You're listening to the Bible for normal people the only God ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete ends and I'm Jared bias.

Welcome everyone to this episode of the podcast before we get started just a reminder folks Jonah for normal people is out and you need to read this and buy it and give it to everybody you know that's right.

You can just go to Amazon wherever you get books and get.

Jonah for normal people it's part of our series is part of our series so we have Genesis out we have Exodus out now Jonah yeah and yeah, but I think it's fun

Jonah is again one of my favorite books and I try to bring in critical scholarship and some of the understandings but also a personal spin on it because I think as you'll see in the book of

Jonah itself I think it invites personal response discussion conversation argument and so I try to bring some of that in as well.

Okay today you're in for a real treat we're talking about the most juicy topic yes what you really need to know about the Dead Sea Scrolls the what the Dead Sea Scrolls yeah and then we have with us no one better to talk about it then Sydney White Crawford.

Yeah, she's wonderful Sydney spent most of her teaching career at the University of Nebraska and Lincoln and her main area is Dead Sea Scrolls also like second temple Judaism of course because that's part of it and like Hebrew language and things like that.

But her area that she's focused on is Dead Sea Scrolls and you can tell by how she talks about it yeah yeah really just off the top of her head stuff so anyway it was a great discussion about the implications of this monumental transformative manuscript find for our understanding of the Hebrew Bible the Christian Bible and indeed to a certain extent Christianity in its context in the first century and it's surprising how recent it was.

I mean my dad was born in 1947 really okay so the same my house was made in 1947 right so we're talking not I mean when we think about menu scripts and all of these things we kind of think well all that got discovered a long time ago and now we're building on all these things but this is recent discoveries right that you know Sydney tells us at the end of the episode has only recently impacted English translations exactly right yeah and how profound they are again is just when they were discovered people said we have to rethink a few things here that we thought we understood.

And who knows what the next manuscript pile is and where it's going to be found and how that might broaden our understanding let's put it broadened our understanding changing some things but definitely broadened it and that's what scholars love broadening and understanding more.

All right let's hear from Sydney.

We have to remember that all of these manuscripts were hand copied by trained scribes and if you have enough of them you can get within 50 years we don't have any dated text but we can give these relative dates by the study of the handwriting.

Hello Ho Ho here's an important message from network rail for anyone who's traveling by train this Christmas and New Year we'll be working over the festive period to make improvements to the railway most of the network remains open but some train services will be affected from Sunday the 25th of December until Monday the 2nd of January so to keep your festive plans on track please check before you travel at national rail.co.uk

Well yeah okay so I think it's worth while giving the listeners just the quick scoop on okay what are the Dead Sea scrolls yeah.

The Dead Sea Scrolls refer to a collection of manuscripts that were found in various find sites around the Dead Sea from above Jericho all the way down to Masada but what most people mean when they say that are the scrolls found in the 11 came

around the site of Kumron which is in the northwest corner of the Dead Sea south of Jericho and these were the original scrolls that were found beginning in 1947 so they're on their 75th anniversary right now.

Happy birthday.

Yes exactly happy birthday to the scrolls and they're important because they are the largest group of Hebrew manuscripts Jewish manuscripts ever found in the Holy Land.

I mean really except for the Kumron Scrolls all our finds of written material are very small a lot of them are just inscriptions on Astroka or stone potchards or stone and a lot of them are our business documents bills of sale and wills and which are important for reconstructing life but the Kumron Scrolls are literary texts.

Both the literature of ancient Israel that we think of as the Bible but also the literature of the second temple period the period between the Babylonian exile and the fall of the second temple in the year 70 to the Romans.

So for new testament studies these scrolls overlap with the lifetime of Jesus and then the beginnings of the early church so it's hard to overestimate their importance.

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