qumran collection. 500? How could a tiny,
isolated settlement like Qumran, which should
probably only support 150, maybe 200 people max,
have 500 scribes working there? And why would
this tiny radical sect have so many copies of
mainstream biblical texts? It doesn't add up.
So under this theory, what was the settlement
at Qumran? They reinterpret the archaeology completely.
They argue it wasn't a monastery. It was a Hasmonean
fort, a military outpost, later maybe a pottery
production center, the ritual baths, the jars.
They argue these are all things you'd find in
any normal Jewish settlement of the period. And
the famous scriptorium. They argue it was most
likely a dining hall. The whole sectarian settlement
idea, they say, is a myth created to explain
the scrolls when it should be the other way around.
And finally, we have to at least touch on Theory
4, which you noted is by far the most controversial
of the Christian origin theories. Right. These
are theories that exist very much on the scholarly
fringe, but they get a lot of popular attention
because they connect the scrolls directly to
early Christianity. What's the main claim? The
most famous claim was made in the 60s by a Spanish
Jesuit named José O 'Callaghan Martínez. He argued
that a tiny, tiny scrap of papyrus from Cave
7, known as 7Q5, was actually a fragment of the
New Testament, specifically from the Gospel of
Mark. And if that were true, it would be huge.
It would be earth -shattering. It would prove
the Gospel of Mark was written and circulating
before 70 CE, completely rewriting the timeline
of the New Testament. But? But the fragment is
minuscule. It has maybe five legible letters
on it. The overwhelming, near -unanimous consensus
of paleographers is that the identification is
just wishful thinking. The math doesn't work.
Are there other Christian theories? There are.
Robert Eisenman has famously argued that the
figures in the sectarian scrolls, the Teacher
of Righteousness, the Wicked Priest, are actually
coded references to early Christian figures like
James, the Brother of Jesus, and the Apostle
Paul. But again, these theories remain far outside
the academic mainstream because the dating, the
language, and the historical context just don't
line up with the evidence from the scrolls themselves.
So we found the scrolls, we've debated who wrote
them, but now the story moves into the 20th century
and it becomes a story of a crisis. The very
act of discovering them started a clock ticking
on their destruction. It's the ultimate irony.
The same environment that preserved them for
2 ,000 years, that dry, dark, stable climate,
was instantly gone. The moment they were brought
out into the light and air, they started to decay.
Rapidly. What was it about being exposed that
was so damaging? Well, you have moisture, you
have oxygen. Light. But the biggest problem initially
wasn't nature. It was humans, well -intentioned
humans. The early researchers, what did they
do? The most catastrophic mistake was the widespread
use of adhesive tape, scotch tape. Wait, they
used scotch tape on 2 ,000 -year -old documents?
They did. In the late 40s and 50s, to try and
piece the little fragments together, the chemicals
in the tape's adhesive seeped into the parchment,
stained it, made it brittle, and in some cases,
it literally lifted the ink right off the surface.
It was a disaster. Just a complete, unmitigated
disaster. But it gets worse, right? There was
a specific event that caused a huge amount of
damage all at once. There was. It was during
the Suez Crisis in 1956. For security reasons,
the main collection of scrolls, which was in
Jerusalem, was moved for safekeeping. To where?
To the vault of the Ottoman Bank in Amman, Jordan.
And a bank vault, you know, is designed to protect
money and gold. It's often cool and damp. The
worst possible environment for ancient parchment.
The absolute worst. They were stored there for
about a year in these humid conditions. Mildew
started to grow on them. The glue on the storage
plates they were using began to melt and cause
damage. By 1958, an assessment found that some
scrolls had lost up to 5 % of their text in just
that short period. They had darkened so much
the ink was becoming illegible. It's just heartbreaking.
So how did they finally stop the bleeding? How
do we preserve them today? Modern science finally
caught up. Starting in 1991, the Israel Antiquities
Authority, the IAA, created a state -of -the
-art conservation lab. Their whole job is to
undo the damage of the past. So they're removing
the tape? Meticulously. They painstakingly removed
the old tape, the oils, the salts, all the contaminants,
and now the fragments are stored in climate -controlled
vaults in acid -free materials under conditions
that mimic the stability of the caves they came
from. Thank goodness, then, for photography,
because we have images of the scrolls from before
the worst of that damage occurred. The photography
is the scroll's insurance policy. There was a
photographer named Najeeb Albina who worked from
1952 to 1967. And he used this new technique
at the time, infrared photography. Which lets
you see things the naked eye can't. Exactly.
His photos, all 1 ,750 of them, were taken before
that horrible year in the bank vault. In many
cases, his infrared plates are the best record
we have. They show letters and words that have
since faded into oblivion on the actual fragments.
And the imaging technology has only gotten better.
NASA got involved at one point. Yeah, which is
just a fantastic crossover. In the 90s, scientists
from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the people
who design cameras for Mars rovers, they applied
their technology to the scrolls. What did they
use? They used multispectral imaging. It's a
system that takes photos in dozens of different
wavelengths of light, far beyond what the human
eye can see. And by doing that, they were able
to digitally distinguish the carbon -based black
ink from the animal hide parchment, making previously
unreadable text just pop off the page. And that
all culminates in the big digitization project
with Google. The ultimate act of preservation
and access. From 2011 to 2016, the Israel Museum
and Google collaborated on this massive project
and digitized the major scrolls in unbelievable
detail. We're talking 1 ,200 megapixel images.
So you can zoom in and see the individual fibers
of the parchment. You can. And they did it using
special flashes that filter out UV light to prevent
any further damage. The result is that now anyone
on Earth with an Internet connection can study
these scrolls in more detail than most scholars
could a generation ago. But that access is a
very new thing. For decades, the story of the
scrolls wasn't one of open access, but of an
academic scandal. A lockdown. It was a huge controversy.
For about 40 years, from the 50s until 1991,
access to the majority of the unpublished fragments
was controlled by a small international committee
of scholars. And they just sat on them. The pace
of publication was glacial. They effectively
created an academic monopoly. If you weren't
on the committee, you couldn't study the texts.
Scholars around the world were furious, arguing
that this shared human heritage was being held
hostage by a tiny group. So what broke the logjam?
It was a couple of things that happened all at
once in 1991. First, the Huntington Library in
California revealed that they had a complete
set of photographic negatives of all the scrolls,
and they announced they were making them available
to any qualified scholar. They just opened the
floodgates. They did. At the same time, some
other scholars used computers to reconstruct
the unpublished texts from a preliminary concordance
and published it themselves. The monopoly was
broken. The official committee had no choice
but to open up Access, which finally led to the
complete publication of everything in a massive
40 -volume series. But opening up Access created
a new kind of legal problem, didn't it? A battle
over copyright. A fascinating and landmark case.
It was called Cameron v. Shanks. A scholar named
Elisha Kimron had spent more than a decade painstakingly
piecing together that MMT scroll we talked about
from hundreds of tiny fragments. And someone
published his work without permission. Herschel
Shanks, the editor of Biblical Archaeology Review,
published Kimron's reconstructed text. Kimron
sued. But how can you copyright an ancient text?
It should be in the public domain. That was Shanks'
argument. But Kimron's argument was more nuanced.
He said, I didn't write the original text. But
I did the scholarly work of deciphering these
illegible scraps and arranging them into a coherent
whole. That act of reconstruction is an original
creative work. And the court agreed? The Israeli
Supreme Court agreed with him. They set a major
precedent. The ancient text itself is public
domain. But a scholar's unique decipherment and
reconstruction of a fragmentary text can be protected
by copyright. It was a huge victory for the intellectual
property rights of scholars. OK, so let's get
to the big so what question. Why do these scrolls
truly matter to people today outside of academia?
Let's talk about their impact on the Bible itself.
This is their most profound legacy. As we said
at the top before the scrolls, our oldest complete
Hebrew Bibles were from the 10th century CE.
The scrolls instantly pushed that date back a
full thousand years to the second century BCE.
A thousand years closer to the original authors.
Exactly. It gave us a window into the Bible's
textual history that we never thought we'd have.
And the first big takeaway, the one that made
all the headlines, was how remarkably accurate
the transmission had been. It was astounding.
One of the early scholars, Miller Burroughs,
used the famous example from Isaiah chapter 53.
He compared the text in the great Isaiah scroll
from Qumran with the Masoretic text from a thousand
years later. And what did you find? In 166 words,
there were only 17 letters that were different.
And most of those were just minor spelling variations,
like the difference between color and color.
It was a stunning testament to the care and fidelity
of the scribal tradition over a millennium. But
that's only half the story. Because while some
scrolls showed that amazing consistency, others
showed the complete opposite. They showed a text
that was still in flux. And this is the deeper,
more complex truth that the scrolls revealed.
Yes, Isaiah was very stable. But when you look
at the Qumran manuscripts of, say, the books
of Exodus or Samuel, you see huge differences
from the text we know today. Not just spelling
differences. No, entire paragraphs that are there
in one version and missing in another. Different
phrasing, different order of events. What the
scrolls proved is that in the Second Temple period,
there wasn't one single authoritative version
of the Old Testament. There were multiple versions
circulating at the same time. Exactly. It forced
scholars to accept that the biblical text was
extremely fluid and existed in several different
textual traditions right up until it was finally
standardized or canonized around 100 CE. The
scrolls don't just affirm the Bible. They show
us the messy living process of how it became
the Bible. Now, we mentioned earlier that the
Book of Esther is the one book of the Hebrew
Bible they didn't find at Qumran. Any theories
as to why? It's a conspicuous absence. There
are two main theories. One is theological. The
community at Qumran was intensely pious and sectarian,
very focused on purity and separation. They may
have had a problem with the story of Esther,
a Jewish woman marrying a foreign Persian king.
It didn't fit their worldview. It may have been
ideologically objectionable to them. The other
theory is liturgical. It has to do with their
calendar. The festival of Purim, which is the
whole point of the Book of Esther, is not part
of the unique solar calendar that the Qumran
community followed. So if they didn't celebrate
Purim, they had no need for the book that explains
Purim. Exactly. It was simply irrelevant to their
religious life. Which brings us to the most modern
and most politically charged aspect of the scrolls,
the fight over who owns them. Yes, the custody
battle. The scrolls have been caught up in geopolitics
from the very beginning. Remember, they were
found in an area that was controlled by Jordan
after the 1948 war. The main collection was housed
in a museum in East Jerusalem. Until 1967. Until
the Six -Day War in 1967. When Israeli forces
took control of East Jerusalem, they also took
control of the museum and its contents, including
the scrolls. They were moved to the Shrine of
the Book at the Israel Museum in West Jerusalem,
where they are today. And that's the heart of
the current dispute. It is. Israel claims ownership
based on them being the paramount heritage of
the Jewish people. They argue they are the rightful
custodians. But Jordan and the Palestinian Authority
argue that the scrolls were taken illegally from
occupied territory in violation of international
law like the 1954 Hague Convention on Cultural
Property. So the scrolls have become a potent
symbol in the larger Israeli -Palestinian conflict.
A very potent symbol. And it's worth noting that
Jordan does still own a small number of scrolls
that were acquired before 1967, which are on
display in a museum in Amman. So even the collection
itself is physically divided by this conflict.
And as if all that weren't complicated enough,
the fame and value of the scrolls have spawned
a dark modern industry forgeries. This is a huge
problem. Since about 2002, with the price of
genuine fragments going into the millions, the
black market has been flooded with fakes. And
these forgeries are getting good. Very good.
They'll often take a genuine piece of ancient
blank parchment or leather and then write on
it with modern ink, trying to mimic the ancient
script. It takes serious scientific analysis
to spot them. And there was a very public, very
embarrassing example of this recently. There
was. The Museum of the Bible in Washington, D
.C. had spent millions acquiring 16 purported
Dead Sea Scroll fragments. In 2020, after extensive
testing, they had to announce that all 16 of
them were modern forgeries. All of them? Every
single one. It was a massive wake -up call from
museums and collectors everywhere. It proves
that for any fragment that appears on the market
now, you need ironclad provenance and rigorous
scientific testing because the incentive to cheat
is just too high. Hashtag tag tag outro. So when
you step back and you try to sum up the value
of all this, it's just it's immense. On one level,
they gave us our oldest surviving manuscripts
of the Bible, closing that thousand year gap
and confirming the incredible dedication of ancient
scribes. But it's more than that. It's so much
more. They gave us this direct. unfiltered insight
into the diversity and the passion of Jewish
life and belief during that critical Second Temple
period, the time just before the Bible as we
know it was finalized, and just before rabbinic
Judaism and Christianity emerged as distinct
movements. So after all this, what does it mean
for you listening to this? You're looking for
some kind of certainty in history. And what you
find is complexity. You find a sacred scripture
that was once extremely fluid. You find half
a dozen competing theories about who even wrote
it down. You find priceless texts that were almost
destroyed by something as mundane as scotch tape.
And you have this bitter, unresolved political
fight over who even gets to call them their own.
So I think that leaves us with a question. Given
all this evidence of fluidity, of debate, of
human error, and of modern conflict, what does
it really mean when even our most sacred and
ancient documents are not settled facts but are
still living sources of discovery and a fierce
argument today? It means that our understanding
of history is never truly final. The documents
themselves might be ancient, trapped in time
for 2 ,000 years, but the fight over what they
mean, where they came from, and who they belong
to, that's a thoroughly modern struggle. And
it's one that is constantly reshaping how we
think about our own history, our identity, and
our faith.