Subtitle by: Abraham Christen Liando
For thousands of years they lay hidden in desert caves.
900 texts, most of them in fragments, creating an enduring puzzle.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest and most complete set of ancient writings
ever unearthed in modern times.
60 years after their discovery,
they are still revealing secrets about the Jewish world into which Jesus was born.
lncluding a map, with a list of spectacular treasures
and clues as to where they might be found.
What ancient secrets do the scrolls reveal?
Can we reassemble all the parts before they disintegrate
and shed new light on a time when two great religions parted ways
and changed history for ever?
Sometimes, history changes because of the smallest of things.
Like a lost goat.
lt's 1 947, the year the state of lsrael is formed,
and the errant goat belongs to a young Bedouin boy in the Judean desert.
(CaIIs goat)
Thinking it has disappeared into a cave, he tosses in a rock, hoping to scare it out.
lnstead, he hears something shatter.
Frightened of what might lie inside,
the boy enlists his cousin, Muhammed edh-Dhib, to explore the cave.
What they find is a disappointment.
No goat. No treasure.
Just some broken pottery and several ancient jars containing scrolls wrapped in linen.
Muhammed edh-Dhib gathers the loot and puts it in a sack.
Not knowing the value of his treasure,
he hitches the sack to his Bedouin tent pole, where it hangs for days.
Eventually, he sells pieces of the scrolls to a shoemaker in Bethlehem,
for the equivalent of around two pounds.
They would turn out to be the tip of the iceberg,
the first cash of what would swell to some nine hundred texts
of profound religious and historical significance,
practically the only surviving biblical documents written before 1 00AD.
Today, the Dead Sea Scrolls sit quietly in the lsrael Museum's Shrine of the Book.
Whispering stories of a distant past and speaking to the earliest days of Judaism
and perhaps the origins of Christianity.
Many of the scrolls contain biblical stories we already know.
Multiple copies of almost every book in the Old Testament.
Among them, 20 copies of Genesis,
1 7 copies of Exodus...
..and 37 copies of the Book of Psalms.
You've got every book of the Hebrew BibIe in there, except for the Book of Esther.
So they are reading and writing and beIieving the same things that we are today,
with aImost no detaiIs Iost in the transmission over the past two thousand years.
Once peopIe are exposed to the scroIIs, something changes.
To me, it's...
touching my roots.
I mean, you Iook at the bibIicaI scroIIs and history comes to Iife.
The Dead Sea ScroIIs are part of the greatest treasures, not onIy of the Jewish nation,
but actuaIIy of human mankind.
But the scrolls are more than a meticulous library of the ancient books of the Jewish Bible.
Many of the texts had never been seen before.
Unknown psalms, mystical writings, apocalyptic musings about the end of the world.
There was also the enigmatic Copper Scroll, which read like a treasure map.
And, most controversially,
there were texts outlining the precepts and rituals of a mysterious Jewish sect
that lived in the desert and saw life as a struggle between good and evil.
To understand the impact of the scrolls,
it's necessary to go back to the scorched landscape in which they were found.
The scrolls were discovered in the Dead Sea region of the Judean desert,
the lowest elevation on the surface of the earth.
Here, the arid environment kept the scrolls from withering away altogether over time.
After the first dramatic discovery in 1 947, other caves in the area were explored.
Fragments of ancient texts were found in each.
The caves were scattered around an ancient site called Qumran.
The closest cave is only about 1 5 metres away.
Some of the scrolls were recovered intact,
others had been badly damaged.
They were written in three different languages.
Ancient Hebrew,
Aramaic
and Greek.
Most were written on parchment, some on papyrus.
One of the caves, designated Number 1 1,
contained scrolls that Dr Hanan Eschel has been studying for over two decades.
DR ESCHEL: Cave 1 1 was found by the Bedouins in January of 1 956
and, Iike in Cave 1 , in 1 947, they found compIete scroIIs.
So we know that the Leviticus ScroII was found over there
and that the PsaIm ScroII was found in the inner part of the cave.
One of them is the Iongest scroII that we have, the TempIe ScroII, which is 24 feet Iong.
The Temple scroll was unique in both its size and content.
lt records Moses'instructions from God
on how the temple at the heart of the Jewish faith should be built,
giving precise details and measurements.
Some scholars have called it a second Torah,
with God speaking to Moses directly to emphasize the authority of his words.
Historians 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.
The settlement of Qumran was traditionally identified as the remains of a Roman fort.
Today, many scholars believe it was something very different.
lnstead 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.
About 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.
Some scholars say the people who wrote the scrolls fled into the desert
to escape both the Roman occupation and the corruption of the temple.
Qumran is so important and so unique,
because we have here a whoIe Iibrary of a sectarian group of a group who Ieft JerusaIem
and went to the desert in order to Iive in a more pure way of Iife,
which was a way to protest against an estabIishment that was corrupt in the tempIe.
But who was this sectarian group?
The Roman historian Josephus gives us an intriguing clue.
Josephus described a group of mystics called the Essenes,
a reclusive community of Jewish monks,
who practised their faith in the first centuries before and after Jesus's birth.
According to Josephus,
the Essenes scorned what they saw as corruption of the holy temple in Jerusalem
and apparently fled to the remote deserts of Judea, where Qumran is found.
Because the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls never identified themselves,
we can't be certain that they were the Essenes,
but, whoever wrote them, the scrolls were guaranteed to strike a nerve 2,000 years later.
ln the scrolls, the faithful transcript of the old Bible mixes with some revolutionary ideas,
ideas that could be seen as foreshadowing the splinter group
that would soon form around the teachings of an obscure carpenter from Galilee
and change the course of Western history.
The scrolls also introduce 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.
Historians speculate that the teacher and the wicked priest
were rivals at the temple in Jerusalem,
who engaged in a power struggle that was eventually won by the wicked priest.
So 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.
The scrolls also show a near obsession with another prominent Christian idea,
the end of the world.
The group that wrote the Dead Sea ScroIIs is waiting for Armageddon.
They are waiting for the End of Days.
Much Iike today, we have, say, David Koresh at Waco,
we've got the debacIe at Jonestown.
Every so often, you've got entire groups that commit suicide,
because they are waiting for the End of Days.
So it Iooks Iike some of the peopIe that wrote the Dead Sea ScroIIs may fit into that category.
There are other precursors of Christianity in the Dead Sea Scrolls,
especially in words that would eventually spread around the globe.
We know that the Essenes were flourishing at the time when Jesus began his ministry
and that he may have appropriated some of their language.
ls it possible Jesus was part of the community that wrote the words on the Dead Sea Scrolls?
To answer that question, we must take a closer look at the scrolls themselves.
The 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.
(ExpIosion)
lt was 1 947.
There was gunfire in the streets of Jerusalem,
because the brand-new United Nations was creating a brand-new state in the region - lsrael.
And unhappy Palestinians were fighting back.
The first scrolls were found in Palestinian territory,
just months before the state of lsrael came into being.
Over the years, other finds were made
and fragments of old writing began to show up in the lucrative antiquities black market.
Some traded them for money, others for political gain,
still others in search of eternal answers.
ln 1 954, pieces of a scroll appeared for sale in America,
in the classified ads of the Wall Street Journal.
An ad listed four of the Dead Sea Scrolls for sale as...
lt was spotted by an lsraeli archaeologist, who purchased them anonymously
for $250,000.
The world expected the museum scholars
to patch the pieces together quickly and publish the results.
lnstead, the scholars in Jerusalem took their time,
40 years worth.
The delay led to grumbling
and a suspicion the scholars had found something they wanted to hide.
Not so, say the people responsible for the complex task.
AII aIong the main concern was about why are the scroIIs being pubIished.
No-one actuaIIy was aware that physicaIIy the scroIIs were aIso in need.
The scholars calculate that they are dealing with about 900 texts, broken up into 1 5,000 pieces.
Lots of the pieces are missing
and, to make things even more complicated, many of the scrolls are copies of the same texts.
Then there is the problem of brittleness.
The fragments are disintegrating.
ln a laboratory at the lsrael Museum in Jerusalem,
a team of preservationists is battling the corrosive effects of time.
80% of the scroIIs are written on parchment, 20% are written on papyrus.
So both are organic materiaIs and, as such, they have a Iife of their own.
Preservation is a meticulous and painstaking task.
The lab workers clean the fragments,
then place them between silk sheets, which will protect them for a while.
We know that, no matter what we do, eventuaIIy, they wiII deteriorate and disintegrate.
What we are trying to do is to sIow down the process.
I aIways say that if the scroIIs waited for us for 2,000 years,
it is our duty to preserve them for at Ieast 2,000 years to go.
Every time someone touches a fragment, the risk of damaging it increases.
Half a world away, in Los Angeles, one man may have a solution to the problem.
Dr Bruce Zuckerman uses state-of-the-art techniques
to make the scrolls available without actually handling them.
Digital technology is the key.
He uses infrared light to read the letters on the scrolls that can't be seen by the naked eye.
Some of us have worked on refining the infrared imaging technique
by using a technique caIIed narrow-band infrared imaging
and I can give you an exampIe here.
Now, this is a IittIe fragment of the Dead Sea ScroII that is in visibIe Iight.
You can see it doesn't Iook too terribIy good.
You can't even be sure there is anything on it.
In fact, when we first saw it, we weren't sure if anything was on it at aII.
So we did appIy narrow-band infrared imaging to this,
and much to our pIeasure and, to some degree, to our surprise,
we discovered that the piece actuaIIy did have writing on it,
so you see that's quite an improvement.
There are Ietters here.
Zuckerman pieces the fragments together digitally,
with a specially designed software program.
This happens to be the word ''king''
and it wasn't hard to basicaIIy use a IittIe graphics program to connect the dots Iike that.
You can see, here's the match.
Mem Iamed
kaf aIef.
Zuckerman and his team have compiled a database of all the Dead Sea Scroll fragments.
lt is now available to scholars in 25 countries.
What we are trying to do is give peopIe powerfuI tooIs,
so they can reconstruct these texts, in a way,
so that they can test their ideas and see if they are vaIid.
When those tooIs are avaiIabIe, the Dead Sea ScroIIs come to Iife again.
Some come to life with words familiar to Jews, Christians and Muslims around the world.
And God said...
Other texts, like the War Rule Scroll, reflect a particular sect's view of the Apocalypse.
Words like these seem oddly similar to those found in the New Testament,
raising even more questions about the men who wrote them.
To help answer them, we go to the Judean desert and the abandoned site at Qumran.
When Bedouin boys found the Dead Sea Scrolls in a cave in Judea, in 1 947,
it set off a frenzy of archaeological activity.
Father Roland de Vaux, a French Dominican priest,
oversaw the excavation of the other caves in the area
and found hundreds of additional fragments.
He decided it was likely that the authors had lived in a settlement nearby.
And the ruins of Qumran fit the bill.
According to de Vaux, the physical layout of the abandoned site seemed to confirm this hunch.
Because of its communal structure, some say that Qumran was custom-built for scroll writing.
Copying the ancient texts was slow.
lntensive work, requiring the coordinated efforts of many individuals,
all of them devoted to the idea of preserving the past.
AII of the rooms in the settIement were used for communaI purposes or as workshops.
In many cases, it's hard, on the basis of archaeoIogy,
to say what any given room was used for,
so we reconstruct much of this information from the Dead Sea ScroIIs
and from our ancient sources, Iike Josephus.
At the time it was inhabited, some 2,000 years ago,
the Qumran site occupied about 7,250 square metres
and might have held as many as 200 members.
Corridors led to various rooms, including one some scholars identify as a scroll room,
where the community's precious texts were kept.
Throughout the site, archaeologists also uncovered ten pools,
which could have been used for ritual baths.
Then there's the main communal room and stacks of pottery archaeologists found there,
where members shared their meals.
The site was built with a combination of stones and mud-brick plaster
and the entire settlement was surrounded by a wall.
One room within the complex contains some of the most persuasive evidence
that the scrolls were written at the Qumran site.
This room, in the middIe of the settIement,
was identified by de Vaux as a scriptorium or writing room.
During the excavations, Father de Vaux found the remains of long, narrow tables and benches,
ideal for assembling and sewing pieces of parchment into one long scroll.
ln this same room, de Vaux also found the remains of inkwells.
DR MAGNESS: InkweIIs are a rare find on archaeoIogicaI excavations in IsraeI.
So the presence of inkweIIs suggested to de Vaux
that this room must have been a room where writing was done.
Around the corner, de Vaux excavated another room, the largest in the site.
This 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.
ln the room adjacent to it, de Vaux found a pantry of dishes.
The pantry contained over 1 ,000 pottery dishes, that were Iying neatIy stacked on the fIoor.
The presence of so many dishes, which were used specificaIIy for dining,
pIates, cups and bowIs,
suggested to de Vaux that communaI meaIs must have been heId in this room.
The Essenes Iived here in the desert and participation in their communaI meaIs
was considered a substitute for participation in the tempIe sacrifices.
ln a ritual that seems to foreshadow the teachings of John the Baptist,
the scroll writers used sacred waters to cleanse themselves spiritually.
And, at Qumran, we can see the remains of an elaborate water system
that channelled rainwater from the cliffs into a series of pools.
One of the characteristic features of Qumran is the Iarge number of Jewish rituaI baths.
The main indication are the broad sets of steps that go from the top to the bottom.
Members of the community would step into these pools,
submerse themselves from head to toe and emerge spiritually pure.
The 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.
That's still the most common interpretation of the Qumran site.
But it's not the only one.
There's nothing, based on the archaeoIogicaI evidence,
that proves that Essenes Iived at the site.
Both in terms of the ceramic evidence and the numismatic evidence,
there's nothing to distinguish Qumran from other contemporary sites in the Dead Sea region.
YUVAL PELEG: It's not a unique site. A site Iike Qumran is common.
We have severaI sites of the same period aIong the Dead Sea shore.
Archaeologist Yuval Peleg
thinks the pools may have been used for something other than ritual bathing.
If the water came into a sedimentation pooI and then to another pooI,
it can't be a rituaI bath, because the water became unpure.
They can't be, according to the Jewish Iaw, a rituaI bath.
Peleg believes the elaborate waterworks
may have been constructed for a far more mundane purpose.
This pooI, 7 1 , is the onIy pooI that De Vaux didn't excavate in the '50s.
Two years ago, in 2004, we started excavating the pooI,
and at the bottom, we found here
a Iayer of 30 centimetres of pure cIay.
Clay that Peleg believes was ideal for making pottery.
What we think today is that Qumran was started as a miIitary post
and, after the Roman conquest, turned into a pottery industry.
Peleg discounts the possibility that the Dead Sea Scrolls were written at Qumran,
or that the Essenes occupied the site at all.
He 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.
But with the caves so close to the site - the nearest only about 1 5 metres away -
many scholars doubt it'sjust a coincidence.
60 years after its first excavation,
Qumran seems to have kept more secrets than it has given up.
Who wrote the scroIIs?
Were they peopIe who Iived in Qumran?
Were they peopIe who Iived in JerusaIem?
Did they bring the scroIIs on their run from JerusaIem?
Who are these peopIe?
Dr lra Rabin believes the new scientific data may help elucidate.
The idea is of course to check
whether we can correIate these scroIIs, and speciaIIy sectarian scroIIs,
to JerusaIem, to Qumran or some other pIace.
I'm trying to see whether there are Iinks, definite Iinks,
between the settIement of Qumran and the caves of Qumran.
Maybe peopIe wiII say there are, but I haven't found one singIe soIid Iink,
you know, physicaI evidence.
What of those small but compelling pieces of evidence that this was a scroll room?
The inkwells?
Such evidence wouId be, for instance, ink found in the inkweII in the settIement
and the matching ink on the scroII...
..to try to foIIow up the provenance of the scroII through the origin of the ink.
Because 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.
So what we hope to achieve
is to know exactIy what scroIIs were written in the area of Qumran.
Unfortunately, her results could be years away.
All 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.
And that brings up an interesting question..
why would a pious, humble and fanatically anti-materialistic people
preserve a treasure map?
Enter the riddle of the Copper Scroll.
ln the National Archaeological Museum in Amman, Jordan,
sits the most perplexing of all the texts found next to the Dead Sea,
the Copper Scroll.
lt describes a treasure, gold and silver, measured in tons.
Since its discovery in 1 952,
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.
The Copper ScroII is quite unique.
It was engraved on highIy pure copper, 99.9% pure copper.
How did they know how to engrave on it? Why did they engrave on copper?
This is a very vaIuabIe, precious materiaI at that time.
CIearIy they wanted to put down information that wouId Iast.
Too brittle to be unrolled,
the scroll had to be painstakingly cut into 29 pieces before it could be translated.
lts contents sound like ripe pickings for the likes of an lndiana Jones.
Written in an ancient form of Hebrew, the Copper Scroll gives precise descriptions
of where large amounts of gold and silver were buried.
But why would any treasure be precious
to the anti-materialistic authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls?
There are two distinct possibilities.
lt could be the treasure of the first Jewish temple, built by Solomon,
and sacked by the Babylonians centuries earlier.
Or, more likely, the Copper Scroll refers to the treasures of the second temple,
destroyed by the Romans at about the time the scrolls were written.
Dr Oren Gutfeld, an archaeologist from Hebrew University,
is trying to get to the bottom of the mystery of the Copper Scroll.
I don't know about the treasures,
but I hope that the tunneI wiII give us more data and heIp us to understand the Copper ScroII.
Working in the middle of the Judean Desert, and guided by the text of the Copper Scroll,
Gutfeld has uncovered a manmade tunnel that he believes may lead to treasure.
In the Copper ScroII, it's mentioned that in the tunneI facing to the north in the Seqaqa VaIIey
are hidden part of the treasures.
The connection between the two, I think it's quite cIear.
And I reaIIy hope that the peopIe who wrote the Copper ScroII
meant one of the tunneIs that I'm excavating.
So far no treasure has turned up,
but Dr Gutfeld has yet to reach the end of the tunnel.
Others have more radical ideas about the Copper Scroll...
..ideas that reach back into Egypt
and have startling implications for Judaism, Christianity and lslam.
Metallurgist and engineer Robert Feather
has raised eyebrows with his interpretation of the Copper Scroll.
lt involves a code he claims to have deciphered
while examining the few Greek letters in the mostly Hebrew text.
In the Copper ScroII there are 1 4 Greek Ietters interspersed in the Hebrew text.
I took the first 1 0 Ietters and put them together
and...Eureka!
They read Akhenaten,
the name of an Egyptian pharaoh who Iived around 1 350 BC.
And it was one of those reveIationary moments.
The revolutionary pharaoh Akhenaten
created what has controversially been called the first monotheistic religion in the world.
He lived at a time when some scholars estimate the lsraelites lived in Egypt before the Exodus.
You onIy have to Iook at the OId Testament
to see that major characters in the OId Testament
Iived or fIed from Egypt.
They absorb this beIief in one God.
The evidence in the Copper ScroII itseIf... It's pretty seIf-evident.
The cIues about Egypt are there for anyone who wants to Iook at them.
Some scholars believe that if the lsraelites did not take the idea of monotheism out of Egypt,
the Egyptians could easily have brought the idea to them.
After all, Egypt was a dominant world power for thousands of years
leading to the first century BC, when many of the scrolls were written.
ROBERT FEATHER: We are in the 1 8th dynasty of Egyptian pharaohs, around about 1 350 BC.
Egypt is the most dominant force in the whoIe of the MiddIe East.
It controIs the whoIe of the Levant, of the hoIy Iand,
what is now Lebanon, right the way up to Assyria.
It is the power and the most weaIthy civiIisation in the worId,
and it makes a Iot of sense that if anyone was going to come to the reaIisation of one God,
it was going to be an Egyptian pharaoh.
lf Feather is right,
the Copper Scroll's significance is far beyond that of a mere treasure map.
lt is a sign that the lsraelites did remember and revere Akhenaten,
who he argues is the first monotheist,
and that Judaism, Christianity and lslam owe their central belief to the land of the pharaohs.
But for most scholars, a controversial code leading to a pharaoh,
leading to the lsraelites, leading to the Copper Scroll,
is too convoluted a trail to follow.
The theory that the treasures mentioned in the Copper ScroII couId be Akhenaten's treasures
and that they're somewhere in Amarna in Egypt is absoIuteIy Iudicrous.
There's no way they couId possibIy be that,
because the Copper ScroII is 1 ,000 years after Akhenaten Iives.
Feather is undeterred by the discrepancy in dates.
He claims the Copper Scroll was copied from an earlier document
much older than the Copper Scroll itself.
But Feather's conviction isn't shared by most scholars.
Some have ventured that the Copper Scroll was the equivalent of an urban legend,
or possibly even an ancient hoax.
One of the major probIems we've got with the Copper ScroII
is that we don't know whether or not to beIieve it.
Not one of the treasures, there are some 64 mentioned in the scroII,
not one of them has ever been Iocated.
My particuIar feeIing is that they're never going to be Iocated,
because they either never existed in the first pIace, or they were found very Iong ago.
But 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.
Some scholars contend the scrolls shed even more light on early Christianity...
..and that a case can be made that Jesus himself was an Essene.
(Chanting)
Some believe that the Dead Sea Scrolls...
..the writings of an obscure Jewish sect,
have much to tell us about the roots of Christianity.
Written in the centuries before and after the birth of Jesus,
they bear witness to a time when splinter groups were breaking away from mainstream Judaism
and practising rituals that seem to anticipate Christianity.
Rituals like the taking of the communal meal.
What we know from the Dead Sea ScroIIs
is that there was a priest who bIessed the cup,
one cup that was shared among many peopIe.
And this was picked up very quickIy in earIy Christianity.
It was refIected in the communaI meaI that we know of,
the Last Supper that Jesus had with his discipIes.
The scrolls also describe ritual baths of spiritual cleansing.
While these rituals seem to echo Jewish traditions,
they also may foreshadow the Christian idea of baptism.
The first step of being united with the peopIe of God is this immersion.
You needed to become cIean.
You need to be pure in body. You aIso have to be pure in heart, according to their ruIes.
Passages from the War Rule Scroll describe a great battle
and the destruction of the sons of darkness,
foreshadowing the Battle of Armageddon described in the Book of Revelations.
Most radical of all, some have even speculated
that Jesus himself spent time with the sect who wrote the scrolls.
Robert Feather, author of The Secret lnitiation Of Jesus At Qumran, draws a controversial link.
He finds too many echoes of Dead Sea Scroll language in the New Testament
to write it off as chance.
There are unique phrases that appear in PauI and in other GospeIs
that can onIy have come from some of the fairIy secretive
confidentiaI documents of the Qumran community.
The anomaIy of Jesus's Iife in the New Testament is,
we hear about his birth, we hear about him coming out at the age of 1 2, then nothing.
Nothing about his formative years, his most important years of his Iife.
The New Testament has nothing to say.
Where is he?
I beIieve he's ensconced at Qumran with the Qumran Essenes, studying BibIicaI texts.
Since the Essenes existed during the life of Jesus,
and held beliefs that seem to parallel some ideas in Christian thought,
Feather thinks that Jesus developed his ideas while living in Qumran.
But there is nothing in the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves to corroborate this theory.
Sceptics of the Jesus-as-Essene theory go on to point out the many differences
between what the Essenes believed and what Jesus taught.
The Essenes were sticklers for ritual purity
and intolerant of people they considered unclean.
Jesus embraced lepers.
The Essenes shunned tax-gatherers and sinners.
Jesus recruited them.
One of the scrolls preaches ''eternal hatred for the men of the pit'',
while Jesus asked people to love their enemies.
So 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.
There is no evidence that Jesus was an Essene.
About the most that schoIars are wiIIing to say
is that John the Baptist couId have been an Essene.
It's difficuIt, if not impossibIe, to actuaIIy Iink Jesus himseIf with the Essenes.
Author Michael Baigent doesn't believe that Jesus was an Essene,
but he believes the scrolls might have threatened the tenets of the Catholic Church
and Christianity in general.
MICHAEL BAIGENT: When we Iook at the scroIIs,
when we read them, we find some very important things.
They oppose directIy Christianity.
They oppose the uniqueness of Christianity.
They show there was a pre-existing messianic context.
They oppose the divinity of Jesus,
because they show that messiah, son of God, doesn't have to have a divine interpretation,
and they oppose directIy the theoIogicaI unity of the GospeIs.
So to that extent, they are a kind of time bomb.
Jesus sometimes referred to himself as the son of God,
which his followers took as a sign of his divine nature.
But the scrolls use the term in a much more worldly context.
There was a text found in cave 4.
And in this text, the titIe Son of God was used.
Now it shows that this titIe
was current in messianic Judaism before Jesus.
It shows that this phrase was current in the Qumran community.
But, of course, in Christianity, son of God has a divine connotation. At Qumran, it didn't.
This interpretation defines Jesus the way present-day Judaism views him,
as a mortal prophet.
Jesus was Jewish.
That's so simpIe, yet so often forgotten.
And he was a messianic Jewish Ieader, whatever that may mean.
But it didn't mean unique, it didn't mean divine
and it meant that he was in a pre-existing Jewish context.
This sent panic through the Church,
and they moved very quickIy to take controI of the scroIIs.
They set up an internationaI team to physicaIIy hoId them,
and they aIso controIIed the interpretation of the scroIIs.
And a scandaI deveIoped.
There was a deception. There was a fraud.
But this is a distinctly minority view.
HANAN ESCHEL: Now that aII the scroIIs are out, we see that there's no secrets here.
And there's no scroIIs here
that sheds negative Iight on the Christian beIief.
Since their discovery,
the Dead Sea Scrolls have been pored over and examined by hundreds of scholars,
and there's still no definitive word on who wrote them, or what they mean.
But someone wrote them,
and then went to a great deal of trouble to hide them,
hastily, as if to preserve something they feared might be lost for ever.
And we know the inhabitants at Qumran had reason to be afraid.
ln 70AD, the Romans destroyed the second temple in Jerusalem,
after sending their armies out into the countryside
to crush the remnants of a Jewish revolt against Roman rule.
There was the imminent danger of destruction,
the destruction of the city of JerusaIem, the destruction of the tempIe in JerusaIem.
The Romans had aIready penetrated PaIestinian territory.
They had arrived in Judea
and started to destroy various viIIages and cities.
Qumran was one of those sites.
HANAN ESCHEL: I beIieve that when the Roman army approached Qumran,
the peopIe decided to hide their scroIIs in caves.
And they thought that they had enough time.
They took some scroIIs to cave 1 , to cave 1 1 , to cave 3.
And then they reaIise that they don't have enough time.
The Essenes disappear from the stage of history
after the first Jewish revoIt against the Romans.
The site of Qumran was destroyed in the year 68AD,
at the time of the first Jewish revoIt against the Romans.
That Jewish revolt ended on a hilltop in southern Judea at a site called Masada.
About 1,000 Jewish defenders were surrounded by Roman soldiers
in a siege that lasted for months.
When the Romans finally broke through,
they discovered that all the men defending Masada had killed themselves.
Some scholars think it's likely
the devout Essenes were among those who died rather than submit to Roman rule.
It's possibIe that some of the Essenes fIed the settIement at the time of the destruction
and joined the group that was hoIding out on top of Masada,
but then after that, we don't hear of them any more.
And that might explain why no-one ever returned to retrieve the scrolls.
lnstead, the scroll writers left behind an inadvertent time capsule
that lay buried for nearly 2,000 years,
and was only rediscovered when a boy went looking for a lost goat.
Now it's up to us to sort through the time capsule's contents,
and to decide what they mean.
WeII, the Dead Sea scroIIs
are the most important witness for the BibIicaI text that we use today.
We actuaIIy have scroIIs we can hoId in our hands,
which peopIe contemporary with the first century heId in their hands.
Now we see that the earIy church was part of the dynamic of ancient Judaism
in the Iand of IsraeI 2,000 years ago.
But we didn't know that before Qumran,
because we didn't have the materiaI and the knowIedge we have today.
Now that we're studying the scroIIs in the 21 st century,
we see how infIuentiaI they were,
how they infIuenced Jewish Iife and how they infIuenced Christianity.
So we see that the earIy church was organised very much Iike the Qumranites.
Those scroIIs shed Iight on aII the Western civiIisation.
As the remaining fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls get reassembled,
it's possible that more mysteries and controversies lie ahead.
Or perhaps the scrolls have already given up all their secrets.
But nothing can diminish the insights the scrolls have already given us
about the world as it was during a pivotal time in history...
..when two religions parted ways,
and changed the world for ever.