Lacey, USA - About 2,000 years ago, an ancient Jewish sect wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest-known manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. Some of the texts closely match canonized scripture, but others were left out.
The puzzle of the Dead Sea Scrolls and their connection to the Bible will be the topic of a free presentation Friday night at Saint Martin's University.
The panel-style lecture, titled "The Authority of Scripture: The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls," culminates the 26th annual Spiritual Life Institute, a weeklong spiritual program each summer hosted by the university.
A Bedouin shepherd is thought to have discovered the first scrolls in a cave along the Dead Sea in 1947. About 1,000 documents were found in 11 caves by 1979. The scrolls are 1,000 years older than the earliest biblical material, and they offered new archeological and spiritual insight to the origins of Judaism and Christianity.
The discovery "gave us a whole new perspective on Judaism in the time that Jesus was emerging on the scene," said recent religious studies graduate Nathan Azinger, who helped organize the institute as part of his senior internship. "It gave us a treasure trove of new information to really look at this period of history ... and rethink what we thought we knew. It was a very exciting thing."
Ian Werret, director of the Spiritual Life Institute, said the scrolls contain letters, religious laws and their interpretation and interpretations of biblical books.
"The scrolls talk about ritual purity a lot and the right way to engage in rights and rituals — what are the right foods to eat, when to worship, how do you engage in prayer," he said.
Werrett, a 1996 Saint Martin's graduate, learned about the scrolls during a class on the New Testament while a student at Saint Martin's. He went on to write his dissertation and publish a book on the rights and rituals described in the manuscripts.
"I was really fascinated by it. It's sort of an interesting combination of archeology and theology and biblical studies," he said.