KIBBUTZ KALIA, Israel — Whenever fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls are put on exhibition anywhere in the world, throngs of religious believers crowd in front of climate-controlled display cases to gaze at them in wonder.

On the surface, the fascination seems ironic. The fragments are faded, some even black, with age and the effects of the amino acids in the animal skins on which they were written. Most are illegible.

Still, the ancient scrolls, discovered 60 years ago this year, have an enduring grip on the imagination and offer important insights of life in ancient Israel at the dawn of Christianity.

The some 930 biblical and non-biblical documents are widely believed to have been written and gathered by a dissident Jewish sect between about 250 B.C. and A.D. 68.

In recent years, the world has seen the media-hyped pseudo-history of "The Da Vinci Code," the revisionist history of the "Lost Gospel of Judas" and the dubious claim of the recently uncovered "lost tomb" of Jesus.

But experts consider the Dead Sea Scrolls an authentic and unparalleled find.

"They were the most significant archaeological discovery of the 20th century," said Adolfo Roitman, curator of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Their importance to religious and historical scholarship is undiminished despite the passage of time. They have changed the world's understanding of the Bible.

"They are like the bones of dinosaurs, untouched for nearly 2000 years, and just by chance, through a tunnel of time, we can reach antiquity through the scrolls" to capture a glimpse of a pivotal era in the shaping of Western civilization, Roitman said.

At the time of their discovery, the scrolls were 1,000 years older than any other known biblical text. They contain the oldest known copies of the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible. The majority of the scrolls predate the earliest book of the New Testament, either 1 Thessalonians or Galatians, which were written in about A.D. 50.

The scrolls' description of a group of ascetic Jews known as Essenes, who were seized by thoughts of Armageddon and lived at the time of Jesus, continues to intrigue and pose key questions about Judaism and ancient life in the Holy Land.

The texts opened a new window to understanding the sectarianism that roiled ancient Israel during the Roman occupation and the extent of the opposition among Jews to their religious establishment in Jerusalem.

There is no direct reference to Jesus or his teachings in the scrolls. And the documents offer no support for Christians who would imagine that the people who wrote the texts had met Jesus or that Jesus himself may have handled them.