Today’s nytimes.com says that “Israel [Is] To Display Dead Sea Scrolls on the Internet.”
“The 2,000-year-old scrolls, found in the late 1940s in caves near the Dead Sea east of Jerusalem, contain the earliest known copies of every book of the Hebrew Bible (missing only the Book of Esther), as well as apocryphal texts and descriptions of rituals of a Jewish sect at the time of Jesus. The texts, most of them on parchment but some on papyrus, date from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D.”
Note: The Dead Sea Scrolls say nothing about Jesus but tell us about the Qumran community known as the Essenes. They give us valuable historical background to a type of Jewish life at the time of Jesus.
