“They tell us more about what Jews were thinking and believing and how they were living around the time that Jesus lived and the time of the New Testament authors,” Stokes said. “And that gives us some very important information and context for interpreting the New Testament.

When a Bedouin shepherd discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls in Israel in the 1940s, few people immediately understood their importance. After taking the scrolls back to his camp, this shepherd left one of them on the ground to be torn apart by children, while one person reportedly used another scroll fragment to wipe a baby’s bottom.

As the scrolls made their way to antiquities dealers and scholars, some refused to accept their antiquity. In 1948, however, biblical archaeologist W.F. Albright of Johns Hopkins University examined some photographs of the scrolls. Dating them quickly to the second century B.C., Albright dubbed these scrolls “the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times.” Now, more than half a century after the discovery of these scrolls, few would debate Albright’s claim.

But what makes these scrolls the most important find of the 20th century?

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS AND THE RELIABILITY OF SCRIPTURE
According to Ryan Stokes, assistant professor of Old Testament at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, the Dead Sea Scrolls affirm the reliability of the Old Testament text, taking scholars much closer to the original autographs of Scripture — that is, to the inerrant texts of the Old Testament as they were first written by their authors.

“These are some of the very oldest copies of the Old Testament that we have, certainly some of the oldest in the original Hebrew and Aramaic,” Stokes said. “The older the copies, the closer we get chronologically to the autographs, the fewer copies there are between the original Old Testament writings and these copies that we have.”
In fact, the Dead Sea Scrolls are 1,000 years older than the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, called the Codex Leningradensis and dated to around A.D. 1008. As a result, Stokes explained, the scrolls “put us in a better position than we were before their discovery to ascertain how the Old Testament developed and how faithfully the Old Testament text had been preserved over the millennia.”

In large part, the scrolls have shown that, through the millennia, scribes faithfully copied the Old Testament and that the Hebrew text translated for modern Christians accurately represents the Bible that Jesus read and the Bible as it was originally written.

“The Bible is reliable, and the texts we have accurately relay to us what was in the original autograph,” said Eric Mitchell, associate professor of Old Testament and archaeology at Southwestern Seminary. The Dead Sea Scrolls, however, differ in some ways from later manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible — most often due to spelling changes or to the difficulties of copying the scrolls by hand. But scholars are not surprised by these variants and are confident in discovering the correct wording of Scripture by comparing copies of the text. In any case, Mitchell said, most of the variants of the Hebrew Old Testament are minor, having little theological significance, and leave the meaning of the original text practically intact.

On a rare occasion, however, the Dead Sea Scrolls have preserved a textual variant rich with theological significance. Take Psalm 22:16, for instance, a passage that Christians understand as referring to Jesus’ crucifixion. The Septuagint, a Greek version of the Old Testament translated before the time of Christ and often used by the early church, supports the translation of Psalm 22:16 in the King James Version and many other English Bibles, “They pierced my hands and my feet.”

[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The source for this document was originally published on Baptist Press—however, the link (URL) to the original article is unavailable and has been removed.]