Thursday, October 21, 2010

More on Google's planned Dead Sea Scrolls archive

GOOGLE'S PLAN with the IAA to put the Dead Sea Scrolls online (noted here) has received endless media coverage, most of it repetitive. But here's an interesting little photo essay from National Geographic.

UPDATE: Reader Luke Richards calls my attention to a glaring error that I should have noticed myself:
Discovered in caves near the Dead Sea in the 1940s and 1950s, the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek scrolls date to between 150 B.C. and A.D. 70. They include copies of nearly every book in the Old Testament as well as others that are not part of the traditional canon, such as the Gospel of Judas (time line of early Christianity).
That'll teach me to skim a source before linking, even if it's the normally reputable National Geographic Society. The Gospel of Judas is a Gnostic Christian text in Coptic which was apparently found in Egypt. It has absolutely nothing to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls. It seems that someone at the National Geographic Society has been reading too much Dan Brown.