Do the Dead Sea Scrolls Undermine the Reliability of the Gospels?
No. In fact they support it. First of all, the DSS are Jewish sectarian documents (including substantial portions of the Hebrew Bible) that do not mention Jesus or early Christianity. Yes, I’m aware that a few so-called scholars see Jesus secretly encoded into the DSS, but their theories haven’t persuaded any serious scholars of the scrolls or of early Christianity. So one might be tempted to say that the DSS are irrelevant to the question of the gospels’ reliability. But this would be a mistake. What the DSS reveal in great detail is the life and thought of a group of Jews more or less contemporaneous with Jesus and early Christianity. Whether Jesus Himself had contact with some of these people is debatable, though many scholars believe they influenced John the Baptist, who then influenced Jesus. Yet even if a connection this obvious didn’t exist, the DSS help us to understand the Jewish world in which Jesus operated. They illustrate the variety of messianic expectations in the time o
