Dead Sea Scrolls illuminate modern faiths

They speak of a Teacher of Righteousness and a pierced messiah, of cleansing through water and a battle of light against darkness.

But anyone looking to the Dead Sea Scrolls in search of proof, say, that Jesus of Nazareth was the messiah presaged by the prophets, or that John the Baptist lived among the scroll's authors, will be disappointed.

What the scrolls provide instead, scholars say, is a window into a world of religious ferment 2,000 years ago that gave rise to Judaism and Christianity as we know them today.

"It is an entire library from this crucial period that opens up to us the interreligious debate that is the background for everything that happened after," said Lawrence H. Schiffman, chairman of New York University's Skirball department of Hebrew and Judaic studies, who has written extensively on the scrolls.

Fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, heralded by many as the greatest archaeological find of the 20th century, are on display through June 6 as part of the Milwaukee Public Museum's latest exhibit, "Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible: Ancient Artifacts, Timeless Treasures."

Excavated from caves in the Judean desert in the 1940s and '50s, the scrolls date from about 250 B.C. to 68 A.D., a period of social and political instability just before the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.

Written on parchment and papyrus in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, they include the oldest-known copies of the books of the Hebrew Bible — what Christians call the Old Testament — and numerous other texts, from biblical commentaries to lists of religious laws governing the daily lives of their authors.

Their initial discovery, in 1947 by Bedouin shepherds in caves above the Dead Sea, is the stuff of Hollywood, a cloak-and-dagger tale of international intrigue set in the final days of the British Mandate before the creation of Israel.

The term scrolls is misleading. Only a small fraction of the 900 documents were complete texts, discovered wrapped in linen and stored in earthen jars. The remainder were painstakingly reconstructed from thousands of fragments excavated from 11 caves, some as small as a fingernail and encrusted with centuries of grime and bat guano.