The Dead Sea Scrolls have certainly been one of the most, if not the
most, important discoveries of ancient documents in the last 100 years.
Certainly, it has been the most contentious of all discoveries and an
entire flood of criticism, whether scholarly, evangelical, skeptical, or
conspiratorial, has developed around the issue of the scrolls themselves.
Given all of the hype of their discovery and the resulting hubbub, however,
what is the real effect of the Dead Sea Scrolls on our understanding of
biblical scholarship' One of the most common errors regarding the scrolls
is to think that they have some sort of effect on the New Testamentâ€"they do
not and do not contain any references to Jesus whatsoever, as they were
actually composed before his birth: The body of literature known as the Dead Sea Scrolls predates the time of Jesus by approximately 80 years and as a consequence of this there are no direct references to his life and teachings.
The documents do, however, refer to some events that are noted within the
corpus of the New Testament themselves and offer a great deal of insight
into the atmosphere of the Jewish community as it existed historically
around the time of Jesus' birth. Indeed, these cultural aspects are one of
the most important elements of the Qumran discover. Just as notable,
however, is the inclusion of many documents that are similar, in part or
almost completely, to the canonized books of the Old testament, which offer
all sorts of important scholarly insight as well.
From a cultural perspective, the Dead Sea Scrolls are invaluable as
they outline many of the practices of the Qumran community at that time and
show that there are many similarities between the beliefs of the Qumran
practitioners of that time and the early Christians as well. It is not
supposed that there is a link, but this shows us, rather, that the
Christian community's beliefs were probab...