Dr. Bobby Duke of The Museum of The Bible notes that his personal studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls have given him “more confidence in the Bible.”



A new exhibit featuring the Dead Sea Scrolls is coming to the Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C. next month.

Dr. Bobby Duke, the museum’s chief curatorial officer, told CBN News the significance behind the upcoming exhibit, Faithwire reported.

“Before 1947, our best Hebrew manuscripts came from about 1,000 AD,” he said. “And when the first cave was found there at Qumran in 1947, it shaved off 1,000 years of manuscript transmission and let us see what the Hebrew Bible was like, what scrolls were like around the time of Jesus and the disciples.”

Duke noted that his personal studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls have given him “more confidence in the Bible.”

“It does give us a sense that the English translations we’re reading today are based on wonderful manuscripts that go all the way back to the time of the New Testament,” he said.

The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit is part of the 75th anniversary tour organized by the Israel Antiquities Authority as well as additional elements from Jerusalem. “It will have wood fragments from what is often called the Jesus boat,” Duke explained. “It’s a first-century boat that would have been very much like the boats Jesus and the disciples would have used on the Sea of Galilee. And really one of the highlights is, [for] the first time on the East Coast ever, [is] the Magdala stone that was found at the site of Magdala, the hometown of Mary Magdalene.”

Additional highlights will provide people a better understanding of the Bible and the early church.

“The scrolls give us a window into just how dynamic the society was 2,000 years ago,” Duke said. “We sometimes think of Sadducees, Pharisees, but there were so many more groups than that, and even this group at Qumran most likely was what Josephus calls Essenes. We see this dynamic, and it was into that world that Jesus and the disciples were spreading the news of the Messiah having come.”

Duke also noted that the Great Isaiah Scroll is the most impactful of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

“This great scroll… has the entire book of Isaiah, all 66 chapters,” Duke said. “But I’ll often zoom in to the first column where you have Isaiah 1:17 that talks about taking care of the orphans and the widows and all of that.”

“That message that Isaiah wrote in the 8th century that we see on the Dead Sea Scrolls from 2,000 years ago is still a message we have today,” he continued. “So, just to think, even our Christian practice of what we do good in the world is something that we can see on these scrolls from 2,000 years ago, just like we can read in our Bibles today.”

Source