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Show Ancient scrolls subject of lecture at BYU The story of the "chance discovery" dis-covery" of a scroll in a cave by a Bedouin shepherd and how it has led to the "greatest Biblical Bib-lical discovery of all time" was told to a group of BYU faculty fac-ulty members recently. Dr. Joseph Saad, director of the Palestine Museum and the man who has directed the work of finding the Dead Sea Scrolls used pictures of the caves and the scrolls to illustrate his account. ac-count. The scrolls which inspired the search for additional writings writ-ings are the work of an Essene monastery. They were written on goat skin, preserved in jars and hidden in caves when it appeared that the Roman soldiers sol-diers would destroy the monastery. mon-astery. Some of the scrolls date from the time of Christ, others which have been found in the more than 15 years since the search began, appear to have been written much earlier, he said. Although the first parchments parch-ments were discovered in 1947, their real worth did not come to light until American scholars schol-ars saw them. Digging to find other scrolls began in 1949. From Cave Four have come 600 scrolls containing the entire en-tire Old Testament except for the Book of Esther. There are now 12 caves in the wilderness of Judea from which scholars have taken scrolls, some written writ-ten on goatskin leather, some on papayrus and some on copper. cop-per. Though many scientists doubted that the scrolls were authentic, through carbon dating dat-ing methods and archaeological evidence, their accuracy has been verified, according to Dr. Saad. Many of the writings in the scrolls have forced much of the Christian world to reevaluate reeval-uate its thinking, according to Dr. Hugh Nibley of the BYU faculty, who introduced the Palestinian scholar. |