The significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls, now i'm often told often hear from Christians who say
the Dead Sea Scrolls they really took us much further back in time and i got much earlier
manuscripts and it confirms the Old Testament we always had it's the same books the same content
Isaiah is just the same Jeremiah's just the same um is a is this true or not i mean what's really
going on here is it more complicated than that yeah no it's a very important it's a
very important thing uh the destiny scrolls are huge hugely important for all sorts of reasons
um not just not just the copies of the bible by the way but also the that tells us a lot about
this group of jews who were in these kind of monastic-like communities uh these they have
scenes um but some some of the Dead Sea Scrolls are biblical manuscripts and they are a huge find
the reason is because the Hebrew Bible that we use today the people who use the hebrew
Bible actually in Hebrew and that are translating the Hebrew Bible are basing
their uh their translations on a manuscript that was written around the year 1000 of the common era
around 1 000 of the common era it's uh it came from leningrad and so it's called codexis
jewish tribes in the middle ages when they copied a manuscript they would destroy it
because now they had a perfect copy of it and they made sure the copy was perfect
they had ways of doing that through the middle ages the problem is what were scribes doing
before the middle ages before they had these rules well we had to guess they were getting
it right and so um the dead sea scrolls were discovered in 1947 and they have they include
portions of every book of the hebrew bible except for uh except for the book of uh esther esther
yeah um because yeah it turns out god is not named in esther and so that for some reason that book's
not among the dead sea scrolls most of the scrolls we have are not complete scrolls the isaiah scroll
is a virtually complete scroll and it is very very close in wording to the codex leningradensis
right so that concept but that confirms the bible we have today was historically accurate it was
accurately transmitted no no it's got nothing to do with it and so so i need to explain several
things here because there's several points that some people like overlook which is the first one
people overlook that's true the isaiah scroll but it's not true of other dead sea scrolls
there are other dead sea scrolls the the scroll of jeremiah that we have is um has a uh has
differences from our jeremiah and the differences from our jeremiah are like the differences that
come to us from the greek translation of jeremiah in the septuagint in the greek greek bible
that version of jeremiah is 15 shorter than the leningradensis 15 uh so that's not very accurate
and so so it's not that everything is like the isaiah scroll the isaiah scrolls like
the isaiah scroll but it doesn't prove that's why it's always mentioned it's always showcased
oh look at isaiah is exactly the same look at the perfection of transformation
that's my first point that this this manuscript by isaiah was written a thousand years before
leningrad's it's accurate but the others are not the same second point um isaiah the prophet
was writing isaiah jerusalem was living in the 8th century bce so that means we don't have any
manuscripts for the first over 700 years so the fact that you have a manuscript that from
say say the year one to the year 1000 you can show that isaiah was copied accurately but our
question is what about between the year 700 bce and one now there's 700 years we have no evidence
in hebrew no hebrew text so you can't say this is exactly what isaiah wrote how would you know
how much it got changed between 700 and the dead sea scroll copy there's no way to know
there are ways not good ways no no um so that's that's second third thing
even if even if we had everything that was accurate in either any book the new testament
or the new testament old testament even if we had a manuscript even we had the original
suppose we had the original of mark or suppose we have the original of uh joshua we have the
original that would have no bearing on the question of whether it's accurate or not
it would only have a bearing on whether we know what the author wrote
so the way i usually illustrate this is we have we have millions of copies of mineconf
and they are accurate they i mean they might not be active with what hitler actually wrote
but they don't they don't have any differences we know what the first printed copy looked like
does that mean that it's accurate no it doesn't mean that it's right it just means you know what
he wrote the fact you know what somebody wrote doesn't mean that what they wrote is right
that's a different thing so those are three really big points that shows that this argument just
doesn't hold and any one of those three shows that they've been hold three together forget it yeah
it's not worse than that because a good example of isaiah is now commonly accepted that yeah maybe
the first 39 chapters of isaiah were written by this prophet
in isaiah from downtown jerusalem but it was added to by maybe a second scribe or maybe a third
scribe or scribes so we don't even even if you dig up the book of isaiah that we have it today
from 500 years ago 600 years ago it doesn't mean we have the prophet isaiah's own words
which many scholars were added to anyway yeah yeah no it's very common to think that i isaiah
and if there's really good reason for this isaiah jerusalem wrote most of chapter 1 to 39 and then
someone 150 years later wrote 40 to 50 55 50 yeah 55 then the other 56 and on and so you know it's
a compilation uh no matter what but even if you have isaiah's words again it doesn't it doesn't
mean that he's right he might be right i mean but that's a different it's a different question
the fact you have an accurate manuscript is not evidence that what the person said is accurate