How Do the Dead Sea Scrolls Relate to Jesus?

What do the Dead Sea Scrolls have to do with Jesus? Well, in some sense, the Dead Sea Scrolls have nothing to do with Jesus because they were most of them, with a few possible exceptions, copied before Jesus was even doing His earthly ministry. They were copied before that time, so there's a sense in which they have nothing to do with Jesus.

Yet at the same time, they are valuable sources of information in a couple of different ways. We gotta understand who copied them. There was a group called the Essenes out at a place near Qumran and they copied these texts. About 1/3 of the texts are copies of simply the Jewish Scriptures. They're different copies of the Jewish Scriptures. These help us understand that the Jewish people truly were copying accurately the Old Testament.

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