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Scholarship suggesting the existence of the Essenes, a religious Jewish group that lived in the Judea before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, is wrong, according to Prof. Rachel Elior, whose study on the subject will be released soon. Elior blasts the predominant opinion of Dead Sea Scrolls scholars that the Essenes had written the scrolls in Qumran, claiming instead that they were written by ousted Temple priests in Jerusalem. "Sixty years of research have been wasted trying to find the Essenes in the scrolls. But they didn't exist, they were invented by [Jewish-Roman historian] Josephus. It's...

Scholarship suggesting the existence of the Essenes, a religious Jewish group that lived in the Judea before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, is wrong, according to Prof. Rachel Elior, whose study on the subject will be released soon. Elior blasts the predominant opinion of Dead Sea Scrolls scholars that the Essenes had written the scrolls in Qumran, claiming instead that they were written by ousted Temple priests in Jerusalem. "Sixty years of research have been wasted trying to find the Essenes in the scrolls. But they didn't exist, they were invented by [Jewish-Roman historian] Josephus. It's...

 Melchizedek Priesthood of LDS and Dead Sea Scrolls PerspectivesResearch by Kerry A. ShirtsIt is claimed by opponents of Mormonism that the Melchizedek Priesthood in the church cannot be accurate because at Hebrews 7:24 the Greek term "aparabaton" means "intransmissible", hence Christ is the only one with the Melchizedek Priesthood. But lets look a little closer and see how the opponents misstate the case. In the Liddell-Scott Lexicon of the Greek Language we note something interesting when we look up this Greek word "Aparabatos":apara-ba^tos, on, unalterable, heirmos aitiôn Stoic.2.266; epiplokê, of causation, Chrysipp.IBID=au=Stoic. 2.293=lr; taxis Plu.2.410f; hê tês kinêseôs idea Ocell.1.15;...

        Ensign » 1972 » December The Old Testament Speaks Today By W. Cleon SkousenProfessor of Ancient ScriptureBrigham Young University  W. Cleon Skousen, “The Old Testament Speaks Today,” Ensign, Dec 1972, 79For centuries some scholars have looked upon the Old Testament as an archaic, pre-Christian (and therefore inferior) scripture. But with the discovery and translation of the Dead Sea scrolls, a number of modern scholars have been shocked into believing that Christianity actually may have originated during the Old Testament period. The scrolls refer to concepts, doctrines, and practices that had been considered nonexistent before the ministry of Christ. In fact,...

<p>JERUSALEM — Scientists using American space technology have started a huge project to digitally photograph the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known version of the Hebrew Bible, and post it on the Internet for all to see, Israeli authorities said Wednesday.</p>

JERUSALEM — In a crowded laboratory painted in gray and cooled like a cave, half a dozen specialists embarked this week on an historic undertaking: digitally photographing every one of the thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the aim of making the entire file — among the most sought-after and examined documents on earth — available to all on the Internet. Equipped with highly powerful cameras with resolution and clarity many times greater than those of conventional models, and with lights that emit neither heat nor ultraviolet rays, the scientists and technicians are uncovering previously illegible sections...

The death and resurrection of Christ has been called into question by a radical new interpretation of a tablet found on the eastern bank of the Dead Sea. The three-foot stone tablet appears to refer to a Messiah who rises from the grave three days after his death - even though it was written decades before the birth of Jesus. The ink is badly faded on much of the tablet, known as Gabriel’s Vision of Revelation, which was written rather than engraved in the 1st century BC. This has led some experts to claim that the inscription has been overinterpreted....

When people hear the name Salome, they immediately think of the infamous dancing girl of the Gospels... At her mother's urging, Salome asked for the head of Herod's most famous prisoner on a platter. Fearful of breaking his word before his guests, Herod granted Salome's request and ordered John the Baptist beheaded. In antiquity there was a considerably more famous Salome, however, who was revered for centuries. She was so admired that generations of mothers, Herodias apparently among them, named their daughters Salome in her honor. This Salome was the only woman ever to govern Judea as its sole ruler....

<p>Editor's Note: According to an exhibit at the United States Library of Congress, young Bedouin shepherds, searching for a stray goat in the Judean Desert in 1947, entered a long-untouched cave and found scrolls in a jar and under debris on the floor. That initial discovery by the Bedouins began a search that lasted nearly a decade, eventually producing thousands of scroll fragments from 11 caves.</p>

Click Video- Learn how DNA was able to sort out and match the DDS fragments

When the San Diego Natural History Museum applied to Stephen Spielberg's foundation for a $100,000 grant to help bring the Dead Sea Scrolls to San Diego and produce a film on the famous Khirbet Qumran site, the foundation was happy to oblige. Did Spielberg know (1) that the museum's scrolls exhibit would be plagued by allegations of bias due to the curator's decision to exclude a major group of Jewish scrolls scholars from the museum's lecture series; (2) that the money would go to a graduate student who is also a minister trained at Pepperdine University, affiliated with the Churches...

CLICK TO WATCH VIDEO Latter-day Saints love ancient religious records. We have already received the Bible, Book of Mormon, and Pearl of Great Price, and we look forward with anticipation to receiving the "words of the lost tribes of Israel" (2 Nephi 29:13), to the unsealing of a large portion of the golden plates, and to the restoration of other ancient texts authored by Adam, Enoch, Joseph, and others. It was no wonder, then, that since the 1947 discovery of ancient scrolls hidden in caves along the shores of the Dead Sea, many Latter-day Saints have been fascinated by the...

Why on earth did it cost six million dollars to bring the Dead Sea Scrolls to San Diego, and why has this exhibit become submerged in controversy? Hoping to shed some light on these matters, I decided to take a closer look at the parties involved. What I found was surprising evidence that members of several Christian fundamentalist organizations played a major role in creating the exhibit and choosing its content, a fact carefully covered up in the media campaign surrounding the exhibit's opening. For details, see my linked article.

An American academic leading visitors around an exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Natural History Museum in San Diego will challenge the consensus on the identity of the scrolls' authors, the Chicago Jewish News said on Friday. Professor Norman Golb, of the Jewish History and Civilization department at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, does not believe that the scrolls were authored by the ancient Jewish Essene sect, a pacifist group, as most experts believe, arguing instead that the scrolls were authored by a variety of Jewish residents of Judea who fled the Roman Army in 70 C.E....

The Los Angeles Times carried an interesting report last week, by Mike Boehm, on the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit taking place at the San Diego Natural History Museum.  They asked the curator, Dr. Risa Levitt Kohn, why the museum has carefully excluded all scholars who oppose the old, and increasingly contested, theory of Scroll origins from the lecture series accompanying the exhibit, and she came up with a good reply--"You don't want to confuse people with so many competing theories, so they walk away, saying, 'Well, nobody really knows anything!'" I for one find that extremely convincing.  The last thing in the world...

The first commandment for showing the Dead Sea Scrolls is: "Let there not be too much light." It has been handed down by the Israel Antiquities Authority, custodian of most of the 2,000-year-old parchments and papyri. The scrolls, many of them pieced together like puzzles from fragments and tatters, contain the oldest known biblical writings — among them a text of the Ten Commandments that will be part of the six-month Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition that opens Friday at the San Diego Natural History Museum. It's billed as the largest and most comprehensive ever. Museum-goers accustomed to prolonged gazing will...

QUMRAN, West Bank -- Researchers say their discovery of a 2,000-year-old toilet at one of the world's most important archaeological sites sheds new light on whether the ancient community was home to the authors of many of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In a new study, three researchers say they have discovered the outdoor latrine used by the ancient residents of Qumran, on the barren banks of the Dead Sea. They say the find proves the people living here two millennia ago were Essenes, an ascetic Jewish sect that left Jerusalem to seek proximity to God in the desert. Qumran and...

The hidden latrines of the Essenes By Ran Shapira In one of his detailed accounts of the Essenes, Flavius Josephus (Yosef Ben Matityahu), described one of the many laws that shaped the Jewish sect's way of life during the Second Temple period. While the Essenes sat in a circle, Josephus wrote, it was forbidden for them to spit into its center. Like many other laws outlined by Josephus, the details of this law appear in the Dead Sea Scrolls found in caves along the northern end of the Dead Sea. These scrolls are attributed to the Essenes. The resemblance between...

Archaeologists, it seems, will dig anything, even latrines. Sometimes this uncovers the stuff of scholarly evidence. Over a hill, a discreet distance from and out of sight of the ruins of Qumran, near the Dead Sea, a broad patch of soil appeared to be discolored. Two archaeological sleuths had reasons to suspect this may have been Qumran’s toilet. Soil samples yielded the desiccated eggs of human intestinal parasites. The researchers say this could well be evidence supporting the controversial view that Qumran was occupied by an ascetic Jewish sect, the Essenes, and that they probably wrote the Dead Sea scrolls...

Toilet evidence links Dead Sea Scrolls to sect By Thomas H. Maugh II Los Angeles Times Following directions found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, archaeologists have discovered the latrines used by the sect that produced the scrolls, discovering that efforts to achieve ritual purity inadvertently exposed members to intestinal parasites that shortened their lifespan. The discovery of the unique toilet area provides further evidence linking the scrolls to Qumran — an association that recently has been called into question by a small but vociferous group of archaeologists who have argued that the settlement was a pottery factory, a country villa...