Vatican scholars are preparing to rewrite the Bible by incorporating revelations contained in ancient scrolls discovered beside the Dead Sea in Palestine, it emerged yesterday.
A team of theologians and historians will gather in Italy later this month to start the potentially explosive task of inserting new details about the life and times of Jesus Christ.
The influence of radical Jewish groups who wanted to overthrow Roman rule is likely to feature in the new Bible, bolstering those who interpret Christ as a revolutionary who fought political oppression.
The Bible is based mostly on manuscripts written centuries after Christ lived, but the so-called Dead Sea scrolls, found at Qumran by shepherds in 1947, have been dated to the decades before and after his crucifixion.
The 800 documents, written by the Essenes, a Jewish sect, date from 170 BC to AD 68, and chronicle the turbulence of the Roman occupation of Judea.
Gianluigi Boschi, a Dominican priest and Vatican biblical scholar, told yesterday's La Stampa, a Turin daily newspaper, that an international commission of scholars had been given the green light to update the Bible by culling material from the scrolls.
The initiative will be officially announced at a conference at the University of Modena on September 26. The team is expected to include Etienne Nodet, author of the The Origins of Christianity; Paolo Garuti, a biblical scholar; and Garcia Martinez, president of the international movement for Qumranic studies.
Martyn Percy, a canon doctor at Sheffield university, welcomed the initiative but suggested the results may be less than dramatic. "There has never been a settled, definitive version of the Bible, it has been an evolving book which has gone through many translations. Only fundamentalists think it came in a fax from heaven."