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00:00For thousands of years they lay hidden in desert caves.
00:06900 texts, most of them in fragments, creating an enduring puzzle.
00:13The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest and most complete set of ancient writings ever unearthed in modern times.
00:20Sixty years after their discovery, they are still revealing secrets about the Jewish world into which Jesus was born.
00:28Including a map with a list of spectacular treasures and clues as to where they might be found.
00:35What ancient secrets do the scrolls reveal?
00:40Can we reassemble all the paths before they disintegrate and shed new light on a time when two great religions parted ways and changed history forever?
00:58Sometimes history changes because of the smallest of things, like a lost goat.
01:13It's 1947, the year the state of Israel is formed.
01:23And the errant goat belongs to a young Bedouin boy in the Judean desert.
01:28Thinking it's disappeared into a cave, he tosses in a rock, hoping to scare it out.
01:34Instead, he hears something shatter.
01:40Frightened of what might lie inside, the boy enlists his cousin, Mohamed El Dib, to explore the cave.
01:50What they find is a disappointment.
01:52No goat, no treasure, just some broken pottery and several ancient jars containing scrolls wrapped in linen.
02:01Mohamed El Dib gathers the loot and puts it in a sack.
02:09Not knowing the value of his treasure, he hitches the sack to his Bedouin tent pole, where it hangs for days.
02:19Eventually, he sells pieces of the scrolls to a shoemaker in Bethlehem, for the equivalent of around two pounds.
02:26They would turn out to be the tip of the iceberg, the first cache of what would swell to some 900 texts of profound religious and historical significance.
02:39Practically the only surviving biblical documents written before 100 A.D.
02:44Today, the Dead Sea Scrolls sit quietly in the Israel Museum's shrine of the Book,
02:58whispering stories of a distant past and speaking to the earliest days of Judaism,
03:03and perhaps the origins of Christianity.
03:09Many of the scrolls contain biblical stories we already know.
03:13Multiple copies of almost every book in the Old Testament.
03:18Among them, 20 copies of Genesis,
03:2217 copies of Exodus,
03:25and 37 copies of the Book of Psalms.
03:28You've got every book of the Hebrew Bible in there, except for the Book of Esther.
03:33So they are reading and writing and believing the same things that we are today,
03:37with almost no details lost in the transmission over the past 2,000 years.
03:42Once people are exposed to the scrolls, something changes.
03:47To me, it's touching my roots.
03:51I mean, you look at the biblical scrolls, and history comes to life.
03:55The Dead Sea Scrolls are part of the greatest treasures, not only of the Jewish nation, but actually of human mankind.
04:05But the scrolls are more than a meticulous library of the ancient books of the Jewish Bible.
04:12Many of the texts had never been seen before.
04:15Unknown psalms, mystical writings, apocalyptic musings about the end of the world.
04:21There was also the enigmatic Copper Scroll, which read like a treasure map.
04:28And most controversially, there were texts outlining the precepts and rituals of a mysterious Jewish sect that lived in the desert,
04:38and saw life as a struggle between good and evil.
04:45To understand the impact of the scrolls, it's necessary to go back to the scorched landscape in which they were found.
04:55The scrolls were discovered in the Dead Sea region of the Judean Desert, the lowest elevation on the surface of the earth.
05:01Here, the arid environment kept the scrolls from withering away altogether over time.
05:10After the first dramatic discovery in 1947, other caves in the area were explored, and fragments of ancient texts were found in each.
05:21The caves were scattered around an ancient site called Qumran, the closest caves only about 15 metres away.
05:28Some of the scrolls were recovered intact, others had been badly damaged.
05:34They were written in three different languages, ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.
05:43Most were written on parchment, some on papyrus.
05:50One of the caves, designated number 11, contained scrolls that Dr. Hanan Achel has been studying for over two decades.
05:57Cave 11 was found by the Bedouins in January of 1956, and like in Cave 1 in 1947, they found complete scrolls.
06:10So we know that the Leviticus scroll was found over there, and that the Sun scroll was found in the inner part of the cave.
06:17One of them is the longest scroll that we have, the Temple scroll, which is 24 feet long.
06:22The Temple scroll was unique in both its size and content.
06:26It records Moses' instructions from God on how the Temple at the heart of the Jewish faith should be built, giving precise details and measurements.
06:37Some scholars have called it a second Torah, with God speaking to Moses directly to emphasise the authority of his words.
06:44Historians immediately began to wonder who had written the scrolls, and decided that clues of authorship might be found in the Qumran ruins near the caves.
06:57The settlement of Qumran was traditionally identified as the remains of a Roman fort.
07:08Today, many scholars believe it was something very different.
07:11Instead of a military outpost, they say it seems to have been a kind of monastery, built by a group of dissident Jews searching for a new kind of salvation in troubled times.
07:24About 40 years before the birth of Jesus, Rome had annexed Judea, installed a puppet king, and taken control of the Temple in Jerusalem, the holiest site in the Holy Lands.
07:39Some scholars say the people who wrote the scrolls fled into the desert to escape both the Roman occupation and the corruption of the Temple.
07:49The Qumran is so important and so unique because we have here a whole library of a sectarian group, of the group who left Jerusalem and went to the desert in order to live in a more pure way of life,
08:04which was a way to protest against establishment who was corrupt in the Temple.
08:11But who was this sectarian group?
08:14The Roman historian Josephus gives us an intriguing clue.
08:25Josephus described a group of mystics called the Essenes, a reclusive community of Jewish monks who practiced their faith in the first centuries before and after Jesus' birth.
08:39According to Josephus, the Essenes scorned what they saw as corruption of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.
08:44And apparently fled to the remote deserts of Judea, where Qumran is found.
08:53Because the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls never identified themselves, we can't be certain that they were the Essenes.
09:00But whoever wrote them, the scrolls were guaranteed to strike a nerve 2,000 years later.
09:04In the scrolls, the faithful transcript of the Old Bible mixes with some revolutionary ideas.
09:13Ideas that could be seen as foreshadowing the splinter group, but would soon form around the teachings of an obscure carpenter from Galilee, and change the course of Western history.
09:22The scrolls also introduced us to a character called the Teacher of Righteousness, who fought against a wicked priest and asked his followers to turn away from material wealth, embrace humility, and live pious lives.
09:41Historians speculate that the teacher and the wicked priest were rivals of the temple in Jerusalem, who engaged in a power struggle that was eventually won by the wicked priest.
09:58So the teacher and his followers fled into the desert, where they nursed the idea that they were the chosen ones, the sons of light who would defeat the forces of darkness at the end of time and see salvation.
10:16The scrolls also show a near obsession with another prominent Christian idea, the end of the world.
10:31The group that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls is waiting for Armageddon. They're waiting for the end of days.
10:37Much like today, we have, say, David Koresh at Waco. We've got the debacle at Jonestown.
10:43Every so often, you've got entire groups that commit suicide because they're waiting for the end of days.
10:50And so it looks like some of the people that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls may have fit into that category.
10:57There are other precursors of Christianity in the Dead Sea Scrolls, especially in words that would eventually spread around the globe.
11:04We know that the Essenes were flourishing at the time when Jesus began his ministry, and that he may have appropriated some of their language.
11:22So, is it possible Jesus was part of the community that wrote the words on the Dead Sea Scrolls?
11:29To answer that question, we must take a closer look at the scrolls themselves.
11:37The modern story of the scrolls is a cloak-and-dagger thriller, filled with secret meetings and parcels passed in the dark of night, set against a backdrop of politics and war.
11:54It was 1947. There was gunfire in the streets of Jerusalem, because the brand new United Nations was creating a brand new state in the region, Israel.
12:11And unhappy Palestinians were fighting back.
12:14The first scrolls were found in Palestinian territory, just months before the state of Israel came into being.
12:24Over the years, other finds were made.
12:27And fragments of old writing began to show up in the lucrative antiquities black market.
12:34Some traded them for money, others for political gain, still others in search of eternal answers.
12:44In 1954, pieces of a scroll appeared for sale in America in the classified ads of the Wall Street Journal.
12:51An ad listed four of the Dead Sea Scrolls for sale as an ideal gift to an educational or religious institution.
13:01It was spotted by an Israeli archaeologist, who purchased them anonymously for $250,000.
13:06The world expected the museum scholars to patch the pieces together quickly and publish the results.
13:14Instead, the scholars in Jerusalem took their time, 40 years' worth.
13:20The delay led to grumbling, and a suspicion the scholars had found something they wanted to hide.
13:26Not so, say the people responsible for the complex task.
13:32All along, the main concern was about why aren't the scrolls being published.
13:37No one actually was aware that physically the scrolls are also in need.
13:47The scholars calculate that they're dealing with about 900 texts, broken up into 15,000 pieces.
13:52Lots of the pieces are missing, and to make things even more complicated, many of the scrolls are copies of the same texts.
14:05Then there's the problem of brittleness. The fragments are disintegrating.
14:09In a laboratory at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, a team of preservationists is battling the corrosive effects of time.
14:2480% of the scrolls are written on parchment, 20% are written on papyrus.
14:29So both are organic materials, and as such, they have a life of their own.
14:34Preservation is a meticulous and painstaking task.
14:37The lab workers clean the fragments, then place them between silk sheets, which will protect them for a while.
14:47We know that no matter what we do, eventually they will deteriorate and disintegrate.
14:54What we're trying to do is to slow down the process.
14:56I always say that if the scrolls waited for us for 2,000 years, it is our duty to preserve them for at least 2,000 years to go.
15:09Every time someone touches a fragment, the risk of damaging it increases.
15:12Half a world away in Los Angeles, one man may have a solution to the problem.
15:20Dr. Bruce Zuckerman uses state-of-the-art techniques to make the scrolls available without actually handling them.
15:27Digital technology is the key.
15:32He uses infrared light to read the letters on the scrolls that can't be seen by the naked eye.
15:38Some of us have worked on refining the infrared imaging technique by using a technique called narrowband infrared imaging.
15:48And I can give you an example here.
15:53Now this is a little fragment of a Dead Sea scroll that is invisible light.
15:59And you can see it doesn't look too terribly good.
16:02In fact, you can't even be sure that there's anything on it.
16:04In fact, when we first saw it, we weren't sure if anything was on it at all.
16:07So we did apply narrowband infrared imaging to this.
16:14And much to our pleasure and to some degree to our surprise, we discovered that the piece actually did have writing on it.
16:22So you see, that's quite an improvement.
16:25There are letters here.
16:27Zuckerman pieces the fragments together digitally with a specially designed software program.
16:32This happens to be the word king.
16:37And it wasn't hard to basically use a little graphics program to connect the dots like that.
16:43You can see, here's the match.
16:45Mem, Lamed, Kaf, Olive.
16:49Zuckerman and his team have compiled a database of all the Dead Sea scroll fragments.
16:54It is now available to scholars in 25 countries.
16:56What we're trying to do is give people powerful tools so they can reconstruct these texts in a way so that they can test their ideas and see if they're valid.
17:08When those tools are available, the Dead Sea scrolls come to life again.
17:13Some come to life with words familiar to Jews, Christians and Muslims around the world.
17:18And God said, let the waters underneath the heavens be gathered together, and let the dry land appear.
17:29And it was so.
17:31Other texts, like the War Rule scroll, reflect a particular sect's view of the Apocalypse.
17:36The suns of righteousness shall shine to all ends of the world, continuing to shine forth until the end of the appointed seasons of darkness.
17:47Words like these seem oddly similar to those found in the New Testament, raising even more questions about the men who wrote them.
17:54To help answer them, we go to the Judean desert and the abandoned site at Qumran.
18:09When Bedouin boys found the Dead Sea scrolls in a cave in Judea in 1947, it set off a frenzy of archaeological activity.
18:16Father Roland Devaux, a French Dominican priest, oversaw the excavation of the other caves in the area, and found hundreds of additional fragments.
18:32He decided it was likely that the authors had lived in a settlement nearby, and the ruins of Qumran fit the bill.
18:40According to Devaux, the physical layout of the abandoned site seemed to confirm this hunch.
18:48Because of its communal structure, some say that Qumran was custom-built for scroll writing.
18:54Copying the ancient texts was slow.
18:59Intensive work requiring the coordinated effects of many individuals, all of them devoted to the idea of preserving the past.
19:06All of the rooms in the settlement were used for communal purposes or as workshops.
19:13In many cases, it's hard on the basis of archaeology to say what any given room was used for.
19:20So we reconstruct much of this information from the Dead Sea scrolls and from our ancient sources like Josephus.
19:27At the time it was inhabited, some 2,000 years ago, the Qumran site occupied about 7,250 square meters and might have held as many as 200 members.
19:38Corridors led to various rooms, including one some scholars identify as a scroll room where the community's precious texts were kept.
19:47Throughout the site, archaeologists also uncovered 10 pools which could have been used for ritual baths.
20:02Then there's the main communal room and stacks of pottery archaeologists found there, where members shared their meals.
20:09The site was built with a combination of stones and mud-brick plaster, and the entire settlement was surrounded by a wall.
20:24One room within the complex contained some of the most persuasive evidence that the scrolls were written at the Qumran site.
20:30This room in the middle of the settlement was identified by DeVoe as a scriptorium or writing room.
20:45During the excavations, Father DeVoe found the remains of long, narrow tables and benches, ideal for assembling and sewing pieces of parchment into one long scroll.
20:55In this same room, DeVoe also found the remains of inkwells.
21:06Now, inkwells are a rare find on archaeological excavations in Israel.
21:13So the presence of inkwells suggested to DeVoe that this room must have been a room where writing was done.
21:19Around the corner, DeVoe excavated another room, the largest in the site.
21:24This room seemed to fit the description of a communal room as described in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and we know of the Essenes' devotion to communal living.
21:38In the room adjacent to it, DeVoe found a pantry of dishes.
21:41The pantry contained over 1,000 pottery dishes that were lying neatly stacked on the floor.
21:50The presence of so many dishes, which were used specifically for dining, plates, cups and bowls, suggested to DeVoe that communal meals must have been held in this room.
22:01The Essenes lived here in the desert, and participation in their communal meals was considered a substitute for participation in the temple sacrifices.
22:14In a ritual that seems to foreshadow the teachings of John the Baptist, the scroll writers used sacred waters to cleanse themselves spiritually.
22:25And at Qumran, we can see the remains of an elaborate water system that channeled rainwater from the cliffs into a series of pools.
22:32One of the characteristic features of Qumran is the large number of Jewish ritual baths.
22:42The main indication are the broad sets of steps that go from the top to the bottom.
22:47Members of the community would step into these pools, submerse themselves from head to toe, and emerge spiritually pure.
23:06The pools, the communal rooms, and the scriptorium are all consistent with a pious splinter group of Jews, like the Essenes, trying to preserve and improve upon their religious heritage.
23:17That's still the most common interpretation of the Qumran site.
23:27But it's not the only one.
23:30There's nothing based on the archaeological evidence that proves that Essenes lived at the site, both in terms of the ceramic evidence and the numismatic evidence.
23:45There's nothing that distinguishes Qumran from other contemporary sites in the Dead Sea region.
23:54It's not a unique site.
23:55A site like Qumran is common.
23:57We have several sites of the same period along the Dead Sea shore.
24:02Archaeologist Yuval Peleg thinks the pools may have been used for something other than ritual bathing.
24:07If the water came into a sedimentation pool and then into another pool, it can't be a ritual bath, because the water became unpure.
24:23They can't be, according to the Jewish law, a ritual bath.
24:26Peleg believes the elaborate waterworks may have been constructed for a far more mundane purpose.
24:32This pool, 71, is the only pool that the Vo didn't excavate in the 50s.
24:40Two years ago, in 2004, we started excavating the pool, and at the bottom we found here a layer of 30 centimeters of pure clay.
24:51Clay that Peleg believes was ideal for making pottery.
24:58What we think today is that Qumran was started as a military post and after the Roman conquest turned into a pottery industry.
25:06Peleg discounts the possibility that the Dead Sea Scrolls were written at Qumran, or that the Essenes occupied the site at all.
25:19He points out that any Jewish sect who had fled Jerusalem in search of a more pious life could have hidden the scrolls in the caves without settling in Qumran.
25:26But with the caves so close to the site, the nearest only about 15 meters away, many scholars doubt it's just a coincidence.
25:44Sixty years after its first excavation, Qumran seems to have kept more secrets than it has given up.
25:49Who wrote the scrolls? Were these people who lived in Qumran? Were those people who lived in Jerusalem? Did they bring the scrolls on their runs from Jerusalem? Who are these people?
26:03Dr. Ira Rabin believes the new scientific data may help elucidate.
26:08The idea is, of course, to check whether we can correlate those scrolls, especially sectarian scrolls, to Jerusalem, to Qumran, some other place.
26:17I'm trying to see whether there are links, definite links between the settlement of Qumran and the caves of Qumran.
26:26Maybe people will say they are, but I haven't found one single sound link, you know, physical evidence.
26:35What of those small but compelling pieces of evidence that this was a scroll room, the inkwells?
26:40Such evidence would be, for instance, ink found in the inkwell in the settlement and the matching ink on the scroll, to try to follow up the provenance of the scroll through the origin of the ink.
27:00Because ink is an organic material mixed with water, Rabin and her team hope to match the ink composition with water in different areas across the region.
27:13So what we hope to achieve is to know exactly what scrolls were written in the area of Qumran.
27:19Unfortunately, her results could be years away.
27:24All we can say for certain is that the men who wrote the scrolls lived at the crossroads of Judaism and Christianity, and wanted both to preserve the revered past and see into an apocalyptic future.
27:35And that brings up an interesting question. Why would a pious, humble and fanatically anti-materialistic people preserve a treasure map?
27:54Enter the riddle of the Copper Scroll.
27:56In the National Archaeological Museum in Amman, Jordan, sits the most perplexing of all the texts found next to the Dead Sea, the Copper Scroll.
28:13It describes a treasure, gold and silver, measured in tons.
28:17Since its discovery in 1952, scholars have wondered why this scroll would be found among documents written by a people who swore themselves to poverty and awaited the end of the world.
28:34The Copper Scroll is quite unique. It was engraved on highly pure copper, 99.9% pure copper.
28:41How did they know how to engrave on it? Why did they engrave on copper?
28:44This is a very valuable, precious material at that time.
28:48Clearly, they wanted to put down information that would last.
28:54Too brittle to be unrolled, the scroll had to be painstakingly cut into 29 pieces before it could be translated.
29:03Its contents sound like ripe pickings for the likes of an Indiana Jones.
29:08In the mouth of the spring of the temple, vessels of silver and gold for tithe and money.
29:14The whole thing being 600 talents.
29:17In the outer valley, in the middle of the circle on the stone, buried at 17 cubits beneath it, 17 talents of silver and gold.
29:29Written in an ancient form of Hebrew, the Copper Scroll gives precise descriptions of where large amounts of gold and silver were buried.
29:36But why would any treasure be precious to the anti-materialistic authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls?
29:43There are two distinct possibilities.
29:47It could be the treasure of the first Jewish temple built by Solomon and sacked by the Babylonians centuries earlier.
29:56Or, more likely, the Copper Scroll refers to the treasures of the second temple, destroyed by the Romans at about the time when the scrolls were written.
30:05Dr. Oren Goodfeld, an archaeologist from Hebrew University, is trying to get to the bottom of the mystery of the Copper Scroll.
30:17I don't know about treasures, but I hope that the tunnel will give us more data that helps us to understand the Copper Scrolls.
30:26Working in the middle of the Judean desert, and guided by the text of the Copper Scroll,
30:31Goodfeld has uncovered a man-made tunnel that he believes may lead to treasure.
30:38In the Copper Scroll, it's mentioned that in the tunnel that's facing to the north in the Secha Kha Valley are hidden parts of the treasures.
30:46The connection between the two, I think it's quite clear.
30:49And I really hope that the people who wrote the Copper Scroll meant to one of the tunnels that I'm excavating.
30:56So far, no treasure has turned up, but Dr. Goodfeld has yet to reach the end of the tunnel.
31:04Others have more radical ideas about the Copper Scroll.
31:09Ideas that reach back into Egypt and have startling implications for Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
31:19Metallurgist and engineer Robert Feather has raised eyebrows with his interpretation of the Copper Scroll.
31:24It involves a code he claims to have deciphered, while examining the few Greek letters in the mostly Hebrew text.
31:31In the Copper Scroll, there are 14 Greek letters interspersed in the Hebrew text.
31:38I took the first ten letters and put them together.
31:42And Eureka, they read Akhenaten, the name of an Egyptian pharaoh who lived around 1350 BC.
31:54And it was one of those revelationary moments.
31:59The revolutionary pharaoh Akhenaten created what has controversially been called the first monotheistic religion in the world.
32:08He lived at a time when some scholars estimate the Israelites lived in Egypt, before the Exodus.
32:13You only have to look at the Old Testament to see that major characters in the Old Testament lived or fled from Egypt.
32:26They absorb this belief in one God.
32:31The evidence in the Copper Scroll itself, it's pretty self-evident.
32:35The clues about Egypt are there for anyone who wants to look at them.
32:41Some scholars believe that if the Israelites did not take the idea of monotheism out of Egypt,
32:48the Egyptians could easily have brought the idea to them.
32:51After all, Egypt was a dominant world power for thousands of years, leading to the first century BC, when many of the scrolls were written.
32:59We are in the 18th dynasty of Egyptian pharaohs, around about 1350 BC.
33:06Egypt is the most dominant force in the whole of the Middle East.
33:12It controls the whole of the Levant, of the Holy Land, what is now Lebanon, right the way up to Assyria.
33:20It is the power and the most wealthy civilization in the world.
33:23And it makes a lot of sense that if anyone was going to come to the realization of one God, it was going to be an Egyptian pharaoh.
33:32If Feather is right, the Copper Scroll's significance is far beyond that of a mere treasure map.
33:38It is a sign that the Israelites did remember and revere Akhenaten, who he argues is the first monotheist.
33:44And the Judaism, Christianity and Islam owe their central belief to the land of the pharaohs.
33:53But for most scholars, a controversial code leading to a pharaoh, leading to the Israelites, leading to the Copper Scroll, is too convoluted a trail to follow.
34:02The theory that the treasures mentioned in the Copper Scroll could be Akhenaten's treasures, and that they are somewhere in Amarna in Egypt, is absolutely ludicrous.
34:15There is no way that they could possibly be that, because the Copper Scroll is a thousand years after Akhenaten lives.
34:23Feather is undeterred by the discrepancy in dates.
34:26He claims the Copper Scroll was copied from an early document much older than the Copper Scroll itself.
34:39But Feather's conviction isn't shared by most scholars.
34:42Some have ventured that the Copper Scroll was the equivalent of an urban legend, or possibly even an ancient hoax.
34:48One of the major problems we've got with the Copper Scroll is that we don't know whether or not to believe it.
34:56Not one of the treasures, there are some 64 mentioned in the scroll, not one of them has ever been located.
35:02My particular feeling is that they're never going to be located, because they either never existed in the first place, or they were found very long ago.
35:10But even if the Copper Scroll does not lead to treasure, or to the origins of Judaism, there's no denying that the rest of the scrolls have profound implications for Judaism at the time of Jesus.
35:26But some scholars contend the scrolls shed even more light on early Christianity,
35:30and that a case can be made that Jesus himself was an Essene.
35:45Some believe that the Dead Sea Scrolls,
35:49the writings of an obscure Jewish sect,
35:54have much to tell us about the roots of Christianity.
35:57Written in the centuries before and after the birth of Jesus,
36:04they bear witness to a time when splinter groups were breaking away from mainstream Judaism,
36:11and practicing rituals that seem to anticipate Christianity.
36:17Rituals like the taking of the communal meal.
36:20What we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls is that there was a priest who blessed the cup,
36:32one cup that was shared among many people.
36:36And this was picked up very quickly in early Christianity.
36:40It was reflected in the communal meal that we know of the Last Supper that Jesus had with his disciples.
36:48The scrolls also describe ritual baths of spiritual cleansing.
36:55While these rituals seem to echo Jewish traditions,
36:58they also may foreshadow the Christian idea of baptism.
37:01The first step of being united with the people of God is this immersion.
37:06You need to become clean.
37:10But you need to be pure in body, you also have to be pure in heart according to their rules.
37:15Passages from the War Rule scroll describe a great battle and the destruction of the Sons of Darkness,
37:25foreshadowing the Battle of Armageddon described in the Book of Revelations.
37:28There shall be a battle and horrible carnage before the God of Israel for it is a day appointed by him as a battle of annihilation for the Sons of Darkness.
37:41Most radical of all, some have even speculated that Jesus himself spent time with a sect who wrote the scrolls.
37:51Robert Feather, author of The Secret Initiation of Jesus at Qumran, draws a controversial link.
37:59He finds too many echoes of Dead Sea Scroll language in the New Testament to write it off as chance.
38:06There are unique phrases that appear in Paul and in other Gospels that can only have come from some of the fairly secretive, confidential documents of the Qumran community.
38:20The anomaly of Jesus' life in the New Testament is we hear about his birth, we hear about him coming out at the age of 12, but nothing.
38:31Nothing about his formative years, his most important years of his life.
38:36The New Testament has nothing to say.
38:38Where is he?
38:40I believe he is ensconced at Qumran, with the Qumran Essenes, studying Biblical texts.
38:45Since the Essenes existed during the life of Jesus, and held beliefs that seem to parallel some ideas in Christian thought,
38:54Feather thinks that Jesus developed his ideas while living in Qumran.
39:00But there is nothing in the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves to corroborate this theory.
39:07Skeptics of the Jesus as Essene theory go on to point out the many differences between what the Essenes believed and what Jesus taught.
39:16The Essenes were sticklers for ritual purity, and intolerant of people they considered unclean.
39:22Jesus embraced lepers.
39:27The Essenes shunned tax-gatherers and sinners.
39:31Jesus recruited them.
39:34One of the scrolls preaches eternal hatred for the men of the pit, while Jesus asked people to love their enemies.
39:40So while it's possible Jesus knew of groups like the Essenes, and may have borrowed elements from them, his basic message couldn't have been more different.
39:50There is no evidence that Jesus was an Essene.
39:54About the most that scholars are willing to say is that John the Baptist could have been an Essene.
39:58It's difficult, if not impossible, to actually link Jesus himself with the Essenes.
40:05Author Michael Bagent doesn't believe that Jesus was an Essene.
40:09But he believes the scrolls might have threatened the tenets of the Catholic Church and Christianity in general.
40:13When we look at the scrolls, when we read them, we find some very important things.
40:22They oppose directly Christianity.
40:25They oppose the uniqueness of Christianity.
40:27They show there was a pre-existing messianic context.
40:31They oppose the divinity of Jesus, because they show that Messiah, Son of God, doesn't have to have a divine interpretation.
40:40And they oppose directly the theological unity of the Gospels.
40:44So to that extent, they're a kind of time bomb.
40:46Jesus sometimes referred to himself as the Son of God, which his followers took as a sign of his divine nature.
40:55But the scrolls use the term in a much more worldly context.
40:59There was a text found in Cave 4, and in this text, the title Son of God was used.
41:07Now, it shows that this title was current in Messianic Judaism before Jesus.
41:13It shows that this phrase was current in the Qumran community.
41:19But, of course, in Christianity, Son of God has this divine connotation.
41:24At Qumran, it didn't.
41:26This interpretation defines Jesus the way present-day Judaism views him, as a mortal prophet.
41:35Jesus was Jewish.
41:37That's so simple, yet so often forgotten.
41:39And he was a messianic Jewish leader.
41:44Whatever that may mean.
41:46But it didn't mean unique.
41:48It didn't mean divine.
41:50And it meant that he was in a pre-existing Jewish context.
41:55This sent panic through the church.
41:59And they moved very quickly to take control of the scrolls.
42:02They set up an international team to physically hold them.
42:07And they also controlled the interpretation of the scrolls.
42:11And a scandal developed.
42:13There was a deception.
42:15There was a fraud.
42:17But this is a distinctly minority view.
42:20Now that all the scrolls are out, we see that there's no secrets here.
42:25And there's no scrolls here that sheds negative light on the Christian belief.
42:35Since their discovery, the Dead Sea Scrolls have been poured over and examined by hundreds of scholars.
42:39And there's still no definitive word on who wrote them or what they mean.
42:49But someone wrote them.
42:51And then went to a great deal of trouble to hide them, hastily, as if to preserve something they feared might be lost forever.
42:58And we know the inhabitants at Qumran had reason to be afraid.
43:09In 70 AD, the Romans destroyed the second temple in Jerusalem.
43:13After sending their armies out into the countryside to crush the remnants of the Jewish revolt against Roman rule.
43:19There was the imminent danger of destruction, the destruction of the city of Jerusalem, the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.
43:29The Romans had already penetrated Palestinian territory.
43:35They had arrived in Judea and started to destroy various villages and cities.
43:45Qumran was one of those sites.
43:48I believe that when the Roman army approached Qumran, the people decided to hide their scrolls in caves.
43:55And they thought that they have enough time.
43:58They took some scrolls to cave 1, to cave 11, to cave 3.
44:01And then they realized that they don't have enough time.
44:04The Essenes disappear from the stage of history after the first Jewish revolt against the Romans.
44:11The site of Qumran was destroyed in the year 68 AD, at the time of the first Jewish revolt against the Romans.
44:22That Jewish revolt ended on a hilltop in southern Judea at a site called Masada.
44:26About a thousand Jewish defenders were surrounded by Roman soldiers in a siege that lasted for months.
44:33When the Romans finally broke through, they discovered that all the men defending Masada had killed themselves.
44:40Some scholars think it's likely the devout Essenes were among those who died rather than submit to Roman rule.
44:50It's possible that some of the Essenes fled the settlement at the time of the destruction and joined the group that was holding out on top of Masada.
45:04But then after that, we don't hear of them anymore.
45:08And that might explain why no one ever returned to retrieve the scrolls.
45:15Instead, the scroll writers left behind an inadvertent time capsule that lay buried for nearly 2,000 years,
45:22and was only rediscovered when a boy went looking for a lost goat.
45:25Now it's up to us to sort through the time capsule's contents and to decide what they mean.
45:37Well, the Deci scrolls are the most important witness for the biblical texts that we use today.
45:46We actually have scrolls we can hold in our hands, which people contemporary with the first century held in their hands.
45:53Now we see that the early church was part of the dynamic of ancient Judaism in the land of Israel 2,000 years ago.
46:03But we didn't know that before Qumran because we didn't have the material and the knowledge we have today.
46:10Now that we're studying the scroll in the 21th century, we see how influential they were,
46:16how they influenced Jewish life and how they influenced Christianity.
46:19So we see that the early church was organized very much like the Qumranites.
46:26Those scrolls shed light on all the Western civilization.
46:34As the remaining fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls get reassembled,
46:38it's possible that more mysteries and controversies lie ahead.
46:41Or perhaps the scrolls have already given up all their secrets.
46:48But nothing can diminish the insights the scrolls have already given us about the world as it was during a pivotal time in history.
46:54When two religions parted ways and changed the world forever.
47:02in the world forever.
47:03in the world forever.
47:08Transcription by CastingWords