"Subtitle by:" "Abraham Christen Liando" "For thousands of years they lay hidden in desert caves." "900 texts, most of them in fragments, creating an enduring puzzle." "The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest and most complete set of ancient writings ever unearthed in modern times." "60 years after their discovery, they are still revealing secrets about the Jewish world into which Jesus was born." "including a map, with a list of spectacular treasures and clues as to where they might be found." "What ancient secrets do the scrolls reveal?" "Can we reassemble all the parts before they disintegrate and shed new light on a time when two great religions parted ways and changed history for ever?" "Sometimes, history changes because of the smallest of things." "Like a lost goat." "It's 1 947, the year the state of Israel is formed, and the errant goat belongs to a young Bedouin boy in the Judean desert." "(calls goat)" "Thinking it has disappeared into a cave, he tosses in a rock, hoping to scare it out." "Instead, he hears something shatter." "Frightened of what might lie inside, the boy enlists his cousin, Muhammed edh-Dhib, to explore the cave." "What they find is a disappointment." "No goat." "No treasure." "Just some broken pottery and several ancient jars containing scrolls wrapped in linen." "Muhammed edh-Dhib gathers the loot and puts it in a sack." "Not knowing the value of his treasure, he hitches the sack to his Bedouin tent pole, where it hangs for days." "Eventually, he sells pieces of the scrolls to a shoemaker in Bethlehem, for the equivalent of around two pounds." "They would turn out to be the tip of the iceberg, the first cash of what would swell to some nine hundred texts of profound religious and historical significance, practically the only surviving biblical documents written before 1 00AD." "Today, the Dead Sea Scrolls sit quietly in the Israel Museum's Shrine of the Book." "Whispering stories of a distant past and speaking to the earliest days of Judaism and perhaps the origins of Christianity." "Many of the scrolls contain biblical stories we already know." "Multiple copies of almost every book in the Old Testament." "Among them, 20 copies of Genesis, 1 7 copies of Exodus..." "..and 37 copies of the Book of Psalms." "You've got every book of the Hebrew bible in there, except for the Book of Esther." "So they are reading and writing and believing the same things that we are today, with almost no details lost in the transmission over the past two thousand years." "Once people are exposed to the scrolls, something changes." "To me, it's... touching my roots." "I mean, you look at the biblical scrolls and history comes to life." "The Dead Sea scrolls are part of the greatest treasures, not only of the Jewish nation, but actually of human mankind." "But the scrolls are more than a meticulous library of the ancient books of the Jewish Bible." "Many of the texts had never been seen before." "Unknown psalms, mystical writings, apocalyptic musings about the end of the world." "There was also the enigmatic Copper Scroll, which read like a treasure map." "And, most controversially, there were texts outlining the precepts and rituals of a mysterious Jewish sect that lived in the desert and saw life as a struggle between good and evil." "To understand the impact of the scrolls, it's necessary to go back to the scorched landscape in which they were found." "The scrolls were discovered in the Dead Sea region of the Judean desert, the lowest elevation on the surface of the earth." "Here, the arid environment kept the scrolls from withering away altogether over time." "After the first dramatic discovery in 1 947, other caves in the area were explored." "Fragments of ancient texts were found in each." "The caves were scattered around an ancient site called Qumran." "The closest cave is only about 1 5 metres away." "Some of the scrolls were recovered intact, others had been badly damaged." "They were written in three different languages." "Ancient Hebrew," "Aramaic and Greek." "Most were written on parchment, some on papyrus." "One of the caves, designated Number 1 1, contained scrolls that Dr Hanan Eschel has been studying for over two decades." "DR ESCHEL:" "Cave 1 1 was found by the Bedouins in January of 1 956 and, Iike in Cave 1 , in 1 947, they found complete scrolls." "So we know that the Leviticus scroll was found over there and that the psalm scroll was found in the inner part of the cave." "One of them is the longest scroll that we have, the temple scroll, which is 24 feet long." "The Temple scroll was unique in both its size and content." "It records Moses'instructions from God on how the temple at the heart of the Jewish faith should be built, giving precise details and measurements." "Some scholars have called it a second Torah, with God speaking to Moses directly to emphasize the authority of his words." "Historians immediately began to wonder who had written the scrolls and decided that clues of authorship might be found in the Qumran ruins near the caves." "The settlement of Qumran was traditionally identified as the remains of a Roman fort." "Today, many scholars believe it was something very different." "Instead of a military outpost, they say it seems to have been a kind of monastery, built by a group of dissident Jews searching for a new kind of salvation in troubled times." "About 40 years before the birth of Jesus, Rome had annexed Judea, installed a puppet king and taken control of the temple in Jerusalem, the holiest site in the Holy Lands." "Some scholars say the people who wrote the scrolls fled into the desert to escape both the Roman occupation and the corruption of the temple." "Qumran is so important and so unique, because we have here a whole library of a sectarian group of a group who left JerusaIem and went to the desert in order to live in a more pure way of Iife," "which was a way to protest against an establishment that was corrupt in the temple." "But who was this sectarian group?" "The Roman historian Josephus gives us an intriguing clue." "Josephus described a group of mystics called the Essenes, a reclusive community of Jewish monks, who practised their faith in the first centuries before and after Jesus's birth." "According to Josephus, the Essenes scorned what they saw as corruption of the holy temple in Jerusalem and apparently fled to the remote deserts of Judea, where Qumran is found." "Because the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls never identified themselves, we can't be certain that they were the Essenes, but, whoever wrote them, the scrolls were guaranteed to strike a nerve 2,000 years later." "In the scrolls, the faithful transcript of the old Bible mixes with some revolutionary ideas, ideas that could be seen as foreshadowing the splinter group that would soon form around the teachings of an obscure carpenter from Galilee and change the course of Western history." "The scrolls also introduce us to a character called the "teacher of righteousness", who fought against a wicked priest and asked his followers to turn away from material wealth, embrace humility and live pious lives." "Historians speculate that the teacher and the wicked priest were rivals at the temple in Jerusalem, who engaged in a power struggle that was eventually won by the wicked priest." "So the teacher and his followers fled into the desert, where they nursed the idea that they were the chosen ones, the sons of light who would defeat the forces of darkness at the end of time and see salvation." "The scrolls also show a near obsession with another prominent Christian idea, the end of the world." "The group that wrote the Dead Sea scrolls is waiting for Armageddon." "They are waiting for the End of Days." "Much like today, we have, say, David Koresh at Waco, we've got the debacle at Jonestown." "Every so often, you've got entire groups that commit suicide, because they are waiting for the End of Days." "So it looks like some of the people that wrote the Dead Sea scrolls may fit into that category." "There are other precursors of Christianity in the Dead Sea Scrolls, especially in words that would eventually spread around the globe." "We know that the Essenes were flourishing at the time when Jesus began his ministry and that he may have appropriated some of their language." "is it possible Jesus was part of the community that wrote the words on the Dead Sea Scrolls?" "To answer that question, we must take a closer look at the scrolls themselves." "The modern story of the scrolls is a cloak-and-dagger thriller, filled with secret meetings and parcels passed in the dark of night, set against a backdrop of politics and war." "(explosion) lt was 1 947." "There was gunfire in the streets of Jerusalem, because the brand-new United Nations was creating a brand-new state in the region - Israel." "And unhappy Palestinians were fighting back." "The first scrolls were found in Palestinian territory, just months before the state of Israel came into being." "Over the years, other finds were made and fragments of old writing began to show up in the lucrative antiquities black market." "Some traded them for money, others for political gain, still others in search of eternal answers." "In 1 954, pieces of a scroll appeared for sale in America, in the classified ads of the Wall Street Journal." "An ad listed four of the Dead Sea Scrolls for sale as... lt was spotted by an Israeli archaeologist, who purchased them anonymously for $250,000." "The world expected the museum scholars to patch the pieces together quickly and publish the results." "Instead, the scholars in Jerusalem took their time, 40 years worth." "The delay led to grumbling and a suspicion the scholars had found something they wanted to hide." "Not so, say the people responsible for the complex task." "AII along the main concern was about why are the scrolls being published." "No-one actually was aware that physically the scrolls were also in need." "The scholars calculate that they are dealing with about 900 texts, broken up into 1 5,000 pieces." "Lots of the pieces are missing and, to make things even more complicated, many of the scrolls are copies of the same texts." "Then there is the problem of brittleness." "The fragments are disintegrating." "In a laboratory at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, a team of preservationists is battling the corrosive effects of time." "80% of the scrolls are written on parchment, 20% are written on papyrus." "So both are organic materials and, as such, they have a life of their own." "Preservation is a meticulous and painstaking task." "The lab workers clean the fragments, then place them between silk sheets, which will protect them for a while." "We know that, no matter what we do, eventually, they will deteriorate and disintegrate." "What we are trying to do is to slow down the process." "I always say that if the scrolls waited for us for 2,000 years, it is our duty to preserve them for at Ieast 2,000 years to go." "Every time someone touches a fragment, the risk of damaging it increases." "Half a world away, in Los Angeles, one man may have a solution to the problem." "Dr Bruce Zuckerman uses state-of-the-art techniques to make the scrolls available without actually handling them." "Digital technology is the key." "He uses infrared light to read the letters on the scrolls that can't be seen by the naked eye." "Some of us have worked on refining the infrared imaging technique by using a technique called narrow-band infrared imaging and I can give you an example here." "Now, this is a little fragment of the Dead Sea scroll that is in visible light." "You can see it doesn't look too terribly good." "You can't even be sure there is anything on it." "In fact, when we first saw it, we weren't sure if anything was on it at all." "So we did apply narrow-band infrared imaging to this, and much to our pleasure and, to some degree, to our surprise, we discovered that the piece actually did have writing on it, so you see that's quite an improvement." "There are letters here." "Zuckerman pieces the fragments together digitally, with a specially designed software program." "This happens to be the word "king"" "and it wasn't hard to basically use a little graphics program to connect the dots like that." "You can see, here's the match." "Mem Iamed kaf aIef." "Zuckerman and his team have compiled a database of all the Dead Sea Scroll fragments." "It is now available to scholars in 25 countries." "What we are trying to do is give people powerful tools, so they can reconstruct these texts, in a way, so that they can test their ideas and see if they are valid." "When those tools are available, the Dead Sea scrolls come to life again." "Some come to life with words familiar to Jews, Christians and Muslims around the world." "And God said..." "Other texts, like the War Rule Scroll, reflect a particular sect's view of the Apocalypse." "Words like these seem oddly similar to those found in the New Testament, raising even more questions about the men who wrote them." "To help answer them, we go to the Judean desert and the abandoned site at Qumran." "When Bedouin boys found the Dead Sea Scrolls in a cave in Judea, in 1 947, it set off a frenzy of archaeological activity." "Father Roland de Vaux, a French Dominican priest, oversaw the excavation of the other caves in the area and found hundreds of additional fragments." "He decided it was likely that the authors had lived in a settlement nearby." "And the ruins of Qumran fit the bill." "According to de Vaux, the physical layout of the abandoned site seemed to confirm this hunch." "Because of its communal structure, some say that Qumran was custom-built for scroll writing." "Copying the ancient texts was slow." "Intensive work, requiring the coordinated efforts of many individuals, all of them devoted to the idea of preserving the past." "AII of the rooms in the settlement were used for communal purposes or as workshops." "In many cases, it's hard, on the basis of archaeology, to say what any given room was used for, so we reconstruct much of this information from the Dead Sea scrolls and from our ancient sources, Iike Josephus." "At the time it was inhabited, some 2,000 years ago, the Qumran site occupied about 7,250 square metres and might have held as many as 200 members." "Corridors led to various rooms, including one some scholars identify as a scroll room, where the community's precious texts were kept." "Throughout the site, archaeologists also uncovered ten pools, which could have been used for ritual baths." "Then there's the main communal room and stacks of pottery archaeologists found there, where members shared their meals." "The site was built with a combination of stones and mud-brick plaster and the entire settlement was surrounded by a wall." "One room within the complex contains some of the most persuasive evidence that the scrolls were written at the Qumran site." "This room, in the middle of the settlement, was identified by de Vaux as a scriptorium or writing room." "During the excavations, Father de Vaux found the remains of long, narrow tables and benches, ideal for assembling and sewing pieces of parchment into one long scroll." "In this same room, de Vaux also found the remains of inkwells." "DR MAGNESS:" "InkweIIs are a rare find on archaeological excavations in israel." "So the presence of inkweIIs suggested to de Vaux that this room must have been a room where writing was done." "Around the corner, de Vaux excavated another room, the largest in the site." "This room seemed to fit the description of a communal room, as described in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and we know of the Essenes'devotion to communal living." "In the room adjacent to it, de Vaux found a pantry of dishes." "The pantry contained over 1 ,000 pottery dishes, that were lying neatly stacked on the floor." "The presence of so many dishes, which were used specifically for dining, plates, cups and bowls, suggested to de Vaux that communal meals must have been held in this room." "The Essenes lived here in the desert and participation in their communal meals was considered a substitute for participation in the temple sacrifices." "In a ritual that seems to foreshadow the teachings of John the Baptist, the scroll writers used sacred waters to cleanse themselves spiritually." "And, at Qumran, we can see the remains of an elaborate water system that channelled rainwater from the cliffs into a series of pools." "One of the characteristic features of Qumran is the large number of Jewish ritual baths." "The main indication are the broad sets of steps that go from the top to the bottom." "Members of the community would step into these pools, submerse themselves from head to toe and emerge spiritually pure." "The pools, the communal rooms and the scriptorium are all consistent with a pious splinter group of Jews, like the Essenes, trying to preserve and improve upon their religious heritage." "That's still the most common interpretation of the Qumran site." "But it's not the only one." "There's nothing, based on the archaeological evidence, that proves that Essenes lived at the site." "Both in terms of the ceramic evidence and the numismatic evidence, there's nothing to distinguish Qumran from other contemporary sites in the Dead Sea region." "YUVAL PELEG:" "It's not a unique site." "A site like Qumran is common." "We have several sites of the same period along the Dead Sea shore." "Archaeologist Yuval Peleg thinks the pools may have been used for something other than ritual bathing." "If the water came into a sedimentation pool and then to another pool, it can't be a ritual bath, because the water became unpure." "They can't be, according to the Jewish law, a ritual bath." "Peleg believes the elaborate waterworks may have been constructed for a far more mundane purpose." "This pool, 7 1 , is the only pool that De Vaux didn't excavate in the '50s." "Two years ago, in 2004, we started excavating the pool, and at the bottom, we found here a layer of 30 centimetres of pure clay." "Clay that Peleg believes was ideal for making pottery." "What we think today is that Qumran was started as a military post and, after the Roman conquest, turned into a pottery industry." "Peleg discounts the possibility that the Dead Sea Scrolls were written at Qumran, or that the Essenes occupied the site at all." "He points out that any Jewish sect who had fled Jerusalem in search of a more pious life could have hidden the scrolls in the caves without settling in Qumran." "But with the caves so close to the site - the nearest only about 1 5 metres away - many scholars doubt it'sjust a coincidence." "60 years after its first excavation," "Qumran seems to have kept more secrets than it has given up." "Who wrote the scrolls?" "Were they people who lived in Qumran?" "Were they people who lived in jerusalem?" "Did they bring the scrolls on their run from jerusalem?" "Who are these people?" "Dr Ira Rabin believes the new scientific data may help elucidate." "The idea is of course to check whether we can correlate these scrolls, and specially sectarian scrolls, to jerusalem, to Qumran or some other place." "I'm trying to see whether there are links, definite links, between the settlement of Qumran and the caves of Qumran." "Maybe people will say there are, but I haven't found one single solid link, you know, physical evidence." "What of those small but compelling pieces of evidence that this was a scroll room?" "The inkwells?" "Such evidence would be, for instance, ink found in the inkwell in the settlement and the matching ink on the scroll... ..to try to follow up the provenance of the scroll through the origin of the ink." "Because ink is an organic material mixed with water," "Rabin and her team hope to match the ink composition with water in different areas across the region." "So what we hope to achieve is to know exactly what scrolls were written in the area of Qumran." "Unfortunately, her results could be years away." "All we can say for certain is that the men who wrote the scrolls lived at the crossroads of Judaism and Christianity, and wanted both to preserve the revered past and see into an apocalyptic future." "And that brings up an interesting question.." "why would a pious, humble and fanatically anti-materialistic people preserve a treasure map?" "Enter the riddle of the Copper Scroll." "In the National Archaeological Museum in Amman, Jordan, sits the most perplexing of all the texts found next to the Dead Sea, the Copper Scroll." "It describes a treasure, gold and silver, measured in tons." "Since its discovery in 1 952, scholars have wondered why this scroll would be found among documents written by a people who swore themselves to poverty, and awaited the end of the world." "The Copper scroll is quite unique." "It was engraved on highly pure copper, 99.9% pure copper." "How did they know how to engrave on it?" "Why did they engrave on copper?" "This is a very valuable, precious material at that time." "clearly they wanted to put down information that would last." "Too brittle to be unrolled, the scroll had to be painstakingly cut into 29 pieces before it could be translated." "Its contents sound like ripe pickings for the likes of an Indiana Jones." "Written in an ancient form of Hebrew, the Copper Scroll gives precise descriptions of where large amounts of gold and silver were buried." "But why would any treasure be precious to the anti-materialistic authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls?" "There are two distinct possibilities." "It could be the treasure of the first Jewish temple, built by Solomon, and sacked by the Babylonians centuries earlier." "Or, more likely, the Copper Scroll refers to the treasures of the second temple, destroyed by the Romans at about the time the scrolls were written." "Dr Oren Gutfeld, an archaeologist from Hebrew University, is trying to get to the bottom of the mystery of the Copper Scroll." "I don't know about the treasures, but I hope that the tunnel will give us more data and help us to understand the Copper scroll." "Working in the middle of the Judean Desert, and guided by the text of the Copper Scroll," "Gutfeld has uncovered a manmade tunnel that he believes may lead to treasure." "In the Copper scroll, it's mentioned that in the tunnel facing to the north in the Seqaqa valley are hidden part of the treasures." "The connection between the two, I think it's quite clear." "And I really hope that the people who wrote the Copper scroll meant one of the tunnels that I'm excavating." "So far no treasure has turned up, but Dr Gutfeld has yet to reach the end of the tunnel." "Others have more radical ideas about the Copper Scroll... ..ideas that reach back into Egypt and have startling implications for Judaism, Christianity and Islam." "Metallurgist and engineer Robert Feather has raised eyebrows with his interpretation of the Copper Scroll." "It involves a code he claims to have deciphered while examining the few Greek letters in the mostly Hebrew text." "In the Copper scroll there are 1 4 Greek letters interspersed in the Hebrew text." "I took the first 1 0 letters and put them together and..." "Eureka!" "They read Akhenaten, the name of an Egyptian pharaoh who lived around 1 350 BC." "And it was one of those reveIationary moments." "The revolutionary pharaoh Akhenaten created what has controversially been called the first monotheistic religion in the world." "He lived at a time when some scholars estimate the Israelites lived in Egypt before the Exodus." "You only have to look at the old Testament to see that major characters in the old Testament" "lived or fled from Egypt." "They absorb this belief in one God." "The evidence in the Copper scroll itself..." "It's pretty seIf-evident." "The clues about Egypt are there for anyone who wants to look at them." "Some scholars believe that if the Israelites did not take the idea of monotheism out of Egypt, the Egyptians could easily have brought the idea to them." "After all, Egypt was a dominant world power for thousands of years leading to the first century BC, when many of the scrolls were written." "ROBERT FEATHER:" "We are in the 1 8th dynasty of Egyptian pharaohs, around about 1 350 BC." "Egypt is the most dominant force in the whole of the middle East." "It controls the whole of the Levant, of the holy land, what is now Lebanon, right the way up to Assyria." "It is the power and the most wealthy civilisation in the world, and it makes a Iot of sense that if anyone was going to come to the realisation of one God, it was going to be an Egyptian pharaoh." "If Feather is right, the Copper Scroll's significance is far beyond that of a mere treasure map." "It is a sign that the Israelites did remember and revere Akhenaten, who he argues is the first monotheist, and that Judaism, Christianity and Islam owe their central belief to the land of the pharaohs." "But for most scholars, a controversial code leading to a pharaoh, leading to the Israelites, leading to the Copper Scroll, is too convoluted a trail to follow." "The theory that the treasures mentioned in the Copper scroll could be Akhenaten's treasures and that they're somewhere in Amarna in Egypt is absolutely ludicrous." "There's no way they could possibly be that, because the Copper scroll is 1 ,000 years after Akhenaten lives." "Feather is undeterred by the discrepancy in dates." "He claims the Copper Scroll was copied from an earlier document much older than the Copper Scroll itself." "But Feather's conviction isn't shared by most scholars." "Some have ventured that the Copper Scroll was the equivalent of an urban legend, or possibly even an ancient hoax." "One of the major problems we've got with the Copper scroll is that we don't know whether or not to believe it." "Not one of the treasures, there are some 64 mentioned in the scroll, not one of them has ever been located." "My particular feeling is that they're never going to be located, because they either never existed in the first place, or they were found very long ago." "But even if the Copper Scroll does not lead to treasure or to the origins of Judaism, there's no denying that the rest of the scrolls have profound implications for Judaism at the time of Jesus." "Some scholars contend the scrolls shed even more light on early Christianity... ..and that a case can be made that Jesus himself was an Essene." "(Chanting)" "Some believe that the Dead Sea Scrolls... ..the writings of an obscure Jewish sect, have much to tell us about the roots of Christianity." "Written in the centuries before and after the birth of Jesus, they bear witness to a time when splinter groups were breaking away from mainstream Judaism and practising rituals that seem to anticipate Christianity." "Rituals like the taking of the communal meal." "What we know from the Dead Sea scrolls is that there was a priest who blessed the cup, one cup that was shared among many people." "And this was picked up very quickly in early Christianity." "It was reflected in the communal meal that we know of, the Last Supper that Jesus had with his disciples." "The scrolls also describe ritual baths of spiritual cleansing." "While these rituals seem to echo Jewish traditions, they also may foreshadow the Christian idea of baptism." "The first step of being united with the people of God is this immersion." "You needed to become clean." "You need to be pure in body." "You also have to be pure in heart, according to their rules." "Passages from the War Rule Scroll describe a great battle and the destruction of the sons of darkness, foreshadowing the Battle of Armageddon described in the Book of Revelations." "Most radical of all, some have even speculated that Jesus himself spent time with the sect who wrote the scrolls." "Robert Feather, author of The Secret Initiation Of Jesus At Qumran, draws a controversial link." "He finds too many echoes of Dead Sea Scroll language in the New Testament to write it off as chance." "There are unique phrases that appear in paul and in other gospels that can only have come from some of the fairly secretive confidential documents of the Qumran community." "The anomaly of Jesus's life in the New Testament is, we hear about his birth, we hear about him coming out at the age of 1 2, then nothing." "Nothing about his formative years, his most important years of his life." "The New Testament has nothing to say." "Where is he?" "I believe he's ensconced at Qumran with the Qumran Essenes, studying biblical texts." "Since the Essenes existed during the life of Jesus, and held beliefs that seem to parallel some ideas in Christian thought," "Feather thinks that Jesus developed his ideas while living in Qumran." "But there is nothing in the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves to corroborate this theory." "Sceptics of the Jesus-as-Essene theory go on to point out the many differences between what the Essenes believed and what Jesus taught." "The Essenes were sticklers for ritual purity and intolerant of people they considered unclean." "Jesus embraced lepers." "The Essenes shunned tax-gatherers and sinners." "Jesus recruited them." "One of the scrolls preaches "eternal hatred for the men of the pit", while Jesus asked people to love their enemies." "So while it's possible Jesus knew of groups like the Essenes, and may have borrowed elements from them, his basic message couldn't have been more different." "There is no evidence that Jesus was an Essene." "About the most that scholars are willing to say is that John the Baptist could have been an Essene." "It's difficult, if not impossible, to actually link Jesus himself with the Essenes." "Author Michael Baigent doesn't believe that Jesus was an Essene, but he believes the scrolls might have threatened the tenets of the Catholic Church and Christianity in general." "MICHAEL BAIGENT:" "When we look at the scrolls, when we read them, we find some very important things." "They oppose directly Christianity." "They oppose the uniqueness of Christianity." "They show there was a pre-existing messianic context." "They oppose the divinity of Jesus, because they show that messiah, son of God, doesn't have to have a divine interpretation, and they oppose directly the theological unity of the gospels." "So to that extent, they are a kind of time bomb." "Jesus sometimes referred to himself as the son of God, which his followers took as a sign of his divine nature." "But the scrolls use the term in a much more worldly context." "There was a text found in cave 4." "And in this text, the title Son of God was used." "Now it shows that this title was current in messianic Judaism before Jesus." "It shows that this phrase was current in the Qumran community." "But, of course, in Christianity, son of God has a divine connotation." "At Qumran, it didn't." "This interpretation defines Jesus the way present-day Judaism views him, as a mortal prophet." "Jesus was Jewish." "That's so simple, yet so often forgotten." "And he was a messianic Jewish leader, whatever that may mean." "But it didn't mean unique, it didn't mean divine and it meant that he was in a pre-existing Jewish context." "This sent panic through the Church, and they moved very quickly to take control of the scrolls." "They set up an international team to physically hold them, and they also controlled the interpretation of the scrolls." "And a scandal developed." "There was a deception." "There was a fraud." "But this is a distinctly minority view." "HANAN ESCHEL:" "Now that all the scrolls are out, we see that there's no secrets here." "And there's no scrolls here that sheds negative light on the Christian belief." "Since their discovery, the Dead Sea Scrolls have been pored over and examined by hundreds of scholars, and there's still no definitive word on who wrote them, or what they mean." "But someone wrote them, and then went to a great deal of trouble to hide them, hastily, as if to preserve something they feared might be lost for ever." "And we know the inhabitants at Qumran had reason to be afraid." "In 70AD, the Romans destroyed the second temple in Jerusalem, after sending their armies out into the countryside to crush the remnants of a Jewish revolt against Roman rule." "There was the imminent danger of destruction, the destruction of the city of jerusalem, the destruction of the temple in jerusalem." "The Romans had already penetrated PaIestinian territory." "They had arrived in Judea and started to destroy various villages and cities." "Qumran was one of those sites." "HANAN ESCHEL:" "I believe that when the Roman army approached Qumran, the people decided to hide their scrolls in caves." "And they thought that they had enough time." "They took some scrolls to cave 1 , to cave 1 1 , to cave 3." "And then they realise that they don't have enough time." "The Essenes disappear from the stage of history after the first Jewish revolt against the Romans." "The site of Qumran was destroyed in the year 68AD, at the time of the first Jewish revolt against the Romans." "That Jewish revolt ended on a hilltop in southern Judea at a site called Masada." "About 1,000 Jewish defenders were surrounded by Roman soldiers in a siege that lasted for months." "When the Romans finally broke through, they discovered that all the men defending Masada had killed themselves." "Some scholars think it's likely the devout Essenes were among those who died rather than submit to Roman rule." "It's possible that some of the Essenes fled the settlement at the time of the destruction and joined the group that was holding out on top of Masada, but then after that, we don't hear of them any more." "And that might explain why no-one ever returned to retrieve the scrolls." "Instead, the scroll writers left behind an inadvertent time capsule that lay buried for nearly 2,000 years, and was only rediscovered when a boy went looking for a lost goat." "Now it's up to us to sort through the time capsule's contents, and to decide what they mean." "well, the Dead Sea scrolls are the most important witness for the biblical text that we use today." "We actually have scrolls we can hold in our hands, which people contemporary with the first century held in their hands." "Now we see that the early church was part of the dynamic of ancient Judaism in the land of israel 2,000 years ago." "But we didn't know that before Qumran, because we didn't have the material and the knowledge we have today." "Now that we're studying the scrolls in the 21 st century, we see how influential they were, how they influenced Jewish life and how they influenced Christianity." "So we see that the early church was organised very much like the Qumranites." "Those scrolls shed light on all the Western civilisation." "As the remaining fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls get reassembled, it's possible that more mysteries and controversies lie ahead." "Or perhaps the scrolls have already given up all their secrets." "But nothing can diminish the insights the scrolls have already given us about the world as it was during a pivotal time in history..." "..when two religions parted ways, and changed the world for ever."