Dead Sea Scrolls

Professor Flint takes you on a journey from Jerusalem to the wilderness of Judea—and into the caves of Qumran, where many of the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947 by Bedouin shepherds. He recounts the story of their discovery, reviews various Scroll manuscripts and shares an interesting analysis comparing the Old Testament books favored […]

Christians, Jews, and Muslims are all spiritual heirs of a specific form of Judaism that arose and developed in the late 2nd Temple period. Along with Pharisees, Zealots, Sadducees, and Essenes—the Jewish groups that espoused a vision of the cosmos and the future such as that reflected in the apocryphal books of Enoch turned out […]

In this wide-ranging interview, Hershel Shanks sits down with 90-year-old priest and New Testament scholar Joseph Fitzmyer to reflect on Fitzmyer’s work with the Dead Sea Scrolls in Jerusalem in 1957 and 1958. The still-lively Fitzmyer recalls those years and more while relating anecdotes about the creation of a concordance from the scroll fragments and […]

In this lively interview, BAR editor Hershel Shanks engages James Charlesworth and Sidnie White Crawford in a conversation about John Strugnell, a linguistics genius and editor-in-chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls project who was ousted as the project’s head in 1990 (as well as from his post at Harvard University) following alleged anti-Semitic remarks. Charlesworth and Crawford […]

This video features Hershel Shanks’s engaging interview with Dead Sea Scrolls experts Weston Fields and George Brooke, who present key findings about the scrolls and the fascinating story behind their study and interpretation. Shanks focuses on British scholar John Marco Allegro, a maverick and self-proclaimed publicist who contended the scrolls could relate to early doctrines […]