Dead sea Scrolls

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At the end of the movie Stigmata, they made refrence to the dead sea scrolls. What are the dead sea scrolls? Were they really condemned by the church? If so, Why? Thanks and God bless.
 
What are the dead sea scrolls? Were they really condemned by the church?
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I can’t imagine that the Church would condemn the Dead Sea Scrolls. When they were discovered in the 50s, part of the deuterocanonical books (like Tobit) were found with the other ancient manuscripts.

From a CA article: “This shows that many of them once existed in Hebrew. It is interesting that the text of the Catholic Old Testament, which was taken from the Septuagint, follows the text of the Dead Sea scrolls more closely than some other translations. This exhibits the care the Church has taken over the centuries to preserve the authenticity of Scripture. Some Jewish and Protestant Bible scholars have taken a renewed interest in the deuterocanonical books since their discovery among the Dead Sea scrolls.”

What are the scrolls and where were they found?

The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in caves along the western shore of the Dead Sea from 1947 to 1956, are considered by many to be the single most important archaeological find of the twentieth century. They comprise about 800 documents, some complete or nearly complete, but most quite fragmentary. In fact about 100,000 fragments have been found in all! Most of the scrolls were found in caves near Qumran, where a community lived which some scholars identify as Essenes, a Jewish sect known to have existed elsewhere in Israel during the Second Temple period, which includes the time of Jesus.

The scrolls comprise, among other things, the oldest copies of the Bible in existence. The Qumran scrolls date from approximately 250 B.C. to about 65 A.D., and at some other locations to about 135 A.D. This means that the Dead Sea Scrolls give us texts of the Bible which were copied more than 1000 years earlier than any others now in existence!
(From the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation)
 
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Eden:
I can’t imagine that the Church would condemn the Dead Sea Scrolls. When they were discovered in the 50s, part of the deuterocanonical books (like Tobit) were found with the other ancient manuscripts.

From a CA article: “This shows that many of them once existed in Hebrew. It is interesting that the text of the Catholic Old Testament, which was taken from the Septuagint, follows the text of the Dead Sea scrolls more closely than some other translations. This exhibits the care the Church has taken over the centuries to preserve the authenticity of Scripture. Some Jewish and Protestant Bible scholars have taken a renewed interest in the deuterocanonical books since their discovery among the Dead Sea scrolls.”

What are the scrolls and where were they found?

The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in caves along the western shore of the Dead Sea from 1947 to 1956, are considered by many to be the single most important archaeological find of the twentieth century. They comprise about 800 documents, some complete or nearly complete, but most quite fragmentary. In fact about 100,000 fragments have been found in all! Most of the scrolls were found in caves near Qumran, where a community lived which some scholars identify as Essenes, a Jewish sect known to have existed elsewhere in Israel during the Second Temple period, which includes the time of Jesus.

The scrolls comprise, among other things, the oldest copies of the Bible in existence. The Qumran scrolls date from approximately 250 B.C. to about 65 A.D., and at some other locations to about 135 A.D. **This means that the Dead Sea Scrolls give us texts of the Bible which were copied more than 1000 years earlier than any others now in existence! **
(From the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation)
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Yes and it also provided proof that the texts of the Old Testament we have been using for the past 2000 years had in fact been faithfully and accurately copied.
 
yep by comparing the manuscripts to others codexes and manuscripts historians and archaeologists are able to see that textual transmission is astoundingly accurate. There is minimal textual corruption. A complete copy from a manuscript of the book of Isaiah was found. This manuscript was 1000 years older than the oldest manuscript they had in possesion. When comparisons were made between these two it was found that the two were 95% identical the other five percent being comprised of minor variations of spelling and slips of the pen. Really amazing.
 
They appear to have confused the dead sea scrolls with documents found at Nag Harabbi(sp?) I think in Egypt. Among them were copies of some of the gnostic writings which were not accepted as canonical by the Church. Your source is questionable at best.
 
the dead sea scrolls have not been condemned by the Church in fact Vatican scholars are among those on the team doing the translations and preservation work on them. There has been controversy over the slow pace of release of the material, but that is because of their extremely bad condition due to mishandling by those who found them and deliberately broke them up trying to make more money on the antiquities market. The photocopies of the originals have been made available to scholars by the university libraries that have copies, and the originals are released to scholars as soon as they are able to be studied without risking further damage. Standard archival policy.
 
QUOTE=Eden]I can’t imagine that the Church would condemn the Dead Sea Scrolls. When they were discovered in the 50s, part of the deuterocanonical books (like Tobit) were found with the other ancient manuscripts.
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I just had to add a little trivia here. One of my apologetic books (purchased from Catholic Answers) says that the Jews removed the deuterocanonical books at the Council of Jamnia (90ad) primarily because they no longer had those books written in the original Hebrew. At that time they only had the Septuagint copies(written in Greek) so they could not affirm that those books were divinely inspired. Several hundred years later, at the time of the reformation, the reformers used the excuse “the Jews don’t use those books in their Holy Book, so we aren’t going to either”. Thus, those 7 books were removed from the Protestant bible.
Since the Dead Sea Scrolls have at least some of those removed books, written in Hebrew, it would appear those books shouldn’t have been removed.

Interesting… 😉
 
puzzleannie said:
the dead sea scrolls have not been condemned by the Church in fact Vatican scholars are among those on the team doing the translations and preservation work on them. There has been controversy over the slow pace of release of the material, but that is because of their extremely bad condition due to mishandling by those who found them and deliberately broke them up trying to make more money on the antiquities market. The photocopies of the originals have been made available to scholars by the university libraries that have copies, and the originals are released to scholars as soon as they are able to be studied without risking further damage. Standard archival policy.
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Suspect…
 
I
can’t imagine that the Church would condemn the Dead Sea Scrolls. When they were discovered in the 50s, part of the deuterocanonical books (like Tobit) were found with the other ancient manuscripts.
Click to expand...
From a CA article: “This shows that many of them once existed in Hebrew. It is interesting that the text of the Catholic Old Testament, which was taken from the Septuagint, follows the text of the Dead Sea scrolls more closely than some other translations. This exhibits the care the Church has taken over the centuries to preserve the authenticity of Scripture. Some Jewish and Protestant Bible scholars have taken a renewed interest in the deuterocanonical books since their discovery among the Dead Sea scrolls.”
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The first book to be found was Ben Sirach, in Hebrew.
The Manual of Discipline shows the Jewish origin of the Baptism, of the Sacrificial Last Supper, of the Episcopal Church goverment. And the function of the priests (cohens) as instruments of the future Messiah. In fact is very close to the manual used by monastics today. Amazìng.
The Bible text is closer to the Septuagint that the Masoretic Text in some books. For example a shorter Jeremiah.
Some long lost parts of Samuel 1 were found. The parts quoted by Josephus but missing from all modern Bibles (but I think the NAB put that missing parts back).
The CC Ecole Biblique de Jerusalem, the Dominican led school responsible for the Jersualem family of Bibles is one of the main resposibles for the DSS preservation and publication.
 
If you ever get to see the Dead Sea scrolls exhibit, by all means don’t miss it, even if it’s just for the historical benefit.
 
Montie_Claunch said:
At the end of the movie Stigmata, they made refrence to the dead sea scrolls. What are the dead sea scrolls? Were they really condemned by the church? If so, Why? Thanks and God bless.
Click to expand...
Stigmata is a hatchet job in reguards to scholarship and historical facts–on par with The Da Vinci Code.

*The Gospel of Thomas, *a late 2nd Century gnostic text was not part of the Dead Sea Scrolls–and the GoT is where Stigmata draws its most outlandish claims.
 
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