Israel’s Hebrew University has announced the discovery of a cave in the Judean desert, the first of its kind in 60 years, which once housed the Dead Sea Scrolls, some of the oldest biblical texts in existence.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are fascinating. Evidence of God’s preserving His Word.
Then again; what are we to do if we find that these manuscripts have some previously unknown text – for example, one of the letters that Paul wrote to the Corinthians that’s not already in the Bible (at least four total ones are referred to, but not all of them found their way into the Bible)? Do we recognize it for what it is, or do we set it aside as inspired yet not divine words? There’s also the possibility that the manuscripts that are widely attested to differ – after all, all the ones that already exist are all different from each other and contain different quirks; added words, deleted words, transposed words, misspelled letters, that sort of thing. Odds are, so many people are comfortable with our permanent Bible the way that it is, any change to it seems unthinkable and any new discovery concerning it seems almost suspicious.
Hi Jaime – the scrolls already contain a number of different non-biblical documents so it wouldn’t be a surprise if there were more. The writing in existence seem to cover what was out there at the times involved so it would be hard to see a completely new book being discovered. The finding of any NT seems unlikely as it was a Jewish sect that stored them.
But finding an intact copy of Paul’s first letter generally would be an even more fascinating discovery. We see supposed new discoveries quite often but there has yet to be a real one.
It’s easy enough for us to lose our mail, Paul’s back-and-forth messages seem rather minimal given the span of his ministry. Sure, some of the letters were passed around – but it still seems as if we should have more of them.
Yeah, sure I agree that there were more letters and the additional Corinthians letters are a good example. The question is whether they will ever turn up. My bet is no – by now they would have if they existed most likely and the early church was pretty exhaustive in writing about what they had.
Interesting questions though.