In 1947, some ancient jars were discovered by chance in a cave at Qumran near the Dead Sea. Two of them contained scrolls – the ancient equivalent of the book. The manuscripts, which included the Old Testament prophecies of Isaiah, turned out to be 2,000 years old.

Archaeologists searched the surrounding caves and found hundreds of scrolls and thousands of fragments with biblical and other sacred writings.

Up until then the oldest known biblical manuscripts had been from the Middle Ages. The remarkable degree of similarity between the scrolls of Qumran and later Bible copies prove the reliability of Jewish textual tradition: scribes copied the words of Scripture with the utmost reverence and care.

Presumably, the scrolls belonged to the Essenes, a desert community waiting for God to purge the earth from impurity and Roman occupation. They apparently hid their sacred texts in the caves of Qumran during a prolonged Jewish revolt against Rome (AD66–73). 

In his book, Can we trust the Gospels? Bible scholar Peter Williams explains why he went with the word ‘trust’. Nowadays, the word ‘faith’ evokes a sense of ‘non-rational belief – something not based on evidence’. However, for early Christians, the Latin word for faith, fides,  meant something far closer to trust, and ‘trust of course, can be based on evidence’. 

Romans 15.4 says that ‘everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope’. We need hope, endurance and encouragement today. So can we trust the Scriptures? What evidence is there? 

The complete Isaiah scroll discovered in the Qumran caves was dated a thousand years older than any other known copy. This discovery revealed how Scripture had been faithfully copied over the centuries. Go on your own journey of discovery, explore the evidence for the reliability of the Bible, then trust and find the very thing you’re looking for today: encouragement, endurance and hope.

Read on to discover more about the enduring power of the Bible: Hebrews 4.12, 2 Timothy 3.16-17, Psalm 1