In 1947, copies of many Jewish works, both canonical writings of the Bible and noncanonical writings, were discovered in a cliff cave near the Dead Sea.  These documents are one of the great historical and scholarly discoveries of the 20th century.  Dating from about 100 BC to 50 AD and known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, they are almost 1,000 years older than any other existing manuscripts of the Bible.  The scrolls were mostly bits and pieces, but, when painstakingly assembled, they included many parts of the Old Testament, some New Testament, and many non-Biblical Jewish writings.

        Written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, these scrolls are believed to have been the work of a radical Jewish sect known as the Essenes.  The Essenes evidently lived in a strict ascetic monastic community called Qumran; they rejected the leadership of the Jews in Jerusalem and practiced a militant, separatist form of Judaism.  The Dead Sea Isaiah Scroll shown above preserves all 66 chapters of the Bible's longest book.  Some parallels between the Qumran scrolls and the New Testament have led to the much-disputed suggestion that both Jesus and John the Baptist were Essenes.  The concern that some of this material might contradict or invalidate parts of the Bible has proven, so far, to be unjustified, although many modern Bibles have added or altered some verses.