ADOLFO ROITMAN, Curator of the Shrine of the Book, has given another public lecture, this one in Hartford, Connecticut.

Expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls speaks at Trinity College

By Tracy Hudak (Jewish Ledger)

HARTFORD - "The Dead Sea Scrolls are a real revolution in scholarship, and they changed everything we knew before about the origin of rabbinical Judaism, historical Judaism, and the early church," said Dr. Adolfo Roitman, curator and director of the Shrine of the Book, which houses the Dead Sea Scroll collection at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Roitman gave a multi-media presentation about the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and their significance for Judaism and Christianity during his Feb. 1 lecture at Trinity College in Hartford. His visit was sponsored by Trinity College's Jewish Studies Program.

The article is pretty good, but it contains this seemingly obligatory glitch:

"Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Biblical manuscripts amongst them, all the Hebrew Biblical manuscripts in hands before Qumran, all of them came from different times. We didn't have ancient testimonies of the biblical texts," said Roitman. There is a Greek version of the Bible from the 4th century, C.E. But, he noted, these manuscripts were not written in Hebrew.

The Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation, is much earlier than this. The Pentateuch was probably translated in Alexandria in the third century B.C.E., with the rest of the books following over the next couple of centuries. There were revisions of this Old Greek version published as well. It may be that Roitman referred to one of the major (more or less) complete LXX manuscripts, Codex Vaticanus or Codex Sinaiticus, which do date to the fourth century C.E., and the reporter misunderstood.