Dead Sea Scrolls support scripture (OneNewsNow.com)

Dead Sea Scrolls support scripture (OneNewsNow.com)

Dead Sea Scrolls support scripture


Allie Martin - OneNewsNow - 4/23/2010 5:15:00 AMA professor of New Testament at a college in Canada is trying to help people have a better understanding of the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In his book, Holman QuickSource Guide to the Dead Sea Scrolls, Craig Evans provides an overview of the Dead Sea Scrolls and their importance to Christianity. The scrolls are a collection of about 900 documents, including texts from the Hebrew Bible, discovered between 1947 and 1956 in 11 caves on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea in Israel.

Evans, a professor at Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia, says a great deal of misinformation has been disseminated about the Dead Sea Scrolls, but he explains they support the accuracy and authority of scripture.

"The oldest complete Hebrew Bible dated to the year A.D. 1000, and so with the Dead Sea Scrolls, we now had manuscripts that were a thousand years older," he reports. "If we use the case of Isaiah, which is...completely preserved, now we can compare these [two] Isaiahs – the real old one [found] at Quaram at the Dead Sea [and] the not-so-old one that we have always had. And when we compare them, we see the text has not changed."

Portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls are on display through October at the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul.