Dead Sea scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls comprise roughly 850 documents, including texts from the Hebrew Bible, discovered between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves in and around the Wadi Qumran (near the ruins of the ancient settlement of Khirbet Qumran, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea). The texts are of great significance in a religious context (as well as a political context), as they are practically the only remaining Biblical documents dating from before AD 100.

Alleged connection to Christianity

A Spanish Jesuit, José O'Callaghan, has argued that one fragment (7Q5) is a New Testament text from the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 6, verses 52-53. In recent years this controversial assertion has been taken up again by German scholar Carsten Peter Thiede. A successful identification of this fragment as a passage from Mark would make it the earliest extant New Testament document, dating somewhere between AD 30 and 60. Opponents consider that the fragment is tiny, and requires so much reconstruction (the only complete word is Greek 'και' = 'and'), that it could have come from a text other than Mark.

Related Topics:
Spanish - Jesuit - 7Q5 - New Testament - Gospel of Mark - Carsten Peter Thiede

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Allegations that the Vatican suppressed the publication of the scrolls were published in the 1990s. Notably, Michael Baigent's and Richard Leigh's book The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception contains a popularized version of speculations by Robert Eisenman that some scrolls actually describe the early Christian community, characterized as more fundamentalist and rigid than the one portrayed by the New Testament, and that the life of Jesus was deliberately mythicized by Paul, possibly a Roman agent who faked his "conversion" from Saul in order to undermine the influence of anti-Roman messianic cults in the region. (Eisenman's own theories, themselves not always convincing, attempt to relate the career of James the Just and Paul to some of these documents.) Baigent and Leigh allege that several key scrolls were deliberately kept under wraps for decades to prevent the rise of alternative theories to the prevailing consensus that the scrolls had nothing to do with Christianity.

Related Topics:
Vatican - 1990s - Michael Baigent - Richard Leigh - Christian - New Testament - Jesus - Paul - James the Just

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Because they are frequently described as important to the history of the Bible, the scrolls are surrounded by a wide range of conspiracy theories: one example is the claim that they were entirely fabricated or planted by extra-terrestrials. There is also writing about the Nephilim. Some call these an extinct race of giants, and others argue that this is evidence of aliens in the Bible, interpreting the "sons of God" (who mated with "the daughters of men") as space aliens creating a mixed breed.

Related Topics:
Bible - Conspiracy theories - Extra-terrestrials - Nephilim

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