In the intervening decades, the scrolls have been enveloped in a storm of controversy and bitter conflict: the scholars entrusted with translating and editing the texts sat on many of them instead, creating suspicions that escalated to conspiracy theories about supposed cover-ups of sensitive, even damaging material. Here, for scholars, students, and the fascinated general reader, are the texts which endure as the nonbiblical center of Judeo-Christianity and the foundation of Western literary traditions.It's been 50 years since a Bedouin youth named Muhammed edh-Dhub went looking for a stray sheep and instead found the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English-the crowning achievement of esteemed biblical scholar Geza Vermes-provides not only reliable, direct access to these intriguing documents but a wealth of scholarly information and an outline of the history surrounding them. After years of academic debate and maneuvering as tense as any espionage novel, the Dead Sea Scrolls and fragments are at last available in their entirety, in an established standard English version. Nothing in the modern study of the ancient Mideast can match the fifty-year saga of these documents hidden by a Jewish sect existing before and during the time of Jesus. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls by a Bedouin goatherd in 1947 transformed our understanding of the Hebrew bible, early Judaism, and the origins of Christianity.
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