JD: Why are the Dead Sea Scrolls are so key to the Christian life and the Bibles that we carry everyday?
RP: In the first place we have no other documents from the time period of Jesus and the New Testament and people have been very critical of the New Testament saying that it was produced at a much later time. Well the Dead Sea Scrolls have shown us they are true to the time in which they claim to have been written. These misunderstandings about Jesus and the missing anicope that Judaism had because after the destruction of the Temple and the reorganization of Judaism after 90 AD Rabbinic Judaism took things in a very different direction and they basically defined themselves an opposition to Christianity. Well the Dead Sea Scrolls had none of those controversies involved. They’re looking at the prophets and their interpreting in a very consistent way as what you see in the pages of the New Testament.
