The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls shook the field of biblical studies to its core, but did they actually change how we view the Old Testament?

Today, we're talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls, what they are, what they can tell us about the editorial history of the Old Testament, and whether they really show the perfect error-free transmission of the Hebrew Bible.

At the end, we have our bonus segments, which this

week is audience Q&A, where I'll be asking Bart what happened to the children of Jesus' apostles.

Welcome to misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman.

Bart, before we dive into the scholarly side of this question, I would like to ask you,

when you were an evangelical Christian, how important was it to you that the original biblical text had been perfectly preserved?

Oh, well, when I was a conservative evangelical, that was everything.

You know, because we believed that the Bible was inerrant, but we also knew that scribes had copied it.

And especially with the New Testament, we thought that the scribes had changed it in places.

So it was really, really important to know what the original words were before you could, you know,

you had to know what the words were to know what they met,

and to know what they meant, meant you to understand what God wanted you to know. And so it was

hugely important. But we thought that the, you know, the original text was there someplace. And so

it's kind of a detective story to figure out where it is for the New Testament. That's why I got

interested in studying Greek manual for that precise reason, because I wanted to know the New Testament. That's why I got interested in studying Greek

Manuant for that precise reason, because I wanted to know the original words. We all thought,

though, that the Hebrew Bible didn't have these problems because the Hebrew Bible had been

accurately copied by Jews over the centuries so that when you get the book of Isaiah,

you've got the words he wrote. We were pretty convinced of that.

That's fascinating. So the only text that had these kind of transmission errors was the New

Testament. Yeah, it didn't strike us as weird. It should have struck us as weird.

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