Lesson 10: Qumran Caves and the Old Testament, Part 2

Kootenai Church

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

Lesson 11: Defining and Defending the Canon, Part 3

00:00

All right, we are in lesson 10 of our God Wrote a Book series. Lesson 10 called

00:05

Qumran Caves in the Old Testament. And last week we just handled the first few objections, those five objections under Roman numeral one, dealing with handling objections that might be raised to New Testament reliability up to this point.

00:19

And today we're talking about now in numeral lesson number two on page 33, the reliability of the

00:25

Old Testament. So before we begin, let's bow with a word of prayer. Father, we want to commit our time here and our attention to you, and we pray that this time would be profitable to encourage our hearts in your truth and in your word, and pray that you would help us to appreciate your word and what you have done to preserve it for us.

00:44

We thank you that your word is true, it is reliable, and that you have promised that none of your words shall pass away, heaven and earth will pass away before even one of your words does.

00:54

So we pray that you would show us today how it is that you have accomplished that magnificent and gracious task of preserving your word for us.

01:01

Help us to appreciate this and to love your word and to love you through it and because of it. And we pray your blessing upon this time that what is communicated would be clear and that you give us clarity of thought and understanding today is in Jesus' name, amen.

01:14

Alright, the reliability of the Old Testament. Up to this point, we've mostly been talking about the reliability of the

01:22

New Testament. We've talked about New Testament textual transmission. We've talked about the textual variance that we find in the

01:29

New Testament. We've talked about New Testament manuscripts, the number of New Testament manuscripts, how early those

01:35

New Testament manuscripts are to the time of the writing of those original documents. We've talked about sort of how documents, how

01:42

New Testament manuscripts were copied, how they were distributed, how they were spread, why they were copied and why they were spread.

01:48

And today we're going to change our focus a little bit and talk about the Old Testament and this is the only lesson that we're devoting particularly to the reliability of the

01:57

Old Testament. The New Testament has, with the Old Testament, we have a little bit of a different situation than we have with New Testament documents and transmission, manuscripts and transmission.

02:08

With the Old Testament, or sorry, with the New Testament, we have thousands of manuscripts that date to within just a few years, relatively speaking, of the original.

02:17

We have manuscript fragments that date back into the first century. We have many manuscript fragments that date into the second and third century.

02:24

We have a wealth of manuscripts. We have lots of manuscripts and we have them dating or can date those copies to within a few years of the original writings of the

02:35

New Testament. With the Old Testament, it's a little bit different. The Old Testament has far fewer manuscripts that date a long time from the original and in that way, the

02:44

Old Testament manuscripts are more like other ancient documents. The New Testament had many people making and spreading many copies.

02:53

Old Testament manuscripts had a few highly trained and highly disciplined people making copies. So those are the marked difference.

03:00

The number of manuscripts, the time span between the earliest copies that we have and the date of the original writing, with the

03:07

Old Testament, that's a lot longer. With the New Testament, it's very narrow. With the Old Testament, you have few manuscripts.

03:13

With the New Testament, abundance of manuscripts. With the Old Testament, you had highly trained disciplined scribes whose job was to copy those manuscripts.

03:20

In the New Testament, you had copies being made by people that you don't know, or people that you don't know were necessarily highly trained and so there are textual variants, etc.

03:29

So remember when, I think it was several, a couple months ago, we talked about the care and the detail that went into copying

03:36

Old Testament manuscripts, the Masorettes and the Talmudic school. Remember we talked about how they knew the number of words in each book and they knew what the middle word of each book was and they knew how many letters and they would copy those out.

03:48

They would re -read them. They had lines that they would keep track of and how many letters on each line, etc. All that fastidiousness and the detail that went into copying, well those are the

03:56

Talmudic schools and the Masoretics, the Masorettes, their copying of those manuscripts. That's what's described to them.

04:02

With the New Testament, it wasn't as disciplined and as focused and as specialized as it was with Old Testament documents.

04:08

So why is it that Old Testament documents or manuscripts did not describe? There are a number of reasons here.

04:16

First, the materials of the Old Testament were very destructible and fragile. Remember it wasn't until shortly before the writing of the

04:22

New Testament that we had, I'll use this word for lack of a better word, evolved the ability to write on things that were much more durable like vellum and parchment.

04:33

Back in the Old Testament, things were carved on stone, remember years ago, but then eventually they were written down on very decayable, very fragile pieces of paper.

04:42

So those documents that preceded the time of Christ, they were written on materials that were far less durable than were

04:49

New Testament copies. We have today copies of New Testament manuscripts that date really early into the early church because they were copied on animal skins.

04:58

So far more reliable and durable materials on which those things were written. Second, scribes took great care in destroying

05:05

Old Testament manuscripts. Does that seem like a horrific idea to you? It does to us, right?

05:12

Old Testament scribes, the Masorettes and the Talmudists, they would take great care in destroying Old Testament manuscripts.

05:18

Now why would they do that, do you think? We talked a little bit about this some weeks ago.

05:24

Why would they take great care to destroy those originals? That's right.

05:33

As things got worn, as those materials were worn and used, things could get worn off and therefore what was there would be less reliable, it could be misinterpreted, it could be misread, maybe miscopied.

05:44

So one of the ways that they preserved errors from being duplicated was once they had made an exact copy and they had certified that that was an exact copy of what they were copying, they would destroy the original.

05:56

They did this fastidiously, particularly with copies of things that were beginning to decay or deteriorate.

06:02

They didn't want them sticking around. We tend to think that if we could just have the original of something that that would be better.

06:10

But in their mind, in the ancient mind, that was not how it worked at all. In the ancient mind, if you had a reliable, fastidious, exact copy of something, it was as good as the original.

06:21

They wouldn't have valued the original over a copy like we would today. If you could get the original of something, you'd think, man, this is the original,

06:28

Paul's sweat is on this, Paul's DNA is on this document somewhere, this is what he bled and cried and died over was this document, and you'd think this is fantastic.

06:36

But in the early church, in the ancient world, if you made a copy of it, you'd scrap that, you would burn it, even if it was the very piece of paper that the

06:42

Apostle Paul himself carried with him from one place to another. They just didn't value original documents just because they were original documents like we would today.

06:52

Was that a question? Another question? No? Okay. Another reason why they took great care in destroying those manuscripts is because they went to great pains to copy them and make them exact.

07:06

And scribal laws required them to destroy worn out and thus inferior documents because an inferior document could lead to copying errors if someone copying from it, and they worked to prevent the copying errors.

07:17

And another reason why many of those ancient documents of the Old Testament didn't survive is because the

07:22

Jewish people were ravaged constantly, invaded, their holy books were burned, so many of those documents were lost to antiquity and to history.

07:33

So let's talk about for a moment the certainty prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is number three.

07:39

How many of you have heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Everybody? You've all heard of them? Okay. You've probably heard of them because you're going through the checkout line at Walmart and you see that the

07:48

National Enquirer says the Dead Sea Scrolls reveal that Jesus is coming back in 2020, or the

07:53

Dead Sea Scrolls reveal that there are other Gospels that we should be listening to other than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, or the

07:59

Dead Sea Scrolls reveal that Jesus didn't actually rise from the dead. That's probably for most

08:04

Christians, their familiarity with the Dead Sea Scrolls. How many of you could accurately describe to me what is in the

08:10

Dead Sea Scrolls? Anybody want to take a shot at it? What's that?

08:19

Isaiah is in there, that's correct. Okay. Most of us are very unfamiliar with not only the discovery of the

08:27

Dead Sea Scrolls but their significance in our understanding of the reliability of the Old Testament. So the

08:32

Old Testament textual certainty before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls fared about the same as our certainty of other ancient documents.

08:41

So I said that Old Testament documents were very similar to other ancient documents like Homer's Iliad, or Tacitus, or Caesar, or Herodotus, or Pliny, or Plato, or any one of those ancient documents.

08:51

In other words, we had a long period of time between the writing of the original and the earliest copies that we have, and not only that, but we have many fewer copies of those documents than we do compared to the

09:00

New Testament. With the New Testament, we have something that is singularly unique in its closeness to the original writing as well as the abundance of copies that we have to compare.

09:09

With the Old Testament, it's more like other ancient documents prior to the coming of Christ. Our earliest copy of the

09:16

Old Testament, prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, our earliest copy of the Old Testament was a

09:21

Masoretic text dating from around 900 A .D. 900 A .D.

09:27

Somebody remember when the last Old Testament book was written? What year that was? Nope.

09:35

That was your timer. That meep, meep, meep, meep was the timer. That was the long pause there. Yes? Anybody want to take a guess?

09:43

The last Old Testament book? 90. Nope. It was 400

09:49

B .C. It was the last Old Testament book. That would be, there was a collection of prophets right there towards the end of what is revealed as our

09:57

Old Testament time period, around the time of Nehemiah, not

10:03

Nezra, Ezra and Nehemiah were two different guys. Ezra, Nehemiah, Zerubbabel. Those books,

10:09

Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai was in there, Malachi, and Malachi was one of the last

10:16

Old Testament books written. After that, you had 400 years before John the Baptist shows up and announces the arrival of the

10:21

Messiah. Okay? So the Old Testament, the latest book of the Old Testament was 400 B .C.

10:28

The earliest copy that we had was a Masoretic text of the Old Testament dating from 900

10:33

A .D. So how many years is that? That's about 1 ,300 years between the earliest copy that we possess, 900

10:43

A .D., after Jesus compared to 400 B .C., before Christ.

10:51

So our earliest copy of Isaiah also was 900 A .D., but does anybody know when

10:57

Isaiah was written? That was 700 B .C. Isaiah was 700

11:03

B .C. So what is the time difference between the earliest, between the original writing of Isaiah and the earliest copy we have?

11:10

With the book of Isaiah, we're talking about a difference of 1 ,600 years. 1 ,600 years.

11:16

And we didn't really care much about the accuracy of those Old Testament documents, or we weren't really concerned with whether they're reliable or not, simply because of the care that the

11:25

Masoretes and the Talmudists put into copying them. And there was really no hope, and I'm going back now to prior to the discovery of the

11:33

Dead Sea Scrolls, there was really no hope that we would ever discover any document earlier than 900

11:38

A .D. of an Old Testament text. Sir Frederick Kenyon, who was the one -time director of the British Museum of Natural History, in 1939, he said this rather hopelessly, quote, there is indeed no probability that we shall ever find manuscripts of the

11:55

Hebrew text going back to a period before the formation of the text which we know as Masoretic, close quote.

12:02

So there's no probability that we will ever find a text dating earlier than what we know as the Masoretic text, which is 900

12:08

A .D., again. Sir Frederick Kenyon said that in 1939, and then came 1947.

12:16

A Bedouin shepherd searching for a lost goat between Bethlehem and the Dead Sea, he sat down to rest, and he kind of idly tossed a stone into a cave, and he heard the hollow ring of shattering pottery.

12:27

And that was the beginning of one of the most amazing archaeological discoveries ever. And I mean ever. I'm going to give you here just a quick glimpse of the area that is known as Qumran.

12:40

And these pictures were taken when we were in Israel, and this is just part of the slideshow that I showed you a couple years ago. So this might be repetitive for you, but you may have forgotten what this area looked like.

12:48

This is down toward the Dead Sea, which you'll see here in a moment. I don't have my pointer with me, but if you can see sort of up at the top of that left -hand side that slopes off like that, you can see a cave there.

12:59

You see some entrances up on the top of that, which were sort of top entrances to those caves. Those are where many of the

13:06

Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. It's just kind of a video tour. There's no audio for that, which is fine.

13:12

Oh, thank you. Yeah, he threw the stone down into a hole. Oh, that's my finger.

13:18

Here we go. There we go, pointing out. Okay, so you'll see this is like a visitor center here that we were looking out over across this long valley here.

13:30

And this just kind of gives you an idea of the arid terrain around there where those people lived. And it wasn't different at all back in the time of Christ.

13:41

It was still that arid terrain. Sorry, what?

13:48

Well, you're assuming that they would have grazed sheep there. There were, down in the valley next to the

13:54

Dead Sea, there are date trees, fig trees down in that area. You can see the Dead Sea, which is right behind us there.

14:01

All the way in the back of there is the Dead Sea. So again, there's a close -up picture of where they were discovered.

14:12

When I heard about the Dead Sea Scrolls being discovered in a cave, what I'd always pictured was sort of out in the middle of a grassy land, and then there was a cave entrance there.

14:19

And the boy was sort of sitting outside of it and just pitched a rock in the middle of that. What's that? That was

14:25

Batman, right? That was the Batcave. Thank you. Clearing that up. Now, these are the ruins of the ancient city of Qumran.

14:35

And these are the walls that exist. Those aren't rebuilt. Those are original to what was there around the first century.

14:41

And you can see that they have these large cisterns, and they had these means of...

14:47

You could walk down into where they would collect these waters. So there were massive wells or massive, basically, handmade cisterns there in the rock that they would use.

14:57

And there are little, what would you call them, like little flumes or gutters that they would build to collect the rainwater that came off of that mountain.

15:05

And they would collect rainwater. They would run down in these channels, down into these cisterns, like that right there.

15:13

And so during the few rains that they would get every year, they would collect as much of that water into those cisterns as they could and then use that throughout the course of the year.

15:26

Sorry, what's that? Does it still collect water? Does it still collect water? That I don't know. I don't think so. Probably it's not entirely intact because this has just been partially excavated.

15:36

But you can see these baths in these rooms. That's a massive cistern there with steps going down into it. So you could always just walk down to wherever the water was and draw out whatever water you needed.

15:45

And of course, today they have these planks and walkways where you can walk over top of the ancient ruins of this city. So this is the city in Qumran that existed, remnants of it that existed at the time of Jesus.

15:55

And again, just another picture of the aridness and the remnants of that city. That was from a different one.

16:03

You can go ahead and mute it, Peter. Yes. Yeah, let me answer that.

16:20

Who built this? The scrolls belonged to, and this city belonged to, a devout religious community known as the

16:25

Essenes. They were not Christians. They were Jews. They were a devout Jewish sect called the

16:31

Essenes. They lived in the Qumran Valley in a settlement between 130 BC and 68

16:36

AD or 70 AD. Does anybody remember what happened in 70 AD? Yes, Titus came in and ravaged the city of Jerusalem.

16:46

Now Jerusalem is a couple hours drive, hour and a half drive north of this. And so when he came in and destroyed

16:51

Jerusalem, and he actually drove a number of Jews into the southern region of the land of Israel, where they held up, at that time the

16:59

Essenes were under attack, but because of the same invasion in 70 AD. And so it is believed that they took the scrolls, put them in clay jars, and hid them in the caves in order to preserve them from Roman destruction.

17:12

And the Romans never found them and never saw them. And at that time, around 70 AD, the Essenes were wiped out.

17:18

Yes. Yeah, it's definitely an extraordinary providence, number one, that that entire community would have preserved those scrolls, which

17:40

I'm going to describe to you here in a moment, but then that they would preserve them and keep them in a cave, and then they would be lost to history for 1 ,900 years.

17:47

Amazing. They just sat there undiscovered, unknown, unmolested for 1 ,900 years.

17:53

Yes. Yeah, 1947 was right about the time that Israel became a nation.

18:01

In 1948 is when it happened, yeah. Am I going to tell you how old the

18:07

Dead Sea Scrolls are? Yes, but not before the appropriate time. See, that's my, you got to drop that at the right, it's all about timing,

18:14

Rick. It's like comedy. You got to wait until the appropriate moment. Yes, got to have a punchline.

18:21

So the Qumran community lived down there about 130 to 68 AD before they were invaded and displaced by the

18:28

Romans. And like I say, they were a devout Jewish community, not a Christian community. And they were very messianic, which means that they were waiting for the

18:36

Messiah to come. So they were not Jews who had experienced salvation. They're not Jews who knew the

18:41

Messiah. They are Jews who were still waiting for their Messiah. Now further research since the discovery of the scrolls have questioned some of the things that I've just said to you.

18:50

There's other theories about this community. Some have thought that these scrolls belong to someone who had a large wealthy estate at that location.

18:59

And some people have suggested that it was Sadducees and not Essenes who lived in that valley in that community.

19:04

And that community is just a little bit up from the Dead Sea. I forget what the elevation difference of it would be.

19:11

You could probably look it up on Google Maps. But you can see where the present Dead Sea is, and it's sort of up on a plateau several hundred feet elevation above the

19:19

Dead Sea. So here are the contents of the Dead Sea scrolls. Let me describe them to you for a moment. There were 11 caves that were eventually excavated.

19:28

Those scrolls contained 40 ,000 manuscript fragments. Those 40 ,000 manuscript fragments represented 500 separate scrolls.

19:39

And a few of them were almost perfect and undamaged even after 1 ,900 years. If they had left those scrolls, if those scrolls had been deposited in the northern climes of Israel up around Dan and the headwaters of the

19:57

Jordan River or the Sea of Galilee, they never would have survived 1 ,900 years. You know what is required for a scroll to survive 1 ,900 years?

20:04

It has to be in an arid, dry climate that gets very little water and is pretty much temperate all year round.

20:10

So the perfect location in that community for those scrolls to be preserved. One hundred of these scrolls were parts of the

20:18

Bible. So there are 500 separate scrolls making up 40 ,000 separate fragments of these scrolls.

20:25

One hundred of these scrolls were parts of the Bible. Every book of the Old Testament is represented except Esther. Now that doesn't mean that there are 100 complete copies of the

20:33

Old Testament. It means a hundred of these scrolls represent portions of the Old Testament. And every book is represented there again except for the book of Esther.

20:41

Thirty -six manuscripts have Psalms. Twenty -nine manuscripts contain

20:47

Deuteronomy. Twenty -one manuscripts contain Isaiah. Fifteen manuscripts contain

20:52

Exodus. Seventeen manuscripts contain Exodus. And fifteen manuscripts contain Genesis. The Dead Sea Scrolls also contained a book of hymns.

21:01

It contained other literature like stories, books, legends, etc. This is something to remember when people say that the

21:07

Dead Sea Scrolls reveal lost books of the Bible. So the assumption is that if you find some story of a community or a diary or something like that alongside the book of Isaiah in a cave down in the southern climes of Judah, that that story must also be part of the book of the

21:22

Bible. Just because my collection, my library, contains Bible books as well as other books doesn't mean that I value them the same.

21:31

And so it is with the collection of Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls contain books of the Bible, yes, but it contained a lot of other information scrolls as well.

21:40

Contained literature like stories, books, and legends. It contained a commentary on the book of Habakkuk, a manual of discipline which was basically a rule book for governing that messianic sect that lived in Qumran.

21:52

And it contained a complete copy of the book of Isaiah, a complete scroll of the book of Isaiah.

21:59

Now remember, up to this point, our earliest copy of the book of Isaiah was what? 900

22:05

AD, which meant that there was a 1600 year gap between our earliest copy of Isaiah and when

22:12

Isaiah was originally written, which was 700 BC, a 1600 year gap. The copy of Isaiah that was contained in the

22:21

Dead Sea Scrolls, that complete copy, was dated between 175 and 150

22:27

BC. So that closed the gap from 1600 years down to 600 years.

22:34

By the discovery of the Dead Sea Scroll, we took a thousand years off of our earliest copy of Isaiah. So now what do you want to know?

22:42

That's the next most logical question. How does it compare with the 900

22:49

AD copy of Isaiah? I mean, if we can shave a thousand years off of that distance between the original and our earliest copy, then we would want to go back and we would want to compare, since we can't compare it with the original, we would want to compare the

23:02

Dead Sea copy of Isaiah with the Masoretic copy of Isaiah, which dated a thousand years later. Scholars examined, for instance,

23:10

Isaiah 53 and compared the copy from 900 AD with the copy from 150 BC, and so Norm Geisler and Nix in their general introduction to the

23:19

New Testament write this, quote, of the 166 words in Isaiah 53, there are only 17 letters in question.

23:27

Not 17 verses, not 17 words, 17 letters in question. Before I move on, remember how we talked about the significance of textual variance?

23:37

Not all textual variants are equal, right? Because sometimes their spelling changes, sometimes their word order changes, sometimes they make no significance whatsoever, make no significant difference whatsoever, okay?

23:48

So of the 166 words in Isaiah 53, there are only 17 letters in question. Ten of these letters are simply a matter of spelling, which does not affect the sense.

23:57

Four more letters are minor stylistic changes, such as conjunctions. The remaining three letters comprise the word light, which is added in verse 11 and does not affect the meaning greatly.

24:09

Furthermore, this word is supported by the Septuagint, thus in one chapter of 166 words, there's only one word of three letters that's in question after a thousand years of transmission, and this word does not significantly change the meaning of the passage, close quote.

24:26

So if you can shave a thousand years off of that during a time when the nation of Israel was being ravaged and invaded and destroyed and held captive and oppressed by the

24:38

Romans, and many times people who were making these copies were fearing for their lives, if you can shave a thousand years off of that 1600, and basically you're down to one word, which does not affect the significance or the meaning of the translation at all.

24:50

And you have the Septuagint, which remember was translated prior to the time of Jesus, that does have that word light in it.

24:57

And what kind of accuracy are we talking about in Isaiah 53? Yeah, very, very accurate, right?

25:08

So as an example, Isaiah 40, verse 12 has who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand?

25:17

The Dead Sea text at the same place says who has measured the waters of the sea in the hollow of his hand?

25:23

Wow, does that sound like a significant variant to you? It's not at all, it doesn't change the meaning, it doesn't matter if it said sea or if it says waters.

25:32

Are we talking about overthrowing the Christian faith or the transmission of the Old Testament over such a difference between the

25:38

Dead Sea Scrolls and the copy of Isaiah? Translators will make note of the variance within the text, and so the

25:45

Dead Sea Scrolls were available just in time to use in the revised standard version of the

25:53

Bible in 1952. The revised standard version adopted only 13 readings from the

25:58

Dead Sea Scrolls in preference to the Masoretic text. The NIV lists 16 occasions where the

26:04

Masoretic text and the Dead Sea Scrolls differ, and on 11 occasions in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the

26:09

Dead Sea Scrolls were preferred to the Masoretic text. So you're talking about in every instance between scholars when translating the

26:16

Old Testament and having both the Masoretic text and the Dead Sea Scrolls, you're talking about less than two dozen times in the

26:23

Old Testament where they would prefer one over the other and make a change and have to choose between the two. That's pretty wild, isn't it?

26:32

So the types of variance that we find in the Old Testament text comparing the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Masoretic text of 900

26:39

AD is the exact same kinds of variance that we find when examining New Testament text. Name spellings, missing words, verb tenses, single letter differences, many of these can be accounted for just by understanding how language changes and sometimes word use changes over time.

26:57

So here's the implications of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The accuracy of the Old Testament can be proven, just like the accuracy of the

27:02

New Testament transmission can be proven. In almost a thousand years, you can see the copies contain no substantial changes or losses, and we can reasonably claim and assume that if a thousand years of copying demonstrates that kind of accuracy, you can follow the same degree of accuracy for all the other

27:18

Old Testament books. You must allow, of course, for the same degree of accuracy for the first 600 years.

27:24

There's no reason to believe that what was originally written is so radically different after only 1600 years when the copies have been made, and between 600 years and 1600 years difference, there's hardly any variation at all.

27:37

That make sense? Okay, are there any questions about that before we move on? Actually, let me just finish with a quote before I answer that, and I forgot this.

27:45

F .F. Bruce said that, quote, The new evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls confirms that we had already a good reason to believe that the

27:51

Jewish scribes of the early Christian centuries copied and recopied the text of the Hebrew Bible with utmost fidelity.

27:58

So after the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, after the first century, you didn't have Masorettes and Talmudists that were doing this.

28:03

You had sometimes Christians who were making copies of the Old Testament text, and they did so with the same attention to detail that they attempted to copy

28:11

New Testament manuscript documents with as well. All right, Steve, you had a question? What was the method used for dating the

28:23

Dead Sea Scrolls for that many years prior? I don't know what the method of dating those ancient documents are.

28:31

That's not my field at all. Yeah, Peter? No, those who did the copying of the

28:55

Dead Sea Scrolls, they were not followers of Christ because that dates 150 B .C. Is that your question? Or those who...

29:06

Gotcha. Okay. So I think from the little bit that I've read that goes into dating those manuscripts, they look at handwriting, stylistic changes.

29:16

They sometimes look at wording changes. They also look at the type of material that it was used and maybe the condition of the scroll, as well as if one particular scroll is mentioned in another document that they would view as later, that they might be able to date with certainty.

29:29

For instance, if you had... Let's say you had... And I don't know if this is how it's done or not, but just to give you an idea of what you could do.

29:34

If you had a document like a story or a book that mentioned a certain king ruling in Israel or a certain Roman emperor or a certain

29:40

Greek emperor, and that document, which would have to be dated at a certain date or around a certain date for those current events to be mentioned, if it also mentioned the scroll of Isaiah and mentioned maybe how old it is or mentioned that scroll, you'd be able to date that scroll of Isaiah around the same time or earlier.

29:57

Then what mentions that scroll? Does that make sense? In the same way, you could read through any one of my books and mention, you could date the order, at least put the order of those books in a certain order just by reading the books themselves.

30:13

You don't have to see a date on any one of my books to know that in my fourth book, if I mentioned the three previous ones, then the three previous ones had to have been earlier than that one.

30:20

You can apply some of the same principles of dating and deduction to ancient manuscripts as well. Oh, yeah, that's a good point.

30:36

Different styles of pottery over different ages. Okay, any other questions?

30:48

Some of you are looking at the next page, and there is no next page. That's the end of the lesson. So unless you have a question about the

30:53

Dead Sea Scrolls that I know the answer to, we are done for today. A little bit early. Yeah, Peter. They are in various museums, various collections.

31:03

One of the benefits of modern technology is the ability to take high -definition, high -resolution photographs and scans of those documents and preserve them forever, unless there's a worldwide

31:14

EMP, in which case we're back to parchments and vellum again. Oh, yes, a word of warning.

31:23

That's right. There was another one. I wasn't going to end with this, but I will since we're early. The word of warning is this. Access to the scrolls has only been opened up recently.

31:32

Some of the scrolls, from what I've read, have taken a long time to unroll. You don't take a 2 ,000 -year -old scroll and just unroll it like that.

31:44

That's not how it's done. There's a whole science. Sometimes these can take years to lay out and get them into a condition where you can lay them out and flatten them out.

31:54

That has taken years, not just only to collect them, but also to archive them, to describe them, to study them, to scan them.

32:03

Access to the scrolls is something that's only been opened up within the last few years. By few years,

32:08

I mean relative to 1947, from the 1970s, 80s, into today.

32:15

It's not something where they just, in 1947, just started unrolling these scrolls because they realized what type of a treasure they had found.

32:22

With so many fragments to examine and so many fragments to date, the work is still going on and probably will be going on for quite some time.

32:29

It's going to be an object that people study for a long, long time. Here's the word of warning. Scholars, New Testament, Old Testament, conservatives, liberals,

32:38

Christians, believers, unbelievers, scholars live by a motto, and it's publish or perish. If you don't publish something, then you can write off any attempts at a grant or, what do they call that when you're at a college and you can't be fired, tenure.

32:55

You can write off attempts at a grant or tenure or reputation or whatever it is. You always got to publish or perish, which means that there's always this motivation to come out to publish some new finding, some new discovery, some new theory about the

33:08

Dead Sea Scrolls. When you're walking through the Walmart checkout aisle and you see Dead Sea Scrolls reveal, take it with a grain of salt.

33:15

Just brush that stuff off because most of what we read about the Dead Sea Scrolls will take, most of what we know, don't know today, we will not know for certain for 20 or 30 years about that stuff.

33:28

As it's researched and that area is excavated more and they discover more things and they learn more things. That is a long, it is a long process to unearth the past.

33:37

And so never believe just because somebody comes out and says, well, the Dead Sea Scrolls reveal. No, not necessarily.

33:43

So just don't take any kind of sensationalistic headlines as anything other than somebody's attempt to have their 15 minutes of fame.

33:51

That was the word of warning. All right. Any other questions? Yes. Mm -hmm.

34:56

Yeah. Yeah. Very good. I'm not going to repeat all that because there was a lot of it and it was half of it was in German and she called him sugar or something.

35:04

I'm not sure what that was about. So that's okay. I got the gist of it though.

35:11

Something about publishing things. It was good. All right.

35:16

Any other questions or comments? All right. We'll be done. Let's pray. Father, we are so grateful that you give us confidence in your word.

35:25

And again, we are not here because we need to be convinced your word is true or that you preserved it. Not because we want to know how it is that you have done it, how you've worked in history to accomplish that.

35:33

We thank you for your word again and for the work that it does in our hearts and our lives and make us appreciative of that and encourage our hearts in the truth and in the faith.

35:41

And we pray that you'd be glorified through our worship and our fellowship and the preaching of your word that is to follow in Christ's name, amen. Oh, one other thing real quick.

35:50

This was my last time on God Wrote a Book for a few weeks. So again, I'm taking a break until after the holidays.

35:56

So this was the last lesson. And when we pick it up again after the first of the year, then we'll be covering issues of canonicity.

36:04

How did they discover which books were inspired and did they make decisions to leave certain books out? And if so, why?

36:10

We're going to talk about that and what the early church was looking for in order to determine if a book was inspired by God and why we have 66 and how some of those decisions were made.