Original subtitles

The Dead Sea Scrolls were one of the most important archaeological

finds of the time. They were discovered here in the caves

of Qumran, near the Dead Sea.

But what was written on them?

What secrets about the time of Jesus do they reveal?

Why did the Roman Catholic Church keep them out of the public domain

for nearly 30 years?

Why were they considered so controversial?

And what still lies...

..buried out here?

To modern Israel, the Dead Sea Scrolls are of immense significance

and they're treated with enormous respect and reverence.

They bridge a gap in knowledge about Jewish history.

The most fascinating document that came out of Qumran

was undoubtedly the Copper Scroll.

The records that it kept were about treasure,

and it laid out in precise details, with X marks the spot.

This was pure Indiana Jones stuff. It seemed to reveal the locations

of bundles of treasure in the Holy Lands.

I have no doubt that there's really sexy, really heretical

information in the Dead Sea Scrolls that we may never see.

The scrolls were not published for 40, 50 years.

When they were asked repeatedly, "When are you going to publish

"the scrolls?" They kept saying, "It's on a need-to-know basis."

I mean, can you imagine any historical discovery where

that will be tolerated today?

The Dead Sea Scrolls are made up of thousands of written fragments,

the remains of larger manuscripts, damaged by natural causes

or through human interference.

However, there are a small number of well-preserved, almost-intact

manuscripts that have survived. Fewer than a dozen.

And using radiocarbon tests, scholars have dated them

from about three centuries BC to around the first century AD.

Now, they were all discovered in just 11 caves here around me,

in Qumran, just about a mile from the Dead Sea, over in the distance.

The question everyone has is this...

..what else is buried out here?

One of the reasons for the great mystery about the Dead Sea Scrolls

is the fact that after they were found, they were kept secret

for decades and it wasn't for a very long time

until they were released to scholars.

In that atmosphere, particularly of Biblical research, where there's

very little new material for people to look at, this became explosive.

People were wondering, "What is in them?"

The texts have great historical, religious and linguistic

significance because they are some of the oldest written works

about the Jewish people ever found.

The texts are written on parchment, some on papyrus,

and one on copper.

Some in Hebrew, some in Aramaic, and some in Greek.

Archaeologists have long associated the scrolls with the ancient Jewish

sect called the Essenes.

Although, recent interpretations have challenged this,

and some scholars argue that priests in Jerusalem or other Jewish groups

actually wrote the scrolls.

When the scrolls were discovered, they were, as often happens

with artefacts, they were sold on the market, a vast number of them.

And so it took a while to bring them all back together again, and a

number of authorities had control over them at different times.

The Jordanians, the Israelis, the Vatican... And of course,

in an environment when these weren't being released,

there was suspicion that they weren't being released for a reason.

The Vatican wasn't letting people know what was in them

because there might be something there that didn't suit the Vatican.

People think the conspiracy around the Dead Sea Scrolls

is because the Catholic Church didn't want us to find out some

really juicy stuff about Jesus that would alter our perception

of the Church.

Actually, it appears that maybe it wasn't about Jesus at all.

It was about John the Baptist.

Because one of the first people involved with the with the dig

at Qumran...

..um, has said that they found a headless body there. A skeleton.

And it was believed that this might be the body of John the Baptist.

And anything to do with John the Baptist sends shock waves

and terror into the heart of the Vatican because they know that

John the Baptist is theological dynamite.

Because he was a rival to Jesus.

Organised religion was really fearful about what

the Dead Sea Scrolls could reveal, cos they date to the time

of Jesus Christ and earlier.

So, what if they had the truth about the nature of Jesus

and Mary Magdalene?

All sorts of things that are just completely opposed to what's been

taught ever since. Now, that's a lot to fear.

Because of the poor condition of some of the scrolls, scholars have

not been able to identify all of them.

But here's what we do know.

Some 40% are made up of copies of texts from the Hebrew Scriptures...

..around about another 30% of text from the Second Temple period,

and the remainder, roughly 30%, are non-religious manuscripts that

shed light on the rules and beliefs of a particular Jewish group.

One theory is that around 2,000 years ago, a small group of people,

who opposed the main religion in Jerusalem, came here to get away

from the worldliness of the city, and to practise their variation

of Judaism that they documented in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

This area of Qumran is remote, arid, and not lived in today.

However, it is here that many archaeological digs have been

conducted in search of the scrolls.

Historian and archaeologist Danny Herman has been involved

in a number of them and has a particular interest

in the Copper Scroll.

The Copper Scroll is really a big mystery on so many levels.

OK? If this group was living in the middle of nowhere,

how could it have so much wealth?

The wealth that is described in the Copper Scroll.

I personally believe that the Copper Scroll is a league of itself.

It's not part of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

It was created by the priests in Jerusalem,

and taken to be hidden with the Dead Sea Scrolls...

..as the Romans were advancing.

And, that would explain why the other scrolls are all on papyrus

or parchment, and this one was on copper, right?

That they were actually different?

That could also explain how could someone

both mention such treasures, and also afford such expensive material

to write on or incise the letters on.

And that's a copper sheath.

It's way more expensive than the papyrus or parchment.

In 1956, English archaeologist John Allegro was the first to transcribe

the Copper Scroll and identified locations where Temple treasures

were hidden around Qumran.

Danny was part of an archaeological dig that went to one of the

locations listed as a potential hiding place for some

of the treasures.

So here we are...

..in an area of the valley that becomes a canyon.

But it's all natural.

And yet...

..on the left side of this canyon...

..in the 1960s, Allegro publishes the existence of a man-made tunnel.

And the reason he got so interested in this tunnel is because he argued

that it could be the tunnel mentioned in Section A

of the Copper Scroll.

And if it was indeed the one it could be containing huge amounts

of treasures, of silver, of Temple tools.

Who knows what could be hidden in there.

It's actually above our heads.

With no mark around it.

No steps leading into it.

And nowadays, it's got a big piece of cement protecting it

from flash floods.

Can I go and have a look? Yeah, go ahead.

Did I mention the snakes? THEY LAUGH

Oh, wow.

Well, the Copper Scroll was the most exciting, the most, kind of,

headline-grabbing, most media-friendly discovery cos it was

like a sort of Biblical treasure map.

The frustrating thing about the Copper Scroll,

it doesn't seem to align with actual places.

So, perhaps it was always a fake map, perhaps the names of the places

are written in code and we haven't quite cracked the code yet.

That's a possibility.

But there are still people to this day who are out there looking

for the treasure that's been promised by this map.

The Copper Scroll lists 60 hiding locations

and containing maybe 100 or 200 tonnes of gold and silver.

That by itself sounds like a hallucination, you know?

Who could have so much wealth?

But let's remember, up in Jerusalem, the priests were collecting huge

amounts of wealth from the Temple tax and from donations of Jews

from all around the world.

So such quantities of wealth are possible.

But why would they be hidden and why would they be documented

on a copper scroll, and why would that Copper Scroll be hidden

with the Dead Sea Scrolls next to the Dead Sea?

If we were to find at least one of the treasures, we could at least

tell that Copper Scroll is a real documentation of real treasures.

I don't think it's a hoax because you've got the Romans bearing

down on you, you know? They're coming for you.

What are you going to do? Sit there and write a huge lengthy hoax

on a copper scroll? Doesn't seem like a good idea.

Probably better to run, actually, at that point.

So these are people desperately writing this stuff down in the hope

it will be found. I don't think it was a hoax.

I think it's somewhere out there.

Although there was nothing found in the first tunnel, the leader

of the dig took Danny and the team to a second location nearby,

that fits the description as a possible hiding place for treasure.

It's just down the stream...

..over here. All right. OK.

Another tunnel similarly designed on the left side of the dry riverbed...

..going in a very sharp angle.

Maybe this one will contain the treasures.

Can we go in there? Can we climb in?

We can but it's a bit dangerous. You could be running out of air

at a certain depth, OK? And we'll also need torches. OK?

OK. Well, I've got a camera, so...

But if you're feeling uncomfortable... Yeah.

..if you're feeling you're running out of air, we should stop.

OK. OK. I'll let you know. I'll lead. Yeah. OK.

A massive amount of rock and debris was cleared from this tunnel

and it now extends 40 metres down into the cliff.

So you... You excavated this cave.

Yeah. I joined Oren when he was working on this cave.

It was very hard...

A lot of dust.

But it's clearly man-made.

OK? You can see the chisel marks, you can see the steps.

This cannot be natural.

OK?

And why would someone care to do all of this?

What are you benefiting from carving here?

There's not even... green ores.

Yeah, there's no... This is not a copper mine.

No, it's definitely not. It's not to get water.

This is not an aqueduct or a cistern.

It's just a man-made tunnel that goes to nowhere.

OK. But we were excited...

Sure. ..cos the potential was huge. You know, such a tunnel could be

hiding the treasures of the Copper Scroll, or at least some of it,

that was the hope. And that's what kept you going?

That's what kept you digging? That was, for me personally,

a big motivation. Sure. And finding nothing at the end,

that was quite disappointing.

Inevitably, when there is wealth of that magnitude hidden around

somewhere, this gets the attention of archaeologists

and of treasure hunters.

And since the release of the Copper Scroll and the details, people have

tried very hard to locate these places,

not with great success but it hasn't stopped armies of them trying.

It wasn't until 1991, a full 44 years after they were discovered,

that general access was made available to photographs

of the scrolls.

In November of that year, those photos were published by the

Biblical Archaeological Society, and the Huntington Library promised to

open all the microfilm files of all of the scroll photographs.

I don't think people immediately realised how important this

discovery was. Bits went in different directions.

The Hebrew University ended up with some, and a Syrian archbishop ran

off to New York with another bit of it, but I think as it became

evident what this was, then the excitement rose hugely.

It was not immediately clear that these were objects

of particular Scriptural value.

So they really do the rounds.

They kind of... A lot of them travel to America.

They end up in the hands of various academics and scientists.

But the Vatican quickly got wind of this and locked on to it and then

sent its agents out and did everything possible to scoop them up

and then kept them under lock and key for a long, long time.

For a suspiciously long amount of time before any kind of results

of their investigation were published.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in Qumran, about an hour and a half

away from Jerusalem by car today.

And yet this city is literally alive with historic treasures

right under our feet.

Khader Baidun is one of Jerusalem's most famous antique dealers.

I've met him a few times before at his shop here in the Old City.

It really is a treasure trove of artefacts that cover the last

5,000 or 6,000 years.

Historic relics are big business here in Jerusalem.

It's not only relics that Khader is an expert on.

40 years after the discovery of the first scrolls,

he actually met the Bedouin shepherd who found them.

So, Khader, tell me how the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.

It was by accident when he lost his... One of his goats.

He was looking to find it and it was in a cave, that cave.

And when he went down to see, to look after his goat,

he found the jars around the cave and it was full of scroll.

Each jar with one scroll.

And when you say jar, what... What, like a, um...?

It is like... Here. Here's, like this jar.

Oh, wow. That's from the same period, 2,000 year ago.

This is 2,000 years old? Yes. Yes.

And so the scrolls were... Was stored in the jar.

Hidden... They hide it in a jar. Right. OK.

And then he find it, and he pick one or two of them,

in that time, just for curiosity...

He didn't know what it was. Sure.

And then he was walking in Bethlehem where he met...

..the guy who fixed the sandals.

Yeah. And then he say, "I've found this thing here, do you know..."

What it is? What is it, is it worth money or whatever?

Then he said to him, "OK.

"You know what...

"..we can sweep it. Just give you one sandal, and..."

He... So one of the most important discoveries of all time,

he swapped for a pair of sandals? Yes, he swapped it, with him.

And then...

..he had no idea how much it's worth.

The story of what happens to the scrolls is really interesting

because at first they were completely invalidated.

The boys take them back to the village, the village elders take them

to various places, and in Bethlehem they were told, "No, these...

"These are fakes, they are worthless, they're probably stolen

"from some synagogue."

But eventually... You know, shortly thereafter, in 1947,

someone who understands what they really are, buys the first

few of them in Jerusalem.

And then, before you know it, there's advertisements

in The Wall Street Journal for these scrolls, and they've been trying to

sell them to universities for large sums of money.

So, I mean, how much would they be worth, the Dead Sea Scrolls?

If someone was to find them today?

In that time, it wasn't... I mean, in that time, there was not...

..much money in the hands of people. Sure.

When you talk about in that time, one million.

Like you are saying now...

..900 million.

Wow. Yeah. So, worth a lot of money? Yeah.

And so, could there be more scrolls hidden in caves around Qumran now?

Certainly, there is more.

Because, what I believe, that

there is the possibility. Because of this 2,000 year...

Raining and the weather, and there was earthquake and it cover...

..one of these caves and that's the possibility, that it's still

in one of these caves.

It might come as some surprise,

but the black market for the Dead Sea Scrolls is still alive and well

and has been since 1947 when they first were, kind of, discovered and

acknowledged as existing in the first place,

and they trade because there's always going to be interest

from wealthy patrons who want to get their hands on these.

And it's also reflective of the fact that while we have an official

Israeli organization that holds the known Dead Sea Scrolls,

there are many others that are not part of that library.

We shouldn't assume that there isn't a whole load more scrolls out there.

I mean, about 50,000 fragments have been discovered,

but they still think there's many more out there.

But a sizeable chunk of the Dead Sea Scrolls that were discovered

ended up in private hands and these were passed around. The dealers...

Some people thought they were fake, other people didn't.

Some ended up in the hands of academics, and even to this day,

it could be the case that, sort of, the bounty is fragmented

and there are interesting discoveries to be made, you know,

just in someone's loft.

Even though there could be some fragments of the scrolls in private

collections, today, the vast majority can be found here...

..at the Dead Sea Scrolls laboratory

at the Israeli Antiquities Authority.

The preservation and research on the scrolls by the Israelis

is led by the head of the Dead Sea Scrolls projects, Pnina Shor,

who has given us special permission to see some real pieces

of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Now, I'm desperate to see... OK.

So we'll show you. Can you... Can you show us? So we'll show you. OK.

Fantastic. Can you come and help us, please?

Now, obviously you don't want me to touch them or...

I don't touch them. So, of course, you don't. I don't touch them. No,

no, no. OK. It's only the conservators... There's five women

conservators who... They're the only ones allowed to touch these scrolls.

And as you can see, they don't touch them with bare hands either.

So, what you see here is one of the 1,200... Or five...

1,500 plates that has still... that has not been undone yet.

So, hang on... But this... This isn't....

These are fragments of the scrolls?

These are... These tiny... Yes.

These are minute fragments of scrolls. OK?

In this case, we're holding a plate with unknown fragments that

were collected together.

But as you can see...

..and as you realise...

Uh, the big scroll is as important as, or might be as important as,

this minute fragment, because it can be the missing link in the jigsaw

puzzle and therefore, every single fragment is being treated.

But, hang on. So, is there writing on these tiny fragments? Yes.

Yes, there's writing on these fragments but because it has been

taped... Can you turn it back? Because it has been taped...

Oh, I can see the sellotape. See? The residues of the tape enter,

or they penetrate the parchment or the papyrus,

and they cause their disintegration.

The work being done is painstaking beyond belief.

We say scrolls, but actually many of them are fragments no bigger

than your fingernail.

This is like putting together a jigsaw of the Mona Lisa that's

the size of four football pitches.

But the reason it's being done is because the information in those

scrolls about that crucial period of Judaism, as they're moving

from Temple Judaism through to the more synagogue-based version

that we would recognise today, and the evolution in that time

of sects and cults, like Christianity,

is fascinating to the history of Judaism and there are no other

sources for it.

This is unique and therefore is very important to those who specialise

in this area.

Do you have any other...

..maybe larger, fragments that I can take a look at? Yes.

Sure.

So, here you see a plate still waiting for treatment.

You can still see the tape, you can see binding paper.

What are these made of? Is it papyrus or parchment?

This is parchment. Parchment. These are parchment.

Most of their religious writings that we have

are written on parchment.

The documentary material is written on papyrus.

So is this now... Is it, like, hard? Would it snap? Yes.

It's not flexible or malleable like paper? It's not flexible

because it was in the rubble or because it came in contact

with humidity - it blackens and it becomes like a gel.

OK? And so it becomes dark and you cannot actually see

with your eyes what is written on some of it. You see some of it is...

Yeah. I can see writing on this one but this is impossible

to read. But if you look at this plate, this plate has been

treated already. So you cleaned it? Yes. So what happens is they cover

the front, because the majority of the scroll's original parchment are

written on one side, so they cover the front.

They turn it on the back and they try and cleanse it...

SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

..from previous treatments. OK?

And so, in this case, for example, OK? They covered it, they turned it,

they cleansed it from all the gooey and dirt and all the materials that

had been applied beforehand.

They strengthened the edges.

OK?

And when they're through and they turn it back and they take off

the cover, many times the writing comes back to life.

Wow. And this is very, very exciting.

I think you almost have to look at the Dead Sea Scrolls

as the foundational document of the State of Israel.

You know, the US has the Declaration of Independence,

Israel has the Scripture, has the Old Testament.

And this is the oldest, by far the oldest,

version of the Old Testament.

So, of course, they're going to guard it jealously,

plus the fact they've had other people taking bits of it,

it's shot off in all different directions,

they've desperately tried to get it back.

So, clearly, when they do get the scrolls back into one place,

they're going to make sure nobody else gets a look in.

So, what you see in front of you here

is a sheet of the big sand scroll from Cave 11,

it's a complete sheet. You see the sewing on one end,

and the other sewing in the other end,

and we have about five of them that were, of course,

sewn together, rolled.

And to keep them safely, they were put in a jar in the cave.

As it was rolled and put, the bottom part touched the ground

or touched the humidity. This bit? This bit.

And therefore what looks to you as if it is burnt,

it's actually gelatinised, meaning the material, through the humidity,

becomes like a gel, and slowly disintegrates.

So the scroll we just saw is from the first century CE,

this scroll is first century BC, and what you're seeing in front of you

is part of the book of the Torat Kohanim.

All the copies of The Book of the Torat Kohanim,

this is the only one that preserves, all of the Ten Commandments.

Wow. So these are the Ten Commandments?

These are the earliest copy of the Ten Commandments that we have.

The complete Ten Commandments.

It begins here, with "I am your God," and goes through this column

and this column. And the most important one is,

the Fifth Commandment, it says...

SHE READS IN HEBREW

"Honour thy father and thy mother...

"..you will have a long and healthy life."

Today, the Jewish people hold the Dead Sea Scrolls as sacred,

and as they should, because they represent the earliest,

sort of, full description of their religious origins.

There isn't a more important library in all of Israel than this,

because it's the foundation of their religion, and of their state.

The preservation of the scrolls is clearly a massive task,

with thousands of fragments still to be catalogued and archived.

However, some of the processed scrolls are on display in museums

around the world, for the public to see in all their glory.

What's fascinating is that some archaeologists believe

there is still more to be found.

A team of archaeologists in Qumran,

working under the banner Operation Scroll,

excavated a 12th cave, known as Cave 53, early in 2017.

Unbelievably, despite the cave having been looted,

the experts confirm that it did once hold scrolls.

One of the men in charge of the team was Oren Gutfeld.

I've spoken to several experts who say that the whole area around

Qumran has been surveyed once, twice, three times,

and there's nothing more to be found. Do you agree?

Well, that's not true, because of the attitude that our professor told us,

at the university, is - "There's no more scrolls over there.

"The Bedouins' Operation Scroll found everything."

In the last five to seven years, more and more small pieces,

or fragments of parchments of scrolls arrived to the markets

here in the Old City of Jerusalem.

You're telling me that fragments of scrolls are traded by dealers

here in the Old City? That's correct. That's correct.

Of course people are still looking for this treasure,

and why wouldn't they?

There is a Jewish archaeologist, by name of Doctor Oren Gutfeld,

who is doing a lot of work in this area and he's finding things

in caves around Qumran that are suggesting that there

were scrolls there.

There's fragments of papyrus, there's shards of pottery.

So it's really quite encouraging that we might be beginning

to decipher this Copper Scroll, after all these years.

Today, the State of Israel established a new survey programme,

Operation Scroll Two, sponsored by the government,

with teams, now this minute, are serving on the cliffs

and working in the caves. So I don't know how, from that,

they got the idea that there's nothing more to look over there,

and look, my cave, Cave 53, is the proof that there's more over there,

we have found a new scroll cave.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are held up as a cornerstone of historic

discoveries concerning the Jewish people.

But how much do we actually learn about them from these scrolls?

And are there still more scrolls to be found?

Dr Noam Mizrahi is a celebrated academic who agreed to meet with me

and give me the unvarnished truth.

So, Noam, tell me,

what actually is contained

in the manuscripts?

What can they, what do they tell us? What is actually written down on the scrolls?

It's a bit of a bewildering collection of text, to be honest.

We can divide the scrolls into three or four major groups

of texts. One group of text, which is about 25% of the material -

so, about, let's say, 250 scrolls -

is what we call Biblical scrolls,

the earliest copies of books that we know as parts

of the Hebrew Bible. Right. But...

..the kind of stuff that we knew anyway, stuff we've read.

Absolutely.

However, it's very important for me to emphasise that almost none

of these copies is identical

to the text of the Bible as we know it. OK.

Sometimes the differences are very slight -

there are methods of spelling, of orthography, of language.

Sometimes, however, these are major differences.

The text, it's like that you read a different edition

of the same text. So should we be updating the Bible? Should we be

updating the Old Testament with these discoveries?

Well, we should definitely know that even the Old Testament

had a history.

So, before the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest version of the

New Testament we had was from about the 400s, but the oldest version

of the Old Testament was actually a lot more recent, was only

1,000 years old, so this meant we now had a 2,000-year-old version

of the Old Testament -

everything except the Book of Esther - so that in itself,

obviously, was fascinating to both Jews and Christians.

But also we learnt a lot about this strange community out

there in Qumran, who were a kind of mix of radical Jews

and proto-Christians.

You know, I think you have to see it as a very fluid environment. It tells us a lot about

the sort of people who invented modern Judaism

and modern Christianity.

Do you think that there are still secrets hidden

within the scrolls, within the documents, that we are yet

to find out?

I would say that all the scrolls by now are known,

but the scrolls have disintegrated to so many small fragments

and the assortment of these fragments is, like, a huge number

of jigsaw puzzles

that we're still playing with.

So, every year there is a new publication, more than one

publication, which offers a new identification of fragments,

a new assortment, new joining of fragments, and then this

in turn recolours our understanding of the text.

Do you think it's possible that there are more scrolls hidden

in Qumran or in the mountains nearby.

Personally, I very much hope that there are.

It would be wonderful, of course, if we get other scrolls,

even if we get other copies of the same text

that we have in Qumran, even that would be a major help,

because so many of the texts are so hopelessly fragmentary that

every new bit of information would be crucial.

It's possible there's a lot more to find at Qumran, because we don't

know the extent of the cave network.

People did bury stuff, and certainly around the time of the Roman

suppression, about 130 AD, a lot of those

documents have gone missing. Something of a dark age

in historical knowledge.

And, yes, there probably is a lot more stuff, but whether it's going

to be explosive or sensational, you know, to the, to outsiders,

or just some more academic stuff, is absolutely open to question.

Apart from the excavation of the 12th cave in Qumran,

there is another equally fascinating story related

to the Dead Sea Scrolls.

A man came forward in March 2011, claiming that he had found a small

leather codex in a cave in Jordan.

His name is David Elkington.

According to the story,

these ring-bound lead and copper codices were in the possession

of an Israeli Bedouin farmer named Hassan Saeda,

who claimed that they had been found by his great grandfather in a cave

a century ago.

Elkington believes the codices could contain the earliest

historical evidence of Jesus' existence, and was quoted in the

press that they might be as important as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

However, the Israeli Antiquities Authority considered them

inauthentic and worthless, saying the books are a mixture

of incompatible periods and styles without any connection or logic.

But could the codices really contain genuine information on the formation

of Christianity in Qumran over 2,000 years ago?

The group at Qumran were obviously Nazoreans,

OK, call them Greek Essenes.

There's obviously a lot of evidence of connections between Jesus

and this group, although he perhaps wasn't specifically a member

of that group.

My personal theory is that he was not a member of that group

because he superseded them.

In other words, they were on a kind of a programme to bring

about the real, the true King of Israel,

in the proper Hebrew-Jewish messianic sense of the word,

and I think that when it came to Jesus, they had succeeded.

So, therefore, he is not a Nazorean as the Gospels referred to him,

he is THE Nazorean. He's the A-1, number one, "That's it, we've done it."

I think that gives us quite a few pointers as to the connection

between the teacher of righteousness and Jesus, the codices and the Dead

Sea Scrolls, because the codices share much with the scrolls,

and I believe that the codices will show the scrolls to be

proto-Christian documents.

I think that's why they've caused such an enormous

amount of controversy.

The David Elkington codices are probably the best example of the

fact that the world wants to maintain the status quo.

Nothing new. Don't rock the boat.

Immediately, everyone jumps on them and says, "No, they're fake!

"They're frauds!" So the Israelis,

every institution in the world says,

"No, no, don't believe anything they say, because they're frauds,"

and it makes you, makes you wonder,

if a real discovery, and maybe this is one, comes out, will anyone

believe it? Is everyone that intent on maintaining the status quo?

We had no other option than to pursue it, in order

to quell the vilification.

It was the only way we could go about this, otherwise we would have

to run and hide and be forever scarred by this appalling

campaign. So I called Roger Webb - we looked him up online and I called

him, and we had a chat,

and he was very jolly about the whole thing. He said, "Well,"

he said, "yeah, they might well be fakes."

He said, "Let's prove it."

All the official channels have written off the codices as fake,

but Elkington decided to have the age of the lead tested

by Professor Roger Webb, a leading expert on ion beam physics.

His first tests on the front cover found radioactive isotopes

still active in the lead, meaning they are less than 150 years old.

Not satisfied with the results,

he ran some more tests on the inside pages.

So, the second test showed the, showed no activity for the inner

pages of the lead, the book, demonstrating the lead now is

actually, was genuinely old, at least over 150 years old.

Compared quite favourably to both

a 400-year-old sample we had from a sash window.

So this was old lead, the weight from a sash window,

and also a sample we had that was an example of Roman lead

that had been in the ground for 2,000 years.

So this was quite favourable and suggested that we had

actually real, old lead, greater than 150 years.

There are aspects to the codices that could not have been faked.

I mean, one of them being that, over the course of 2,000 years,

the metal matrix has disturbed.

So what's happened is that the impurities in the metal have

gradually leached out of the metal,

and they've appeared on the surface, where they've taken crystalline

form and then fallen out, OK?

And you can see on some of the codices, there are holes

in the pages.

And if you look on others, you can see the crystalline growth.

Now, according to our expert, he said,

"Well, you're looking here at a process that takes 1,600-1,800 years.

"2,000 years, easily."

I mean, I certainly believe they are more than 150 years - that

I don't have a problem with. The going back 2,000 years,

I'm, I don't know, I can't put an age on that at all.

There are other evidences that it is actually quite old.

The patina on them does actually indicate that these have

been around and in contact with the ground for a long period of time.

They look very similar to lead that we've dug up out of the ground

from 2,000 years ago.

So it's been in contact with the ground in the same way.

And they look very similar to that, so in terms of the way they look,

they look very authentic.

I've never believed them to be fake. If you follow a logical

progression, why and how they exist and the circumstances

in which you found them, it simply does not tally that they are fake.

And, furthermore,

nobody has yet convinced us of how they were faked.

We've seen fakes. We've seen modern ones, and they are remarkably different.

I mean, so remarkably different that you want to fall about laughing

at how crude they are,

because when you're using lead, it can only be crude when you're using

it in a modern circumstance.

It seems that experts are saying there are multiple dates

ascribed to various bits of the codices,

so it looks like it's been a bit of a mishmash, put together at some

point, not necessarily very recently.

There is still a wall of silence.

There is still a wall of dogma preservation, that, "I don't care

"what you've discovered or how accurately it dates or how authentic

"the non-biased laboratories say it is,

"it's not going to be accepted."

It's really quite worrying.

The Jordan codices' legitimacy is inconclusive at best,

but the mystery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is very much alive.

In the vast open space of Qumran,

there may well be fragments waiting to be discovered by archaeologists

still digging the site today.

Almost habitually, the authorities, the Catholic Church have dismissed

all of these as fakes. "They must be fakes,

"they can't possibly be real," and that could be the case.

But it's also the case that you never know what the earth is going

to spit out, and it could be that one day the earth is going to spit

out something that does undermine the whole value system of

Christianity, of Judaism, of another religion.

So it is a little bit suspicious that whenever something new is dug

up, seemingly promising artefacts, it's often conked on the head

and instantly dismissed.

I think what's more

fascinating about the Dead Sea Scrolls than what's in them

is actually why they were written, why they were hidden.

You know, this was a community that was about to be slaughtered,

basically, by the Romans.

You know, they were on their way out, and we learn more about, you

know, the desperate measures they took to hide the knowledge they had,

how much importance they put on this knowledge,

and then of course, The Copper Scroll, you know, the treasure map,

which is fascinating, you know. But we get to see a community that

knew its number was up.

You know, that's basically what the Dead Sea Scrolls show us.

But, in terms of what they say, not so interesting.

Indications are

that we may have in the Dead Sea Scrolls the tip of the iceberg.

There's probably a lot more. And local and recent

excavations are validating that there are signs of

shards of pottery and little fragments of papyrus that indicate

that even more of the Dead Sea Scrolls are on the black market,

and there's probably all sorts of caves and hideaways around

the Dead Sea that we've yet to find.

They are without doubt a significant historical and Biblical discovery.

But how many other texts and scrolls still lie buried at Qumran

and other sites in Israel and Jordan?

And, importantly, how different

are their facts from what we know from the Bible?

Is this difference, or perhaps a fear of it,

the reason why the authorities covered up the release

of the Dead Sea Scrolls for over 40 years? And how much else is buried

out here in the caves, in the deserts, that would challenge the

Church's view of events of 2,000 years ago.

I'll see you next time.

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