Dead Sea Scrolls authors remain mystery

JERUSALEM (KABC) -- The Dead Sea Scrolls are, without exaggeration or hype, the greatest religious or archeological discovery of the 20th century. The scrolls date back 2,000 years to the era of Jesus Christ. But who wrote them and why? The answers remain a mystery.

"The question of who wrote the scrolls is one of the great debates among scholars 'til this very day," said Oren Ableman, a Dead Sea Scrolls researcher with the Israel Antiquities Authority.

Based on the writings, the authors were likely a pretty controversial group, branching off from the mainstream Judaism of the day. They were "highly intellectual rebels," who were never heard from again, according to Ableman.

"The people who hid these scrolls probably hid them right before the Romans came in and destroyed the place in 68," Ableman said.

Eyewitness News was granted exclusive access to the IAA's Jerusalem laboratory, where more than 15,000 fragments of ancient parchment and papyrus are carefully tended to. With writings in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic - likely the main language used by Jesus himself - the scrolls are kept in a meticulously controlled climate.

"We went to the caves and we monitored the humidity and the temperature over there. That's how we keep the scrolls over here in our laboratory and exhibition," said Orit Kuslanski of the IAA.

One of the interesting aspects of looking at these scrolls is that the scribes made mistakes! There are words that don't belong and other edits. When a mistake was made, the text had to be scratched off of the parchment.

And if you mistakenly wrote God's name? You would need a bit of a holier solution.

"If you want to erase it, you're not allowed to cross it out. It's forbidden. So what you do is, you put dots on the bottom of the script and that indicates that you're supposed to skip that," Kuslanski said.

Much of the work done at the IAA is actually fixing damage done by previous scholars who used scotch tape to piece together the scrolls back in the 1950's.

"No one meant to harm the scrolls," Kuslanski said. "It was never their intention. If they knew now I'm sure they would be upset about it. They did what they knew was best at the time and scotch tape was a new thing back then. It was a new invention."

The scrolls will be on display at the California Science Center beginning on March 10.