One of the greatest textual discoveries, at least related to the Bible, in the twentieth century was that of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These are a number of scrolls that were discovered in a series of caves near the Dead Sea. They are dated to the first century (BC and AD).
When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, the one question that was on many people’s minds was: What would they say about Jesus?
After all, they were from the same general area that Jesus was active and from around the same time Jesus was active. This could change the way we understood Jesus.
It took a long time for all of the scrolls to be translated. Some saw the delay as being the Church roadblocking the process to prevent inconvenient revelations about Jesus.
The truth was that while some scrolls were in good condition, many were in very small pieces and it would take a long time to find out what pieces went with which scroll and how they fit together. Add to this the reluctance of the small group of scholars to share the scrolls allotted to them out of fear of losing out on a major find and you get a pretty bad delay.
However, the Dead Sea Scrolls were eventually all translated. And what did they say about Jesus?
Nothing.
Is this because Jesus never existed? Not at all. There are very few references to historical figures in the scrolls and many of them are very esoteric. Code names were used for the figures and most of them were from the origins of the sect and that was from a time that pre-dated Jesus by a number of decades.
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls neither proves nor disproves the existence of Jesus.
That is not to say that the Dead Sea Scrolls is of no interest to New Testament scholars. It fills in much of what was lacking from our limited descriptions of what some first century Jews believed. They gives us an idea of how some Jews interpreted the Hebrew Bible and how some of them anticipated a messiah.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were a tremendous discovery’s but the lack of mention of Jesus does not support the Jesus Myth Theory.
