THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS get lots of attention in the Kansas City Star today in advance of the exhibit at Union Station which opens on 8 February.

Scrolls a great marvel for Christians, Jews
By MORRIS B. MARGOLIES

From Feb. 13 through May 8, some of the original Dead Sea Scrolls will be on display at Union Station.

Kansas City should be immensely proud that it has qualified to exhibit these scrolls.

What importance can they have for us today, given that they’re 2,000 years old? That is the question put to me during and after some 20 lectures I have given on the subject in the past few months.

Within this brief space I shall try to summarize my response.

The response is pretty accurate but needs some corrections and nuancing.

Many of the parables of Jesus are contained in the religious writings of the scroll sect. The career of the group’s leader, whom they designated as the Teacher of Righteousness, eerily foreshadows the life and death of the founder of Christianity.

No, none of the parables of Jesus are found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And anything beyond the most general of comparisons between Jesus and the Teacher of Righteousness as ancient Palestinian Jewish teachers moves quickly into fringe ideas.

The Dead Sea Scrolls Hebrew Bible had been written more than a thousand years before. A close comparison of this Essene text with the 9th-century Masoretic text reveals virtually an identical rendition.

Well, yes, some of the manuscripts are close to the Masoretic text and one or two are virtually identical, but a fair number of them have quite a few variations, often siding with variants known from the Septuagint Greek translation or the Samaritan Pentateuch. But these are only rarely matters of substance.

The Essenes had clearly broken away from the political and religious leadership of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. Their writings reveal a much more rigid observance of Jewish ritual than had prevailed in the Holy City.

They set up their own sheltered and exclusivist community at Qumran, just northwest of the Dead Sea. They wrote their biblical and sectarian scrolls with great diligence. When in 66 of the common era the fury of Roman power was aimed at a besieged Jerusalem, the Essenes hastened to hide their writings in the nearby Caves of Qumran, some 10 miles south of the Holy City.

Some version of the Essene hypothesis is probably right, but the degree to which the Qumran sectarians split from the Jerusalem Temple is far from clear. A serious split is implied by the Habakkuk Pesher. One can, but need not, read a split into the Community Rule. The Damascus Document assumes its readers will worship in the Temple, although perhaps not without reservation. And various liturgical texts (e.g., 4Q512) and calendrical texts give directions for worship in the Temple. The whole question of who used which calendar and where and when also figures into the problem. Relations with the Temple may have been better and worse over time; we really just don't know.

The second article:

Sacred texts on secular stage
Pages offer a peek at roots of faiths, and hope of profit for Union Station.

has lots of quotes from biblical and Qumran scholars.

The third:

Here’s how to see the scrolls

is self-explanatory and is of interest to those who plan to attend.