in fulfilling Jesus’ prophecy: “This good news of the kingdom will be preached in all the inhabited earth for the purpose of a witness to all the nations, and then the accomplished end will come.” (Matt. 24:14) To God’s glory, let us prove ourselves honored representatives of his perfect government for all mankind.

Christianity’s Origin and the Dead Sea Scrolls

IN THE spring of 1947 three Bedouins were going about in the town of Bethlehem trying to sell seven ancient manuscripts. These were in the form of leather scrolls, some containing Biblical and some containing sectarian writings, that the Bedouins had found in stone jars in a cave. The cave being situated in the wilderness of Judah not far from the Dead Sea, the scrolls came to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. It took months for the Bedouins finally to dispose of their scrolls, four of them to St. Mark’s Monastery and three to the Hebrew University at Jerusalem. Seven years later the University purchased the other four scrolls, which, in the meantime, had been vainly offered for sale in the United States, for the sum of $250,000. These four included the most prized of them all, a scroll in archaic Hebrew of the complete book of Isaiah, all sixty-six chapters.

Not without good reason these scrolls have been described as the “greatest manuscript discovery of modern times.” They have been definitely dated as of the second century B.C. by experts in the fields of archaeology, paleography (the science of deciphering ancient writing) and the carbon-14 process. Previously the oldest-known Hebrew witness to God’s Word had been the Nash papyrus, which goes back not quite as far and consists of only one small page, in four fragments, and which never was a part of a scroll. Incidentally, it contains the Ten Commandments and two verses of the Shemá or Jewish declaration of faith as found at Deuteronomy 6:5, 6.

Since the year 1951 many other similar discoveries have been made, including tens of thousands of fragments of ancient Bible manuscripts. All these having been found in the same general region, they also are referred to as Dead Sea Scrolls.

Rounding out the story of the Dead Sea Scrolls was the uncovering of the Khirbet (”ruins”) Qumran, located only a mile from the cave where the first scrolls were found. These ruins have been identified as those of a monastery, the headquarters of the sect that had produced the Dead Sea Scrolls, at least those first found. As to the identity of this sect, the “foremost authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls today” tells us that “there is now sufficient evidence . . . to identify the people of the scrolls definitively,” that is, finally and permanently, “with the Essenes,” a Jewish