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"What About the Dead Sea Scrolls...Why Are Some Not in the Bible?"
Pastor Mike Anderson
Sunday, August 5, 2007 - GSLC-North
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When I first saw this topic, I though hmmm… how am I going to preach on this topic??? But as I have researched this it has opened up for me a whole new fascination with this topic, specifically as it relates to the authenticity, relevancy and accuracy of the Old Testament.
The verse that I have chosen for today is 2 Timothy 3:16 which says, "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man (and woman) of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work."
What is so interesting to me is that Timothy was primarily referring to the Old Testament scriptures, or better known as the Hebrew Bible. And if all Scripture is God-breathed, or another word we use is "inspired", then certainly we would expect it to be accurate in all its renderings. Over the next two weeks we are going to cover the trustworthiness of the bible both Old and New Testaments.
Since the bible is the source of truth and specifically the source of our understanding the gospel or Good News about Jesus, it is important to be able to show the credibility of it as a historical document. The good news is that the bible has stood the test of time and the results of thousands of years of scrutiny and analysis have proven the bible to be a document unequalled in terms of authenticity and reliability from a historical and literary perspective.
Up until the mid 20th century it was clear how this was so for the New Testament, which has more than 20,000 manuscripts that back up the original documents, which are written shortly after the events occurred (Ie. In some cases within 15 years). And of all those documents the accuracy between them is within the 99% range with differences being minor in renderings of words, but nothing substantive in terms of meaning of the texts.
But today we are talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls, their relevancy for us and why some Dead Sea Scrolls are in the bible and some are not.
First it would be helpful to give a brief overview of their discovery started in 1947 and also what is actually in them.
Believe me there is a plethora of info related to this and there are slight variations of the accounting of all this so keep this in mind. But I have copied a website that I found most helpful in giving 25 fascinating facts about the Dead Sea Scrolls. If you are interested I have some copies on the patio.
First know that the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in eleven caves along the Northwest shore of the Dead Sea between the years of 1947 and 1956. The area is 13 miles east of Jerusalem and is 1,300 feet below sea level. Incidentally the humidity in the area is amazingly low, which is why some feel these artifacts were preserved so well in these caves.
As the story goes and although there are different iterations, the basic one goes like this. Bedouin (Arab) shepherds were looking for a lost goat near the caves along cliffs near the Dead Sea shores and they threw a rock into a cave. They heard something break and discovered jars containing manuscripts.
The discovery first came to be known to scholars when these finds were sold by a Bedouin to an antiquities dealer called Kando. He in turn sold three to a Hebrew university and four to a Syrian monastery where they came to the attention of European and American scholars.
Between 1949 and 1956 ten additional caves were found near Qumran, where an ancient sect similar to the Essenes in the bible lived at Qumran. This was a very sectarian community and many of the finds related to their community and way of life. They had strict observance to the Torah and had a high degree of Messianic expectation and apocalyptic type visions. The scrolls appear to be a library of the Jewish sect.
Remember that in AD 70 the Second Temple which was rebuilt after Jewish exile in 6th century B.C. was razed by the Romans. Therefore this sect was trying to preserve their religious literature and artifacts from being seized and taken away by Rome.
The easiest analogy I could make were if for some reason the Christian faith were to come into attack and our church wanted to preserve all of our important documents. We would take all the Pastor's libraries, all of our communion elements, our Books of Worship etc.. And of course there would be bibles.
This gives us an answer to today's question, because not everything in the Dead Sea Scrolls was just the Hebrew bible, which we call the Old Testament. There were extra biblical writings, like the book of Enoch, which is also not included in the Christian bible. It included community code of conduct books, much like a new member packet might have our by laws, and ways that we co-exist in community.
There would be commentaries that the pastors use in preparing their sermons. And again there would be bibles. So all of the Dead Sea Scrolls are important to us because they help us to understand what this strict community was like, which was also the same time that Jesus walked and created the Christian community.
In fact these communities are referred to in the bible and by first century historian Josephus as he often mentions the Essenes, Sadducees and Zealots.
So even though there are no New Testament texts per se, the major relevance for the finds is that they confirm the authenticity of the Old Testament. You see up until this discovery the main manuscripts used for the Hebrew bible, were the Masoretic Text. The word "Masor" in Hebrew means tradition. And the Masoretes were entrusted with preserving the Scriptures and their accuracy.
In fact they had several ways to count the meter and number of verses, consonants etc, which were tabulated in the margins. To give you an example there are more punctuation marks in Hebrew than there are letters in the English language. And these marks all lend to the interpretation and meaning of the words and their relationship to each other in the sentence.
So anyways the Masoretes did their copying between the 7th and 11th centuries. In the 10th century there was a full manuscript of the Hebrew bible. And this was the translation that was used until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. What did this mean?
There was a gap between the 10th century and the time dating back to when these documents were written which predates even Jesus' time. But what is really fascinating and most important for us today is that as they compared the texts of the Dead Sea Scroll finds, which remember included all of the OT except for the book of Esther, they found remarkable and astounding agreement between something written and scribed for 11 centuries.
Archaelogists and textual critics have maintained that at least 95% of the finds are in agreement. And where there are variances it is over small areas like spelling (honor vs. honour). Like I have mentioned with a language as complex as Hebrew (trust me I took 8 hours of it in Seminary, and as a side note, Bill Bright the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ as legend has it dropped out of seminary after taking Hebrew class!!) this is an amazing confirmation of how well the Old Testament was transmitted through the ages.
In fact some of the most documents scrolls are Isaiah, the Psalms and Deuteronomy. Specifically passages like Isaiah 53 have been scrutinized because they are Messianic passages. So we know that as early 100 BC Isaiah was widely circulated as a precursor to Jesus' arrival some 130 years later.
I really do hope I have not gotten too deep into the details. For me this was a wonderful revelation and has added to an already strong confidence regarding the bible's accuracy and specifically as we have talked about the Old Testament. Just this week we were reading about King Hezekiah and how he built treasury houses in about 8th century BC to store the gold and silver that was brought to him because of the blessing God brought to him and the favor of the people around him.
To think that some of the precious gold and silver found in these caves might have been part of the temple treasury is just astounding. The bible is coming alive and at a time when truth and the Christian message is being challenged more and more.
A final application for this is in all of this we see the deep reverence and respect these Jewish zealots had for God's word. They staked their very lives on protecting and being able to pass it on to their children. Today bible's are readily available, but do we understand the faithfulness of twenty centuries or our spiritual fathers and mothers to get us this Good News of Jesus Christ.
God's Word is unchanging and eternal, and Jesus was the Word that came in the flesh. The bible is the treasure chest of this Eternal Word and something worthy of our reflection and zeal and protection. I pray that we would be as faithful to pass the truths of these Scriptures as has been so faithfully transmitted to us!
Amen.