Story
The Dead Sea Scrolls
Jewish manuscripts from the centuries around the turn of the era, found again in the twentieth century.
Step 1
Caves, not a church archive
From 1946/47, caves near Qumran yielded Hebrew, Aramaic, and some Greek manuscripts: biblical books, rule texts, hymns, and commentaries. They are Jewish writings. They are not Christian documents planted in the desert.
Step 2
What they change
The scrolls push the evidence for the Hebrew scriptures back centuries and show more than one way of reading them before the rabbis and the churches standardized their canons. They do not contain the New Testament.
Step 3
Who hid them?
A majority of specialists still connect the scrolls with a strict Jewish group related to the Essenes whom Josephus describes, and with the settlement at Qumran. A significant minority does not. The link is a hypothesis, not a label on the jars.