Nevertheless, the scrolls were written by Jesus' contemporaries and offer insights into the hopes and fears of the people to whom he was preaching, as well as the times in which they lived.

"It's a world full of angels and demons. It's a world where God is struggling against Satan. It's a world in which you have demon possession and the possibility of curing, as Jesus is reported to have done. It's a very exciting world in which you hear about the coming of Messiahs or the Messiah,' said James H. Charlesworth, professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey.

The first scrolls were discovered in 1947 by a Bedouin shepherd who thought that gold might be stashed in the caves near Qumran that dot the sheer yellow cliffs that rise 1,200 feet above the world's lowest body of water, the Dead Sea.

Instead, as the story goes, the shepherd, Jum'a Muhammed Khalil, heard the crack of a broken pottery jar when he hurled a stone through the cave's narrow mouth.

The four scrolls that Khalil and two other shepherds recovered from the jars and hawked to an antique dealer in Bethlehem earned Khalil a share of $64.80. By 1957, the rest of the scrolls had been uncovered following an Indiana Jones-like dash for archaeological treasure.

Today, the cave where Khalil discovered the first Dead Sea Scrolls is unmarked and infested with bats, as desolate as it probably was to those who used it as a storage place more than 2,000 years ago.

With the aid of such modern tools as digital imaging and infrared photography, the scrolls — written mostly on calfskin or sheepskin with an ink that was a mixture of soot, gum, oil and water — have been translated, if not decoded.

What is obvious to scholars of the scrolls — and dismaying to biblical literalists — is that God did not hand down the Bible in its present form.

According to scholars, the Bible's content and structure evolved from earlier texts.

Jewish Scripture and what Christians call the Old Testament was adapted by editors to conform to their social, political, personal and devotional needs and those of their community.

The writers of the scrolls made the Scriptures their own, much as believers wittingly or unwittingly do to- day., embracing and emphasizing some texts while ignoring or discarding others.

"Far from descending from Mt. Sinai on tablets, the Hebrew Bible is characterized by a long process of editing," said Timothy H. Lim, professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.