I am a person of faith. But, as you know, I'm full of unanswered (and probably unanswerable) theological questions.
But one of the exciting clues to the scriptures, discovered in my life time, are the Dead Sea Scrolls.
They're currently on loan to the Science Museum of Minnesota. You may wonder what they're doing here since they're so valuable. It's a matter of economics. The science museum paid $6,000,000 for the loan.
We haven't seen them but we recently went to hear the guy who's the academic adviser to the museum speak about them.
He's Alex Jassen, a young Professor of Early Judaism in the Dept. of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. Here are a couple of interesting things I learned from him along with some other research:
- The scrolls were found in caves 13 miles East of Jerusalem between 1947 and 1956.
- Made mostly from animal skins, the scrolls were not made accessible until 1991, 44 years after the discovery of the first scroll.
- They were written around 200 years Before Christ, therefore Jesus is not mentioned. They were hidden away by a Jewish sect that was most likely destroyed by Roman soldiers.
- There are over 800 scrolls and fragments, biblical and non-biblical including 19 copies of Isaiah, 25 of Deuteronomy and 30 of Psalms.
- They contain stories about Noah and Abraham including an explanation of why God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Issac.
While Dave and I haven't seen the scrolls here in St. Paul, I did see them in Jerusalem in the 70s. It was exciting at the time but the full value wasn't known then. Now we know they were the most important archaeological find of the 20th century.
And, to me, they are an enormous clue along the road in my mysterious faith journey.
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