The Significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls (2022-01-03) ​

0:00:02 The significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls, now i'm often told often hear from Christians who say 0:00:08 the Dead Sea Scrolls they really took us much further back in time and i got much earlier 0:00:12 manuscripts and it confirms the Old Testament we always had it's the same books the same content 0:00:19 Isaiah is just the same Jeremiah's just the same um is a is this true or not i mean what's really 0:00:26 going on here is it more complicated than that yeah no it's a very important it's a 0:00:30 very important thing uh the destiny scrolls are huge hugely important for all sorts of reasons 0:00:35 um not just not just the copies of the bible by the way but also the that tells us a lot about 0:00:41 this group of jews who were in these kind of monastic-like communities uh these they have 0:00:46 scenes um but some some of the Dead Sea Scrolls are biblical manuscripts and they are a huge find 0:00:52 the reason is because the Hebrew Bible that we use today the people who use the hebrew 0:00:58 Bible actually in Hebrew and that are translating the Hebrew Bible are basing 0:01:04 their uh their translations on a manuscript that was written around the year 1000 of the common era 0:01:10 around 1 000 of the common era it's uh it came from leningrad and so it's called codexis
0:01:18 jewish tribes in the middle ages when they copied a manuscript they would destroy it 0:01:24 because now they had a perfect copy of it and they made sure the copy was perfect 0:01:30 they had ways of doing that through the middle ages the problem is what were scribes doing 0:01:35 before the middle ages before they had these rules well we had to guess they were getting 0:01:40 it right and so um the dead sea scrolls were discovered in 1947 and they have they include 0:01:49 portions of every book of the hebrew bible except for uh except for the book of uh esther esther 0:01:56 yeah um because yeah it turns out god is not named in esther and so that for some reason that book's 0:02:02 not among the dead sea scrolls most of the scrolls we have are not complete scrolls the isaiah scroll 0:02:08 is a virtually complete scroll and it is very very close in wording to the codex leningradensis 0:02:15 right so that concept but that confirms the bible we have today was historically accurate it was 0:02:21 accurately transmitted no no it's got nothing to do with it and so so i need to explain several 0:02:26 things here because there's several points that some people like overlook which is the first one 0:02:31 people overlook that's true the isaiah scroll but it's not true of other dead sea scrolls 0:02:36 there are other dead sea scrolls the the scroll of jeremiah that we have is um has a uh has 0:02:43 differences from our jeremiah and the differences from our jeremiah are like the differences that 0:02:50 come to us from the greek translation of jeremiah in the septuagint in the greek greek bible 0:02:56 that version of jeremiah is 15 shorter than the leningradensis 15 uh so that's not very accurate 0:03:09 and so so it's not that everything is like the isaiah scroll the isaiah scrolls like 0:03:14 the isaiah scroll but it doesn't prove that's why it's always mentioned it's always showcased 0:03:17 oh look at isaiah is exactly the same look at the perfection of transformation 0:03:22 that's my first point that this this manuscript by isaiah was written a thousand years before 0:03:26 leningrad's it's accurate but the others are not the same second point um isaiah the prophet 0:03:34 was writing isaiah jerusalem was living in the 8th century bce so that means we don't have any 0:03:42 manuscripts for the first over 700 years so the fact that you have a manuscript that from 0:03:49 say say the year one to the year 1000 you can show that isaiah was copied accurately but our 0:03:56 question is what about between the year 700 bce and one now there's 700 years we have no evidence 0:04:05 in hebrew no hebrew text so you can't say this is exactly what isaiah wrote how would you know 0:04:10 how much it got changed between 700 and the dead sea scroll copy there's no way to know 0:04:16 there are ways not good ways no no um so that's that's second third thing 0:04:23 even if even if we had everything that was accurate in either any book the new testament 0:04:30 or the new testament old testament even if we had a manuscript even we had the original 0:04:35 suppose we had the original of mark or suppose we have the original of uh joshua we have the 0:04:41 original that would have no bearing on the question of whether it's accurate or not 0:04:49 it would only have a bearing on whether we know what the author wrote 0:04:53 so the way i usually illustrate this is we have we have millions of copies of mineconf
0:05:03 and they are accurate they i mean they might not be active with what hitler actually wrote 0:05:10 but they don't they don't have any differences we know what the first printed copy looked like 0:05:16 does that mean that it's accurate no it doesn't mean that it's right it just means you know what 0:05:22 he wrote the fact you know what somebody wrote doesn't mean that what they wrote is right 0:05:26 that's a different thing so those are three really big points that shows that this argument just 0:05:30 doesn't hold and any one of those three shows that they've been hold three together forget it yeah 0:05:38 it's not worse than that because a good example of isaiah is now commonly accepted that yeah maybe 0:05:43 the first 39 chapters of isaiah were written by this prophet 0:05:46 in isaiah from downtown jerusalem but it was added to by maybe a second scribe or maybe a third 0:05:53 scribe or scribes so we don't even even if you dig up the book of isaiah that we have it today 0:05:59 from 500 years ago 600 years ago it doesn't mean we have the prophet isaiah's own words 0:06:04 which many scholars were added to anyway yeah yeah no it's very common to think that i isaiah 0:06:11 and if there's really good reason for this isaiah jerusalem wrote most of chapter 1 to 39 and then 0:06:16 someone 150 years later wrote 40 to 50 55 50 yeah 55 then the other 56 and on and so you know it's 0:06:23 a compilation uh no matter what but even if you have isaiah's words again it doesn't it doesn't 0:06:30 mean that he's right he might be right i mean but that's a different it's a different question 0:06:36 the fact you have an accurate manuscript is not evidence that what the person said is accurate