Transcript: The Facts Behind the New Dead Sea Scrolls Discovery (Interview with Craig Evans)

But just one more question for you. People watching, I’m sure there’s some that have the background of the Dead Sea Scrolls, some that may not. Remind us of the discovery. Just kind of some of the salient details about it and why the Dead Sea Scrolls as a whole are so significant.

CRAIG EVANS: Well, the first official discovery was at Qumran. And those are what are really called the Dead Sea Scrolls. And some people use that language broader and include anything that’s been found in the region of the Dead Sea. And that was 1947. And I already alluded to that. Bill Brownlee and John Trevor were there. They were in Israel for a different purpose. They didn’t know that they would find themselves in the middle of this first discovery.

So we think it was 1947, though it wasn’t until November of 1947 that scholars became aware of it and on into 1948. Well, when the locals, the Bedouins and others, discovered that these things are valuable, they began systematically looking in the caves, especially the ones near the ruins. You know, the Wadi Qumran ruins or Khirbet Qumran, as the locals call it, the ruins of Qumran. And several more caves came to light in the 1950s. The 11th one was found in ‘56. The fourth one, found in 1952, has about two thirds of all of the scrolls. And we’re not sure what we’re talking about here. The scroll count is perhaps a thousand or just under a thousand.

The reason we’re unsure is because there are so many fragments. And so you get a big pile of fragments and you sift through them and you, you know, do I have two documents here or do I have five? I don’t know. So that kind of work has been going on for decades. So that told everybody, hey, maybe we ought to look at some other caves too. And at Murabba’at, another wadi and caves were there. And guess what? More finds. And the Murabba’at finds related to Bar Kokhba. So we’re jumping in time from the mid-60s when the Qumran community was destroyed by the Romans, mid-60s, the first century.

Now we’re jumping into the second century. And it’s another rebellion. And this one, again, involving the Romans, but it’s Bar Kokhba, the son of the star. And that was the third and final great rebellion that ended the Jewish state. And so we’re talking about the 130s. And so documents were hidden, including actual letters written to and from Simon Ben Kosiba, known as Bar Kokhba, the leader of that revolt.

And then nearby Nahal Hever caves were found, including the Cave of Horrors where bones, other skeletal remains of 40 people were found. We found a minor prophet scroll. And so this is not Qumran. It’s south of Qumran. But it became clear that these caves could, you know, these caves need to be looked at. And so a number of years ago, Israel began a program called Operation Scroll. They got several hundred volunteers, and they scoured the West Bank of the Dead Sea and noting like a thousand or more, more than that, several thousand caves. Five hundred were recorded as potentially worth excavating. And so what we’re talking about today is a byproduct of that effort.

WHAT IS THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS?

SEAN MCDOWELL: Okay, so let’s be clear because all of the news stories that I saw worldwide about this say the latest Dead Sea Scrolls discovery in 60 years. But it seems like when it says a Dead Sea Scroll discovery, the term is being used more broadly than is typically used to refer to the 11 caves of the documents and scrolls that were buried up to the rebellion against Rome in about 70 AD. How are these related to and different from that?

CRAIG EVANS: Well, yeah, you’re very right. We have actually found now 12 caves at the Qumran area in Qumran or nearby. The 12th cave was found just four years ago. You might remember that in January of 2017, it was announced that a 12th cave had been found. And we know that because it has the broken scroll jars, ceramic, just like the other caves. It actually had a couple of pieces of leather and papyrus. It had been looted. So whatever written material used to be there is gone. We had scrolls come to light back in the day, ‘50s and ‘60s. We didn’t know where they came from. Some of them may have come from this 12th cave.

But what we’re talking about now that’s been in the news just in the last few weeks is in the south that we were talking about. And it relates to the second century. That’s very important. And it relates to Nahal Hever, the Cave of Horrors. It relates to Simon Ben Kosiba. So you’re right. In the media, you know, it is confusing. They’ll say, well, it’s the Dead Sea, and anything found at the Dead Sea must be the Dead Sea Scroll. Scholars tend to make a distinction, though, between that.

So when we say the Dead Sea Scrolls, we’re really talking about Qumran and the caves relating to that.

WHO AUTHORED THESE SCROLLS?

SEAN MCDOWELL: Okay, so if the Essenes presumably did not record these scrolls since it was later, do we know who would have authored these?

CRAIG EVANS: No, we don’t. And there’s no reason to think that it was some kind of special group. In the case of Qumran, we have so many scrolls, and many of them are well preserved. We can actually do writing analysis. We’ve identified specific scribes that, you know, wrote these three, four, five different scrolls. But the material at Nahal Hever and elsewhere, it’s not that well preserved.

The other difference, though, the Nahal Hever materials, a lot of it is in Greek. And the Minor Prophets Scroll that I referred to, published 30 years ago, the whole thing is written in Greek. And the recent discoveries are more Greek fragments. In this case, the Prophet Zechariah and Nahum.

SEAN MCDOWELL: Okay, so why were these discovered now? I mean, is it a matter of technology that we have? Is it concern about looting? Is it luck? What are the reasons why this popped to the surface at this stage?

CRAIG EVANS: Yeah, it takes something to motivate everybody to get out there. It’s all of the above, really. There is worry about looting. There is worry about the political autonomy. The West Bank thing is a sensitive thing, you know. And I don’t know how familiar you are with the West Bank, but it’s divided up into A and B and C. And, you know, some places the Jewish people and Jewish scholars simply cannot access. And so there is worry about looting. There’s been scandals you’ve probably been hearing about the last few years. It’s embarrassing. There have been schools that purchased fragments, supposedly from Qumran, you know. Yeah, Cave 4 or one of the other caves.

And it’s ancient leather, but it’s modern ink. And, you know, they’ve been swindled. You know, the Museum of the Bible was embarrassed. There are some other schools. I won’t mention them by name. And they thought they were purchasing fragments of biblical books, you know, fragments that were 2,000 years old. No, they’re not. The leather is, but the writing was done 20 years ago.

So I think there’s that concern, too. And so it’s integrity. And so let’s have people that know what they’re doing who are responsible, not looters, not swindlers, not frauds, and investigate as many of these caves as we can and see what we can find and preserve it and recover it before it disappears and ends up in the hands of looters, collectors, shadowy characters, you know, things like that. I mean, it’s like right out of a novel, the intrigue that can go on in antiquities.

SEAN MCDOWELL: So do we know because of where they’re found and how they’re found that they’re not frauds and forgeries? Or is that still an open question that needs to be addressed?

CRAIG EVANS: Well, I think when you have provenance, you know, you actually there’s a chain of evidence. That’s what police would call it. When a fragment comes to light and a responsible archaeologist, you know, he holds it up and says, we found this fragment at this dig and in this specific location. And there are photographs taken every step of the way. So there it is, you know, in the soil and the dust and the debris. And they take a photograph. Here we are. You know, you get several photographs as it’s being taken out of the ground, carefully handled, put in a baggie or a box or something for preservation and safety.

And so there’s this chain of evidence. And this is unlike the forgeries I was talking about. What typically it was is somebody would claim to have obtained it. Some antiquities dealer. I got it from a Bedouin. It’s been in their family for three generations. I remember my grandfather had it in saddlebags. Here it is. And, you know, and that’s true. Some of these fragments, in fact, did get preserved that way and did come to light like that. And so it’s a plausible story. And, of course, it was repeating itself over and over again.

And it was amazing how many fragments came to light 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, that were very similar to requests that a well-known collector had made. He said, I’d give a lot of money if I could have copies of this, this, this, and this. A few years later, this, this, this, and this all came to light and were available. What do you know? And, of course, the percentages didn’t match. Only 22% of the Dead Sea Scrolls are Bible. Well, these new discoveries were all Bible? Wow. Beat the odds. And that was one of the things that made people suspicious.

And when they were looked at under a microscope, they could see that the ink had been freshly applied, going over abrasions, going over cracks. Rock salt was still clinging to the ink to give it that aged look. And so all the telltale signs of forgery made it clear. So that’s why there’s an effort. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen again. Let’s find everything, including the leather that doesn’t have any writing on it. Let’s recover it in a responsible way and keep records and know what we’re doing so we can avoid this kind of forgery and fraud in the future.

METHODS USED TO DISCOVER THESE SCROLLS

SEAN MCDOWELL: This way of looking at it is really helpful that our mutual friend, J. Warner Wallace, who’s examined the Gospels through a cold case lens, has said, is there a chain of custody going back that takes a piece of evidence to the crime itself? And you’re saying when it comes to these fragments, there is a chain of custody that’s plausible and reasonable, so minimizes the chance that this would be a forgery. That’s such a helpful way to think about it.

Let’s talk about some of the methods that were used to discover this, because when I watched a couple of videos and read about this, some people described it as like an Indiana Jones kind of discovery with drones and with rappelling involved. I don’t think I realized how dangerous certain kinds of archaeological digs are, including this one. So talk a little bit about the technology they used and how risky this was.

CRAIG EVANS: Yes. Sean, it’s very dangerous, this kind of archaeology. I have volunteered for digs. I would never volunteer for a dig like this. And if I did and they were smart, they would refuse me. I’m too old. I’m just too rickety. There’s no way I’m going to go down a rope ladder or be lowered and get into a cave like that. That’s just too dangerous. You can kill yourself or get seriously injured at an ordinary dig right outside the walls of Jerusalem simply by tripping and going headfirst into a hole that’s eight feet down.

I could tell you stories of archaeologists who have been seriously hurt. In fact, tragically, Ehud Netzer a number of years ago died at the Herodium, and he simply leaned against a rail that was not properly fixed. He just down he went, and he fell inside down the hill inside of the Herodium. You’ve probably been there before. It looks like a volcano. Well, he moved down, he went, and he was seriously injured and passed away a day or two later in a hospital. So it can be very dangerous.

There was a cave and we finished our work one year. I think it was 2014, and we were getting ready to leave. And then we heard a report that somebody working for the Israel Antiquities Authority died in a cave-in. So I just, no, thank you. I’m not going down ropes. I’m not going down a cliff. I’m not going to crawl around in a cave like that. Leave that to the young legs, and they can do that.

So, yeah, I have great respect for these volunteers. By the way, it’s hot as blazes unless you’re doing it in the wintertime. And then you’re crawling around in a cave. You can’t even stand up in most cases. You’re on your hands and knees. And like I said, you’re crawling through dust. You’re crawling through centuries of accumulation of dirt, debris, bat dung, bird dung, some of it as fine as talcum powder. They’re all wearing these masks so they don’t breathe that in, which would be very unhealthy. And so it’s hot, miserable, dusty. Can you imagine doing that?

One of the discoveries was made, and it sounds crude, but when you’re in a cave like that, it’s not like the bathroom. You just step out of the cave and walk down the street to the toilet. In the cave, you find a designated area in the cave where you can do your thing. Actually, it was a woman squatting down, and she saw something in the debris. That’s how one of the finds was made. It’s dark. These caves, there are no lights. And so you get flashlights and all kinds of lighting stuff.

So this is difficult, hard work. I mean, some of the Anakala Caves were originally being investigated in the early 60s by the legendary Yigael Yadin. And he was using an army helicopter. I mean, that’s what was going on and lowering people from ropes and supplies and things. He had Jeeps up on top of the cliffs.

So you’re right. To say it’s like Indiana Jones, that’s not much of an exaggeration. All you need are a couple of Nazis shooting at you, and you’ve got the whole thing.

SEAN MCDOWELL: Someone just said, is Craig Evans taking questions? And the answer is yes. We’ve got a few more to uncover what was discovered here. But we will come back to some questions at the end.

Now, talk a little bit about the unique cave. If I got it right, it’s called the Cave of Skeletons.

CRAIG EVANS: Or Cave of Horrors.

SEAN MCDOWELL: Cave of Horrors. That obviously sounds from an Indiana Jones movie.

CRAIG EVANS: Yeah, I know.

SEAN MCDOWELL: What do we know about the cave, and why is it called that?

CRAIG EVANS: Because 40 remains — skeletal remains of 40 people. I mean, there’s a basket of skulls. You know, it’s creepy. And this kind of stuff is found. And we can only imagine what happened to these people. And they didn’t necessarily all die there. You know, we think that for the Jewish people, reburial or asylegium is very important. And so it’s possible that the hope was we would get out of this cave at some point when the danger passes. And we could end up somewhere where we could at least have the heads of our loved ones and give them proper Jewish burial somewhere. But they died. Apparently that just did not happen. So everything remained in the cave.

And that would be pretty creepy. You know, you’re digging in the cave. You’re hoping to find manuscripts. You’re hoping to find pottery. You’re hoping to find coins, maybe jewelry, something like that. You don’t expect to find human remains. Because it’s not a burial cave. You’re not excavating a tomb. And yet that’s what they found. So that’s where it got its name, you know, the Cave of Horrors or Skeletons.

And, of course, they had valuable things, scrolls, books were very valuable. And so I’m not surprised that along with jewelry and valuable things like that, they would also have books.

FRAGMENTS – NAHUM & ZECHARIAH

SEAN MCDOWELL: It’s crazy to think how dangerous it is for us today with our modern technology. How they got people in there in the first place. The story behind that Cave of Horrors must be fascinating.

Let’s shift. Let’s talk a little bit more about what was actually discovered. I understand they found fragments from the book of Nahum and also from Zechariah. What exactly did they find? Tell us a little bit about that.

CRAIG EVANS: Well, I’ve looked at the fragments. And you need to understand they’re small. Some are the size of postage stamps. But a few of the fragments are a little bit larger. And you get three or four lines, not complete, but pieces. For me, the big takeaway, I mean, some people say, oh, there’s some differences. Well, of course there are differences. We have Greek manuscripts, Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible. And a translation is a translation. And so no two translators are going to translate a Hebrew text the same way.

So I’m not surprised that we have some variant readings that don’t match exactly with what we call the Septuagint, the more or less official Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. But what I found, for me, a takeaway that was really interesting was this is Greek, okay? So you know what Greek is. The New Testament is written in Greek. The Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.

But one of the fragments where, you know, the divine name shows up, and in Greek it would usually be kurios, lord, which typically translates the divine name in Hebrew, Yahweh. And it was written out Yahweh. It was written in Hebrew.

SEAN MCDOWELL: Oh, interesting.

CRAIG EVANS: You know, yeah. In Hebrew manuscripts, you’ll see Yahweh written out in paleo, Hebrew letters, and sometimes four dots, you know, representing the Y, the H, the W, and the H, the tetragrammaton. But this was interesting. And so the name was so holy that the scribe didn’t want to write it out in the Greek language. Greek language isn’t holy. It’s just Greek, right?

And so in translating and writing out the Greek text of Scripture, when the scribe came to the name of the Lord, instead of writing out in Greek, kurios, wrote out instead Yahweh in Hebrew.

SEAN MCDOWELL: Now, when you say you examined these, did you look at them online? Do you have connections? Like, how is it that you were able to actually examine these fragments?

CRAIG EVANS: I just looked at, I don’t know, I don’t think I saw all of the fragments. But I was able to look at a bunch of them just on the computer screen, the very screen I’m looking at right now.

SEAN MCDOWELL: Gotcha. Okay. Now, one of the passages that was found was Nahum 1:5 through 6. And I just want to read this and ask you what you think about it. It says: ‘The mountains quake before Him. The hills melt, and the earth heaves at His presence. Yes, the world and all who dwell in it. Who can stand before His indignation? And who can endure the fierceness of His anger? His fury is poured out like fire, and the rocks are thrown down by Him.’

Now, reading that, there’s clearly a certain theology about the judgment of God that’s discovered in this passage. Do you think the fact that we found this piece of the manuscript is telling, revealing about who wrote it, about theology? Or is it just accidental we could have found any portion up there?

CRAIG EVANS: Well, you know, Sean, I don’t know how to answer that question until all the fragments have been studied. Because there are two possibilities. These are fragments of a complete scroll. And if that’s true, then that’s all it is. These are fragments of what had been a complete scroll. So it’s coincidence in that sense.

But if it turns out it’s not a complete scroll, but rather a selection or excerpts of favorite passages, well, then that becomes a lot more significant. And if we go north to Qumran, we have examples of that, where we have a single leaf of leather that has six or seven key Messianic texts or eschatological texts. You know, there they are. And so in a case like that, we find a verse and its number is 2417 or it’s Genesis 49, you know, 10 or something like that.

You realize, well, that’s deliberately chosen because it focuses on a Messianic prophecy or something like that. In this particular case, my hunch is that we probably have remains, fragmentary remains of what had been a complete scroll. I’m saying that I’m prejudiced a little bit because of the Nahal Hever Minor Prophet scroll that was found and published 30 years ago. So this could be fragments related to that specific scroll or perhaps not. But just another example of more books.

Keep in mind, too, you know, we tend to think of a Bible, you know, like here’s the entire Old Testament. And that didn’t exist in antiquity. The books of the Bible were individual. And so, you know, we have two dozen Genesis scrolls. You know, we have three dozen Deuteronomy scrolls. We’ve got 40 Psalm scrolls and things like that. That’s how we talk at Qumran.

And so nobody talks about there’s a Bible or two Bibles at Qumran. It’s just these different scrolls. And it is the same way at Nahal Hever. And so, you know, if we had a perfect record of everything that had ever been in those caves, I doubt if it would be more than one half of the Bible. It would have been just a few of these scrolls and those scrolls and that’s it.

SEAN MCDOWELL: For those of you just joining us, we’re here with Dr. Craig Evans talking about the recent discovery of the new Dead Sea Scrolls and asking the question, what does this reveal about the earliest community? Is there a chance these are forgeries? I’ve got a few more questions for you to kind of unearth what’s going on here. Then we’re going to take some live questions. There’s a bunch of people, I think, chomping at the bits to ask you some questions here.

But very quickly, if you’re new to the channel, make sure you hit subscribe because we’ve got some interviews coming up, behind-the-scenes interviews with Wayne Grudem, with Craig Keener, bringing on a well-known progressive Christian. And we’re just going to talk about the similarities and differences between evangelical Christianity and progressive Christianity. So make sure you subscribe if that interests you to follow.

What is it about this environment? Why is it found? Is it just a combination of being up in a cave? And a lot of people, it’s hard to get there, and it’s dry. Or why do we discover it there versus somewhere else?

CRAIG EVANS: Yeah, very good question. Just about all of the papyri that we have found, and that would include also leather, parchment, everything that we have found comes from two places, the Dead Sea region and Egypt. Now, we have found, of course, some things elsewhere, but it’s because of unusual circumstances. And so we have a handful of papyri book rolls from Greece, but it was because they were superheated and turned into carbon. And the same thing is true in Herculaneum in Italy, where we have about 1,800 and counting, because the excavations aren’t finished, but it’s the Villa of Papyri. And the great heat of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD turned all of these book rolls, at least 1,800 of them, turned them into carbon, which means they’re impossible to unroll. But thanks to super technology, MRI-related technology with computer programming, we can actually X-ray and reconstruct the text of these book rolls.

So those are exceptions, but it’s not because they just happened to lie on the ground and survive. It was because they were turned into carbon, and that made them impervious to dampness and decay. But otherwise, it’s always found in dry regions. And of course, they can’t be exposed to the sun. The sun would destroy them anyway. So you find them in caves. You find them in cemeteries. You find them in burial caves. You find them in sarcophagi. You find them buried underneath the sand, like at Oxyrhynchus.

And so, yes, you’re right. The reason we find them there is because the climate is perfect. The other reason, too, you touched on it, you know, no tourist, nobody’s going to go scrambling down one of those cliffs and jump inside one of those caves and scrounge around hoping to find something to take home. And so because they’re so inaccessible and so dangerous and so out in the middle of nowhere, this is why they’ve survived for 2,000 years. And that’s why we’re finding them now, because we’re deliberately looking for them. We have drones. The drones are, of course, wonderful.

You know, they didn’t have this drone technology 20 years ago the way it is now. These drones, in filming documentaries, I’ve seen it happen. You fly the drone right into the cave. The drone flies into the cave and looks around. It’s got a headlight. It looks around. And they see some things. They look at it and say, you know what? There are signs that people have been in this in antiquity. That’s the cave we’re going to explore. And so the drone does the legwork, at least initially, because you don’t want to go to all that trouble to get into one of these caves and realize, oh, this is a goose egg. There’s nothing here.

And so you want to narrow your, you know, in your lifetime, you can only search in so many caves. So you want to search in the most promising ones, and the drones help. So that’s part of the reason why they’re inaccessible, difficult to get to. We only have technologies now that make it a little more practical. And, of course, it’s a restricted area. You know, there are a lot of factors that come into play.

SEAN MCDOWELL: I’ve got a few more questions for you, but here’s a great one that relates from a thought decoder. He says, how did ancient people get to the caves if they are so inaccessible?

CRAIG EVANS: Yeah, well, they weren’t that inaccessible in antiquity. This is called Marl. And I’ve crawled around. I’ve been in some of the caves. I’ve crawled around in some of the wadis, and you could take your pocket knife out and just write your name on a rock. It’s soft. And so the good news is it’s not that hard to take an existing cave and shape it, make it a little larger, create some nooks and crannies within it if you want to.

Burial caves are done that way, too, so a natural cave gets expanded. And so you could carve into the side of a hill or a cliff the steps, even making what looks like a staircase. But in the passage of time, this is the bad news of being soft, it wears away. And so, you know, there’s what we call Cave 5. I mean, it’s almost totally gone at Qumran. It might have contained as many scrolls as Cave 4 at one time.

And I tell my students, well, whatever scrolls Cave 5 had, you know, it’s all washed away. I mean, they’re nothing but molecules in the Dead Sea now. So some of it is just these vicissitudes of climate and erosion. And so, yeah, this is soft stuff. So it isn’t hard to shape it, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t use ropes themselves.

I mean, the stories about Mount Arbel, you know, by the Sea of Galilee and Herod, lowering soldiers in baskets to fight with the rebels that are inside these caves. So, you know, there’s a long history of that. And so it was dangerous for people back then. You know, these same Arbolites crawled up Masada to capture it from the Romans during the Great Rebellion in 66 to 70. And according to Josephus, they would take cloth or leather, stick it in their teeth, wrap it around their head. You know why? If you fell to your death and you screamed, nobody would hear anything. Well, that means sometimes people fell to their death.

And so, yeah, so it was risky for them back then, even as it is for us now. When we ask volunteers to climb down a rope, they don’t have leather in their teeth. We’re optimistic that they will make it. And if they don’t and they scream, well, that’s good. We want to hear them so we know where to look for them.

SEAN MCDOWELL: Good, good questions. Now, there’s some great ones coming in here, but I’ve got two more for you. And one question is what happens to these scrolls now? Where would they be kept? How would they be analyzed? Will findings come out of this over years? What’s the process moving forward?

CRAIG EVANS: Yeah, well, the main thing is, of course, to study them, to take excellent digital photographs of them. And when they take these photographs, they take them in several ways using different kinds of light media. Because sometimes there’s a piece of leather that just looks like dark brown leather. And then we put infrared on it or ultraviolet or some other wavelength. And then we discover, my gosh, there’s writing here. We just couldn’t see it. And so they do all kinds of things like that to photograph it. And then, of course, the concern is preservation.

And to make sure that, you know, 100 years from now that fragment of text is still there. And you don’t know what other technologies may develop in the future that can help us study it even further. So you take good pictures of it now, scan it, take photos, digitize it, and all that kind of thing. And then also do everything in our power to preserve it. We weren’t real good with that in the 1940s and 50s. It’s just a horror story.

Some of you, if you’ve gone to a Scrolls exhibit, and I’ve been to many of them, I speak at them and that kind of thing. Sometimes you’ll see under the glass case, you know, you’ll see some Scroll fragments and people are looking at it. And one time I was at an exhibit and I saw these fuzzy yellow balls. I thought, what’s that? They were about the size of marbles. And I looked, and it was wads of scotch tape that had been removed from Dead Sea Scroll fragments. And, of course, in removing the, you know, there’s a little bit of leather fuzz attached to the scotch tape that had turned yellow and got oozy gooey. I don’t know if you are old enough to remember scotch tape like that back in the 50s and 60s.

Well, can you imagine that? And some fragments of cigarette burns. And you see photographs. You know, I’m not going to name some of these people. This guy’s got this cigarette and he’s got a half inch of ash on the end of it. And sometimes it drops off and burns the leather. So, you know, there are guys smoking. There are guys, you know, exposed to direct sunlight and stuff like that. And this was happening in the 50s and nobody knew any better. And it was not until the 60s they began to wake up and say, hey, if we don’t take care of these scrolls, you know, they’re not, 100 years from now they’ll just be dust. So they work a lot harder at preservation now.

SEAN MCDOWELL: That’s good. Sounds like they didn’t know that smoking hurt your lungs in the 50s or that smoking would destroy manuscripts in the same way. So one more question for you. And then I want to take some questions. So for those who are watching, you have questions for Dr. Evans, please try to keep them focused on the Dead Sea Scrolls and this recent discovery. Maybe sometime we’ll have you back and we’ll just do a Q&A on archaeology more broadly speaking.

But if you have other questions, we’ll probably have to hold on to those and I’m going to bring in the questions related more specifically to this particular discovery. But let me just ask you a more broad one because when I look at this, we’ve got Nahum 1, 5 through 6. Like we had that preserved in many different lines. Zachariah, like there’s nothing new informationally speaking that’s shocking. That doesn’t mean the discovery is not awesome. But what is the takeaway for this discovery as it relates to Biblical archaeology and maybe even the archaeology as it relates to understanding Jesus and His time better?

CRAIG EVANS: Well, that’s a good question. And that kind of question comes up all the time in doing archaeology or this kind of manuscript research. As simply this, the more we find, then we can fill in more of the gaps. And, you know, Sean, when you think about it, humans have been around a long time. The Old Testament Biblical story goes back, you know, it’s the furthest back 4,000 years if you go back to Abraham. And these manuscripts, we only began to find them, you know, like 200 years ago. Papyri weren’t found in great abundance until the end of the 19th century.

You know, and so when you look at the great scheme of things, this is all new. And so, you know, going into, say, 1850, so that’s not that long ago, say 175 years ago, the Textus Receptus was the Greek New Testament text. Nobody would have thought otherwise. And then what happens? We find Codex Sinaiticus. We find Codex Vaticanus. And Westcott and Hort do something radical. They come up with a Greek New Testament that largely depends on two codices that are 600, 700 years older than the manuscripts that have been used that went into what became known as the Textus Receptus. That was a great jump back. And, you know, that came out in 1881.

Well, 20 years later, it’s already obsolete because of all the papyri that are being found. So this is all recent history in a sense. And so these discoveries, we’ve gone from having nothing to having a whole lot of stuff that goes back to the second century and third century. Who would have dreamed? And when it comes to the Old Testament, and we’ve heard this example, but it’s a good example. We’ve heard it many times. You go from the Codex Leningrad, which is dated precisely at 1008 A.D. And I like to use Isaiah as my example.

And thanks to the discovery in cave one, we have a copy of Isaiah that dates somewhere between 100 and 200 B.C. So we’ve gone back 11 or maybe even 12 centuries in time closer to Isaiah. That’s huge. And so all of this has happened, you know, in relatively recent times, the last 150 years or so. And so these discoveries keep narrowing the gaps. The gaps are getting smaller, which means for scholars, it means less guesswork. And we have bigger samples now, more samples. And so we don’t have to guess and say, well, how good were the scribes anyway back then? Well, now we know. We’ve got samples. We can look at them. And physical archaeology or the remains of physical culture, not talking about books, but just talking about stones and coins and that kind of thing.

You know, there was a time there were no known pre-70 synagogues. And there were scholars not that long ago saying, oh, there were no synagogues. That’s just an anachronism, you know. There weren’t any synagogues until after 70. And that’s being read back into the time of Jesus’ ministry, you know, blah, blah, blah. Well, we have 10 synagogues that are pre-70 in Israel, most of them in Galilee, and counting. And so goofy theories that scholars at one time, often based on silence, have been blown up because of archaeological discoveries.

So this kind of stuff is worthwhile even if it’s just a small fragment and there’s no new reading or there’s no new variant. It doesn’t matter. The more we find, the more we understand scribal culture better, the more we understand the world of the Bible better, the less guesswork there is and the more sure knowledge there is. And that’s a great trait.

SEAN MCDOWELL: So is it fair to say, because the common understanding is often the further we get away from these events, since there’s a larger time gap, the less understanding we have. You’re saying it’s the opposite. Actually, the further we get because of our technology increases and our findings grow, we actually have a more secure, better understanding of the time of Jesus. Is that fair in some?

CRAIG EVANS: Yeah, I think that is true in a lot of ways. I mean, we understand geography better than the ancients did. How do we know that? Well, we have their maps. We have their maps that, you know, the Romans tried to figure out the coastline of the Mediterranean Sea and Italy, and they were wildly inaccurate. They were approximate but wildly inaccurate. They tried to sort out history and so on, but they didn’t have access to the ancient Near Eastern texts, the ceramic, the records that we have found today. And, you know, the other ancient records.

So, no, I’m not trying to be condescending like, well, we’re modern, we’re smart, we know everything. But, you know, it is a great advantage. You know, if you lived in the first century, well, then, doggone it, you know the first century culture better than 100 PhDs do today. But the person in the first century, you know, didn’t go out and do any archaeology. He has no idea what ancient Babylon looked like. It hasn’t been unearthed and won’t be for another 19 centuries.

SEAN MCDOWELL: That’s a great way to look at it. Here’s a question I’d love to have you weigh in to from Mike, Mike Boyce. He says, understanding that they are not large fragments, are they significant enough to be valuable for textual criticism? Are there any that would be relevant for New Testament citations and allusions?

CRAIG EVANS: Well, good question, Mike. Good question, Mike. Thanks for asking that. And, in principle, the answer is yes. They could well be. There already has been mention. There is an interesting variant reading. Like I said, you know, any time you have a Greek translation or any kind of a translation of another language by two or more translators, you’re going to end up with different readings. But when we find different manuscripts, then we look at the New Testament and we realize, well, wait a minute. That’s not a mistranslation of the Hebrew, as it turns out. It’s a variant translation. And that’s one of the big takeaways.

I’m summing up the whole of the last 60, 70 years of discoveries, but this is true. I mean, there were people writing. I remember this scholar. You know, I thought, what a smart aleck. He was writing in the early 60s saying, Matthew twists the Scriptures. You know, he’s alluding to what Peter says, 2 Peter 3, that unstable people misunderstand Paul’s letters. They twist the Scriptures. And he says, well, that’s what Matthew’s doing. And, of course, he’s pointing out that Matthew’s reading of the text is a little bit different here and there. He didn’t realize that there were different versions.

So one of the ways I explain it to my students, if you went back in time to the time of Jesus and found a Bible bookstore somewhere and walked in and said, can I have a copy of Scripture? Guys say, well, sure, but what version do you want? Do you want the Samaritan Pentateuch or do you want the Judean Pentateuch? Or do you want, you know, which version of Jeremiah do you want? Long version? Short version? You want this? You want that? You want the recension? And it’s not as bad as it is today. You go into a bookshop and you’ve got 50 different versions of English that you can choose from. But there was variety back then. We did not know that.

And so when these manuscripts came to light, we realized, oh, this throws textual criticism into a whole new light. And so it isn’t a question of, well, is this the correct reading or is this the wrong reading? Especially when you go to translation. Well, you have lots of options. And some of those options were in circulation a long time ago. Now we’re starting to find them. And so it turns out Matthew isn’t twisting anything. He’s operating within a range of options and possibilities and paraphrasing, which was considered perfectly acceptable.

If you’re a translator, you can paraphrase the text, too. So, you know, that article that that guy wrote 55 years ago or whatever, he wouldn’t write it that way now. You know, because that would be looked upon as silly. And so the scholarship becomes more nuanced. So it’s maybe a little too early to say on this recent find that we’re going to have some bombshell go off. But potentially, you know, we’ll be in a position to understand a verse or two better.

SEAN MCDOWELL: Great. That’s helpful. Each piece helps. Here’s another good question for you from Thought Decoder. Dr. Evans, do you think the basket found in the cave was a more important discovery? I’ve heard another scholar make this claim.

CRAIG EVANS: Well, yeah, it depends on what your specialty is. That always comes up in archaeology. You know, as a Christian scholar, and I worked at Mount Zion, so we’re digging down. And, you know, we get into the first century A.D., first century B.C. And it’s like, okay, stop, here’s where we want to work. And, of course, the director of the dig, Shimon Gibson, well, he’s Jewish. And he’s saying, well, yeah, that’s interesting, but I’m kind of interested in the first temple period. And it’s a little bit lower. So he wants to dig through my section and go a little further down.

And by the way, you know, there might be a Muslim there saying, you just dug through Muslim history, and that’s just debris now over this big pile. What about that? And so this is what happens. You’re making decisions about which parts. So if I were a person that was great primitive human culture, I’d go nuts over this basket because it’s 10,000 years old. And so I might not care. You know, who cares about Jewish history? I’m interested, you know, in the history, you know, thousands of years before Abraham was even born.

And so, you know, there’s a tower at Jericho that’s 10,000, 12,000 years old. It’s underground. They had to dig it up. Now you stand on the bank and look down on the top of it. And so if you’re really into big-time antiquity, then, yeah, I can see why they go crazy over that basket. That’s extraordinary.

SEAN MCDOWELL: That’s really helpful to think about the lens and the questions through which we’re approaching this shapes the way we’re going to value and assess the finds. That makes perfect sense. That’s really helpful.

Here’s a question from a friend, Nikita, you could weigh into. He says, how does this discovery affect the claim that the Qumran community worshiped an early version of Jesus, a teacher of righteousness, who died, rose from the dead, and then ascended into heaven?

CRAIG EVANS: Okay, short answer is it has no impact on that theory at all. And a longer answer is that the theory itself is highly dubious. Now, since the scrolls were first found, people have played with this idea that maybe Jesus was from Qumran. Maybe he was an Essene. Maybe some of his followers were. Maybe the Dead Sea Scrolls refer to him on and on it goes. I don’t subscribe to any of that, and mainstream scholarship does not either. Is there a Jesus template in the scrolls? Only in the sense that there are some Messianic prophecies that are talked about in the scrolls that the New Testament says, yeah, they’re good. They’re valid prophecies.

For Qumran, however, these prophecies are fulfilled not with the Messiah who suffers or is put to death by Romans. And there was a text from Cave 4 that was misinterpreted that way. But Qumran looked for a guy who was going to clean house and kill a bunch of the Romans. And that was not Jesus’ teaching. Jesus instead talked about giving his life, not demanding on being served, but willing to serve others. And he taught that to his disciples. So Jesus’ template was very different, and his template is not represented at Qumran.

SEAN MCDOWELL: That’s really helpful. I appreciate you weighing into that. There was one question here that was asking about where do these come from, how do they discover them. Let me suggest you go back to the beginning of the interview. We covered that for a period of time. We’re running short on time.

If you have questions that I missed, I see a ton of questions and interaction here. I apologize if I missed it. Copy and paste it very quickly. We’ve got just a moment here to ask Dr. Evans. But if there’s any specifically on this recent Dead Sea Scrolls find, how they discovered it, what it means, how to make sense of it, make sure you copy and paste those really quickly, and we will address those.

Did I miss anything that’s important to communicate on this to people? Maybe some other misconception that people have had. Maybe some other way that this helps you think with a Christian faith. Is there anything else that needs to be communicated about this discovery that maybe we didn’t cover here?

CRAIG EVANS: Well, I think it’s important to emphasize that we didn’t find whole text. We have found fragments. And so the big question is are we talking about fragments of what had been complete copies of Zechariah and Nahum? Or excerpts. It’s probably the former, but that’s what needs to be determined. And confirm the date. Make sure we really are talking about the 2nd century, the 130s. We probably are.

But, you know, we found this, the skeletal remains of a child wrapped up in a blanket. That’s thought to be 6,000 years old. That’s 2,000 years before Abraham. And then this woven basket you just mentioned, which is 10,000, maybe 11,000 years old. That’s just astounding. And that just shows you, you know, don’t have one time period in one of these caves. You could have a half a dozen. Because these caves have been around a long time, and a lot of people have gone in and out of them. And, of course, they have this way of accumulating dust and debris. And so you can end up with layers, stratigraphy, inside the cave itself.

SEAN MCDOWELL: What are some of the questions that scholars will be asking and debating about this in the upcoming years? Like what are some areas where there’s disagreement? Are there things that are unknown that we should be looking for as more information comes out about this discovery in the months or years ahead?

CRAIG EVANS: Well, I think the Septuagint scholars are going to have a lot of fun. The people who are experts on the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. And they’re going to be asking themselves questions about affiliation. That is, is this, these fragments part of a way of translating the Hebrew that you see elsewhere? So that’s going to be one of the big questions right away. There will be a lot of specific ones. Any idiosyncratic things about the scribe, his grammar, his spelling, the divine name. I commented on that earlier. I thought that was so interesting. It’s a Greek text, but we don’t have God written out in Greek. He’s written out in Hebrew.

And, of course, at Qumran, up north, the older scrolls, you’ll often see that. But in the Hebrew scrolls where a paleo Hebrew is used. Or dots, four dots for the Tetragrammaton. And so this is interesting. I think it’s consistent with the high regard the Jewish people had for the sacredness of the divine name.

SEAN MCDOWELL: It’s amazing that such small fragments the size of a stamp can unlock so many important questions. And be as significant as you described. Now, last one. You might have a quick answer to this one. But Wayne is asking, I know it’s very early for this question. But how soon will CSNTM be able to digitally photograph these newly discovered documents?

CRAIG EVANS: Well, that’s a good question. Of course, the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts is focused on New Testament manuscripts. But that doesn’t mean that Dan Wallace and his crew won’t be interested in getting photographs of any Greek text and adding it to. So I don’t know. I think you just have to go to the web page for the Center for New Testament Manuscripts and ask them. Go to their comment box and submit a question to them and ask them if they’re going to try to do that.

SEAN MCDOWELL: So I have one last one for you. If people want to track moving forward some of the findings that are reliable and trustworthy about this what are some sources that they should track? Like Facebook groups maybe that have reliable archaeological organizations. News sources. Who can they follow to get reliable information about this moving forward?

CRAIG EVANS: That’s a good question. There are a variety of links that are out there. But I’ve used for years and years Biblical Archaeology Society. I subscribe to the magazine Biblical Archaeology Review. It’s a good crew. Herschel Shanks founded it, edited it for more than 40 years. He passed away, by the way, just a couple months ago. And it’s in good hands now. A new editor has been appointed named Glenn Corbett. So if you’re on their mailing list, it’s real easy to get on it. The Biblical Archaeology Society. They’ll list also every year they’ll have an issue that comes out where all the dig sites are that you can volunteer to join.

SEAN MCDOWELL: Interesting.

CRAIG EVANS: Yeah, that’s right. And so, you know, if you’ve got a couple weeks that you can take off, fly yourself to Israel. Live with the crew in a cheap hotel. And, you know, slave labor for two weeks. Work hard. Get paid nothing. And you’re going to go away enriched by the experience. You get a lot of these questions answered. So go to the Biblical Archaeology Society webpage.

And the thing is, when you’re on the mailing thing, I get email from them four or five times a week. Every single archaeological discovery of any worth is mentioned. And, of course, this is how I initially found out about the thing we’re talking about. Boom, out it came. Hey, guess what’s happened? And, of course, they screen it. Unlike online stuff, which is not properly vetted often, this is vetted properly. So you don’t get cranky stuff and weird stuff. You get good solid stuff.

SEAN MCDOWELL: That is so helpful. I’ve been to Israel a number of times. Never thought about going on a dig. And with young kids, it’s probably not going to happen right now. But I’m putting that on my list. I would love to do that.

Dr. Evans, this is super, super helpful. I want to encourage our viewers to get a copy of your book, Jesus and the Manuscripts, that came out recently. We did an interview on that earlier, which I appreciate. People can go check out if that’s helpful. But you also have a book. I’m going to ask you to hold it up specifically on Jesus and archaeology. And give us the title there to make sure we get it.

CRAIG EVANS: Okay, Jesus and the Remains of His Day. And this book came out in 2015. And everything you want to know about synagogues, bones, burial, demonology. Hey, you’ll like this.

SEAN MCDOWELL: Okay. Well, you are one of my go-to scholars when it comes to historical Jesus and archaeology. So this is super helpful. I really appreciate you coming on. For those of you watching this, make sure you hit subscribe. We’ve got some other interviews, behind-the-scenes interviews coming up with scholars like Wayne Grudem, Craig Keener talking about their life, the people and books that shaped who they are. I’ve got a progressive Christian coming on within the next couple weeks. It’s not going to be a debate. It’s going to be a discussion clarifying just some of the similarities and differences between how we understand the Bible, how we understand sexual ethics, understand the person of Jesus, etc.

So this is brought to you by Biola Apologetics. If you’ve ever thought about getting a master’s, we have a track in archaeology. We would love to have you consider studying with us. There is a link below. And we also want to recommend Houston Baptist University where Dr. Evans teaches, one of our sister schools. We love what you’re doing there and appreciate every chance we get to partner. So, Dr. Evans, hang on just for a moment. But the rest of you, thanks so much and have a wonderful Easter. Thanks for joining us and for great questions.

For Further Reading:

The Loud Absence: Where is God in Suffering?: John Lennox (Transcript)

Jocko Podcast: Facing your Inner Darkness. Breaking Your Wretched Loop (Transcript)

Paul Maier on The Real Jesus: New evidence From History And Archeology (Transcript)

Morality, The Lord of the Rings, and Awkward Jokes: Dr Peter Kreeft (Transcript)

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