When Jesus walked on the earth 2,000 years ago the Bible that He read and often quoted from was the Old Testament. With over 2,000 years of translating and copying the Old Testament, down through the centuries, how can we be confident that the Bible that Jesus read (the Old Testament) is the same one we have today?
Enter the Dead Sea Scrolls. A little history behind the Dead Sea Scrolls may prove useful. Back between approximately 200 B.C. and A.D. 70 a Jewish sect somewhat resembling the Pharisees lived called the Essenes. The Essenes believed that worship in Jerusalem had become corrupt so they decided to remove themselves from Jewish society and began a monastic life living in the Judean desert. During their desert stay they devoted themselves to studying and copying the Scriptures while they awaited the expected return of their Messiah.
According to the website Bible.org: “As tensions between the Jews and Romans increased, the community hid their valuable scrolls in caves along the Dead Sea to protect them from invading armies. Their hope was that one day the scrolls would be retrieved and restored to the nation of Israel. In A.D. 70, the Roman general Titus invaded Israel and destroyed the city of Jerusalem along with its treasured Temple. It is at this time that the Qumran community was overrun and occupied by the Roman army. The scrolls remained hidden for the next two thousand years.”1
As we turn to the credibility of the Old Testament we once again shall enlist the aid of our friends the archaeologist and scientist to shed some light on the significance of the now-famous Dead Sea Scrolls. The discovery of these ancient scrolls, in the words of Gerald Lankester Harding, the British director of the Department of Antiquities in Amman Jordan, are “Perhaps the most sensational archaeological event of our time.”2 The Encyclopedia Britannica terms their recovery as follows: “Taken together, these manuscript finds are without precedent in the history of modern archaeology.”3 Just what is all this excitement about?
In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd boy, while hunting for a lost goat on the north shore of the Dead Sea, stumbled upon some old scrolls of writing, which he thought were of little value. One of these scrolls were a 23-foot-long one, which contained the complete text of the Book of Isaiah in Hebrew. When experts began to examine this and other scrolls, they soon realized that they were quite old. In order to scientifically determine their age, the scrolls were flown to the United States, to the University of Chicago, in 1949.
Professor Willard F. Libby, at the Chicago Institute of Nuclear Physics, conducted a procedure that is now considered to be scientifically accurate beyond any doubt, called Carbon 14 dating.
Basically, scientists, with the use of Geiger-counters, can determine the rate of radioactive decay of Carbon 14. Since it takes 5,600 years for carbon to lose half of its original radioactivity, scientists can use this knowledge to extrapolate the age of any organic substance.
Both the Carbon 14 dating method and the incredibly detailed examination of papyrologists came up with the same astonishing conclusion: that the Isaiah manuscript was copied about 100 B.C.
When we compare this 2,000-year-old document with any present day Bible, the significance of this discovery begins to come to light. First, both of these Isaiah texts have the exact same number of chapters: sixty-six. And second, when we compare each text, word for word, we find that they are virtually identical. Yes, there are tiny spelling variations, grammatical mistakes, accidental omissions and additions, and different arrangement of words, but these don’t change any essential doctrines. There can now be no doubt that the Old Testament you hold in your hands today is identical to the ones used by Jesus and the other religious leaders of 2,000 years ago.
Prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest Hebrew complete manuscript (and Hebrew was the original language in which the Old Testament was written) we had was the Masoretic Aleppo Codex which dates to A.D. 935.4 That brings us 1,000 years closer to the original documents in one fell swoop. And the incredible thing that this 1,000 year gap closure shows is how meticulous the scribes, who copied these sacred Scriptures, were.
Needless to say, the excitement generated from this find sparked an unprecedented exploration of desert caves and ancient ruins around the Dead Sea.
So far to date, over 400 ancient manuscripts have been uncovered, 100 being biblical. Of the thirty-nine different books of the Old Testament, only one book has not been found, the Book of Esther. They all date from around 200 B.C. to A.D. 100.
Together these findings should forever silence the critics who contend that the Bible we have today has been rewritten so often as to be of little trustworthiness. The scholars who have thoroughly investigated this stunning discovery have told us again that the few variations that do exist between the Dead Sea Scrolls and our oldest Hebrew manuscripts from A.D. 900 are so small as to be negligible in altering the meaning of any of the text.
Can we trust the Bible we have today? I dare say that if we don’t, we must also throw out all the other ancient works of history and consider them unreliable. Both historians and scientists alike have left us with no other alternative but to acknowledge that the Bible we have in our possession today is virtually the same as that which the scribes of 2,000 years ago so meticulously copied.
1 The Dead Sea Scrolls | Bible.org
2 Werner Keller, The Bible as History ( New York: Bantam Books, Inc., 1980), p. 425.
3 The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Micropaedia, 15th Edition (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1986), Volume III, p. 937.
Hi Curt…I saw the Dead Sea Scrolls when they were on exhibit in Seattle many years ago. They were encased in glass, untouchable, but definately in read-able shape….in good shape.
Are you going to do a devotional about the current scrolls that have just been discovered?
This devotional is very interesting…and so true.