Event Detail

The Dead Sea Scrolls, more accurately known as the Qumran Scrolls, are the remains of 813 scrolls and manuscripts written in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic. 220 of them represented the Old Testament. These are the oldest known Hebrew text of the Bible with some text dating back to about 250 BC. Prior to 1947, the earliest text of the Bible was dated to AD 895. In 1947, a shepherd boy discovered some of them in a cave at Qumran, along the west coast of the Dead Sea in Israel. Subsequently, 11 caves yielded over 100,000 fragments. This discovery has significance for Judaism and Christianity. The scrolls (i) tell us about early Judaism (forerunner to Rabbinic Judaism and 1st century Christianity); (ii) explain the circumstances which led to the Christianity’s rapid Hellenization and Rabbinic Judaism’s resistance to Hellenization; (iii) show that modern translations of the Old Testament are reliable to an uncanny level of accuracy, and affirm that the LXX was a faithful translation; (iv) attest to the accuracy, historicity and antiquity of the New Testament texts, and its nexus to the Hebrew culture; (v) show that Christianity is a stream which flows from a common river, as a corrective to the stream of Judaism, and lays full claim to the faith of Abraham and Jacob, Moses, Noah; and (vi) serve as textual bridges between the two Testaments of the Christian Bible.