The Dead Sea Scrolls: Discover the Secrets of the Bible’s Oldest and Strangest Texts
The appearance of the Dead Sea Scrolls was the most important document discovery of the twentieth century. Yet, in some sense, they didn’t deliver what many assumed to be promised within: that is, the basis for a complete revision of everything we thought we knew about Christianity. The reality of the Dead Sea Scrolls’ content is less simple, but also stranger — which makes it an ideal subject for the YouTube channel Hochelaga, given its penchant for exploring the obscure byways of religious history. And indeed, as host Tommie Trelawny says in his new video above, they are the “oldest Biblical writings ever found,” a status that, whatever their specifics, certainly justifies the great scrutiny paid to them over the past eight decades.
For it was only in 1946 that the Scrolls were found, by a Bedouin shepherd looking for his lost goat in a series of caves in the vicinity of ancient ruins by the Dead Sea. Or so the story goes, anyway, and Trelawny explains some of the complications that emerge when it’s examined more closely.
But the fact remains that those caves did contain, tightly rolled up and for the most part well-preserved, a set of scrolls adding up to “around 900 individual manuscripts: 40 percent of them “resembled books found in the Bible”; 30 percent, apocryphal writings “banned” from the Bible; and another 30 percent, “writings previously unknown to scholarship.” Those last include “texts that described a secretive religious community and apocalyptic visions of a great heavenly war.”
Most intriguingly, there was also “a scroll made entirely of copper that lists the locations of lost treasure.” None of it has ever been found, much as the content of the other texts hasn’t forced a great rethinking of the religion at the center of so much of Western civilization. In fact, as Biblical scholar Robert Alter writes in the London Review of Books, “the notion that these sectarian writings are actually Christian has no scholarly credibility,” though some researchers argue that “the blueprint for the Gospel narratives,” messiah figure and all, “was laid out in the Scrolls and followed by the first Christian writers.” They do, however, reveal a great deal about the worldview of the particular fringe faithful who took to the desert to keep their unorthodox beliefs safe from the harsh judgment of mainstream society — and, for about twenty centuries, safe they remained.
Related content:
Google Puts The Dead Sea Scrolls Online (in Super High Resolution)
Google Digitizes Ancient Copies of the Ten Commandments and Genesis
The Gnostic Gospels: An Introduction to the Forbidden Teachings of Jesus
Introduction to the Old Testament: A Free Yale Course
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.