Who's ever heard about the Dead Sea Scrolls, put up your hand.
Pretty much every hand in the building.
Now these Dead Sea Scrolls were just coincidentally dug up in 1947, right as the nation of Israel
was being founded.
It just happened to be that nobody found them until then and just supposedly some
shepherd boy threw a rock in a cave and happened to find it just randomly, just happened
to be in the year of 1947.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are being used, for example, you know, Bibles International was a group
that had been angry about our film, New World Order Bible Versions, and they claimed to
be translating from the traditional Bible text, but they said, well, in the Old Testament
though, we deviate from the King James a little bit because of what was found in
the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And I've had people tell me over and over again, well, the King James translators,
they got a lot of things wrong in the Old Testament because they didn't have the
Dead Sea Scrolls, you know, they didn't have the manuscripts available to them that we
have available to us today, so you have to understand that, you know, they didn't
get it right because of that reason.
Well let me just explain to you what the Dead Sea Scrolls are because most people
have heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but they don't really know the details of what
that even means.
And so people today are constantly lying about what the Dead Sea Scrolls are because nobody
bothers to read up on it and they, oh, okay, you know, they just, oh, well, yeah, let's
get the NIV then, you know, because it reflects these modern discoveries.
But let me just start out by saying this, I don't care what the Dead Sea Scrolls are,
why would the Word of God be buried for 2,000 years and then all of a sudden we have
to dig up an accurate copy?
So God has just left us without the true Word of God for thousands of years and
for all these centuries, not just the King James Bible, but all the other Bibles
that were translated around the 1500s, the 1600s, with the printing presses being cranking
in Europe for the first time, everybody's had the wrong Bible all this time because
we dug up something new.
That doesn't, that right there defies the preservation of God's Word.
But let me just explain to you what the Dead Sea Scrolls are.
There is a series of caves that are by the Dead Sea and there are 11 of them that
had old ancient documents found in the manuscripts that are from around 200 BC to
shortly after the time of Christ.
But honestly, 99% of what was found in the caves is from around 100 to 200 BC, okay?
So there's like one document that was from around the time of Christ and it had
nothing to do with Jesus Christ.
So the vast majority of these documents are from, you know, 100, 200 BC.
And basically when you go through all of these documents and add them up, they represent
930 different scrolls that were found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Right next to these caves where the scrolls are found, there's a little settlement or
a little town there that's known as Qumran that was buried in the earth, that was excavated
by archeologists.
And so it's been shown that the people who lived in this settlement in Qumran, these
are their scrolls in the caves right next to where they live and so on and so forth.
And the scrolls explain their way of life and so forth.
You see, out of these 930 scrolls that were found at the Dead Sea, starting in 1947,
about 230 of them are books of the Bible.
So you have a lot of copies of Isaiah, you have a lot of copies of Deuteronomy, a lot
of copies of the Psalms, just all, and every book of the Old Testament is represented
except the book of Esther.
So out of these 230 scrolls, you have at least partial every book of the Old Testament.
And then the other 700 scrolls are not the Bible.
It's just other books and writings of these people who lived there.
Okay.
So let me tell you a little bit about the people who put these scrolls together, who
owned these scrolls, who lived in Qumran.
Basically, this is usually known as the Qumran sect.
And when we say the word sect, usually we would call it cult, okay?
And the reason they're called the Qumran sect is because this is a very strange group
of people who had gone out to live in the middle of the desert in a commune where they
weren't owning any of their own money or their own private property.
If they wanted to join this commune, they had to turn in all their money to the leadership.
They had a cult leader that they called the teacher of righteousness.
And they had all kinds of strange beliefs and doctrines that are found in these scrolls.
Many scholars believe that they were totally celibate, that it was all dudes living there.
Other scholars say, no, they were married.
But even the scholars who say they were married have demonstrated that they had a
very weird view toward women in the scrolls, like a very negative view, like basically
that having a physical relationship with your wife is a bad thing.
You know, it's just kind of only a necessary evil just to procreate, which is obviously
a bizarre, warped doctrine.
You say, how many people lived in this commune, this weird cult out in the middle of the
desert, where it might have been a bunch of dudes or maybe there were some women there
that were looked down upon as, you know, well, you know, necessary evil.
It's been estimated that about 150 to 200 people at a time lived there.
But it was over the course of a few hundred years, like I said, you know, 200 BC until
it was actually AD 66 when people stopped living there.
So over the course of a few hundred years, at any given time, there were about 200 people living there.
Now think about this for a minute.
There are millions of Jews in the world at that time.
There are millions of Jews living in other parts of Judea, living in Jerusalem, living
in other parts of the world.
This is just 200 people.
And not only that, these 200 people have all kinds of weird, strange beliefs.
Here are some of their beliefs.
First of all, they believed in a hardcore predestination, hardcore, what we would today
call a Calvinist view, that just everything that happens is God's will, and that bad
people are bad because God made them that way and there's nothing that they could
do to change that, and good people are good because God made, and there's nothing
they could do to change.
It's just, it's all foreordained.
Every single thing that happened is God's will.
That was one of the beliefs of this group.
Not only that, but these people, and if you would flip over to Mark chapter 7.
Not only that, but these people were basically just obsessed with minutiae of God's law
in the sense that they couldn't see the forest for the trees.
They were just like where Jesus is rebuking the Pharisees and other Jews for having
all these extra man-made rules and washings and things where they just have page after
page in these scrolls, page after page after page, where they're just arguing minutiae.
Like for example, you know how the Bible tells you over and over again, if you do
something that makes yourself unclean, that you're supposed to bathe and wash your flesh
and water, and then you're still considered unclean until the even, until the end of
that day.
Okay.
Why?
Obviously just to make sure that you're actually clean before you're declared clean.
Okay.
So they had just pages and pages arguing about, well, do you have to wash right at
even?
Do you have to wash the moment the sun's going down?
Or is it okay to wash earlier in the day and just be unclean until even?
You know, just going on and on about it.
Another huge argument, they write a letter, this sect, this cult.
They write a letter to the preset Jerusalem where they list everything that's wrong
with the temple.
This is why we can't do sacrifice at the temple.
And keep in mind, did Jesus go to the temple?
Did his mom go to the temple?
Did his stepfather, not his real father, but obviously who raised him, Joseph?
Did they go to the temple?
Did Jesus send people to the temple and say, oh, go offer the gift that Moses commanded?
But no, no, no.
These people had nothing to do with the temple because they said, oh, the temple
is just completely impure.
Everybody in the world's wrong.
Only us 200 people out in the middle of the desert were right, and everybody else
is wrong.
So they wrote this big list of grievances to send to the high priest in Jerusalem of
this is what's wrong with the temple.
And these are some of the gross errors that they pointed out, why they could have nothing
to do with the temple.
Why they have to go live out in the desert.
They said this.
When you're pouring the oil from one vessel into another lower vessel, right?
So let's say I have some oil here and I pour it in, right?
Well, they said this.
What if you're pouring from a clean vessel into an unclean vessel, okay?
Well, that doesn't make the bottom vessel clean, does it?
If it starts out unclean and then you pour something clean into it, it's all dirty,
right?
Any idiot knows that, okay?
But here's what they said.
They said that the uncleanness travels upstream.
So that if you take something clean or like let's say wine, you know, you take some
clean wine and you pour it into the dirty wine, the dirtiness travels upstream and makes
this be dirty.
And that's why we can't worship in Jerusalem.
Just stupid stuff like that.
Here's another thing that they didn't agree with.
And this is a little bit crass but, you know, I'm just giving you the facts here.
Another thing that they said was that it was unlawful, according to the Bible, to
use the bathroom on the Sabbath day.
Can't do it.
I mean, no elimination on the Sabbath day.
This is one of their core teachings.
See, these people are missing the weightier matters of the law, love, mercy and judgment.
They're the type that wanted to tithe on the mint, anise and cumin and then miss out
on the big picture.
Look what Jesus said in Mark chapter 7 verse 1, then came together unto him the Pharisees
and certain of the scribes which came from Jerusalem.
And when they saw some of his disciples eat bread with defiled, that is to say, with
unwashed hands, they found fault.
For the Pharisees, watch this, and all the Jews.
So was it just the Pharisees?
And all the Jews, except they wash their hands off to eat not, holding the tradition
of the elders.
And when they come from the market, except they wash, they eat not.
And many other things there be which they have received to hold as the washing of cups
and pots, brazen vessels and of tables.
Then the Pharisees and scribes asked him, Why walk not thy disciples according to the
tradition of the elders, but eat bread with unwashed hands?
He answered and said unto them, Well hath the Zias prophesied of you hypocrites.
As it is written, This people honoreth me with their lips, but their heart is far
from me.
Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.
For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men, as the washing
of pots and cups, and many other such like things ye do.
And he said unto them, Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your
own tradition.
This is a perfect picture of these people living in Qumran because they're missing
out on what God told them to do of actually going and offering these sacrifices at Jerusalem
and going to the temple and going through all that.
Because this is the Old Testament mind you, 200 B.C., 100 B.C.
Because they're too worried about whether that pot that was at the top of the equation
was still clean after pouring it into a dirty vessel.
I mean, just that kind of stupid minutia and splitting of errors.
I mean, these people made the Pharisees look lenient on these cleanliness laws.
They're writing to the Pharisees saying, You guys are too watered down.
Everything's unclean.
The whole temple's unclean.
You guys are getting it all wrong.
These people were a very strange group of people, weird beliefs, and it's only 150,
200 people.
Let's talk about the scrolls themselves.
But first of all, does this sound like the group of people that you would trust to give
you the definitive what the Old Testament really said, what it really said back then?
I mean, I know this is the traditional Old Testament text that's been passed out
that everybody's been reading and believing and preaching, but we dug up what it really
said back then from some weird group.
Not only that, but there's evidence of them tampering with scripture at this group.
The most famous Dead Sea scroll is known as the Isaiah scroll.
Who's ever heard of that?
But here's what you don't know about the Isaiah scroll, is that in the cave where
the Isaiah scroll was found, which is known as cave one, there were actually two Isaiah
scrolls found.
One of them was pristine, relatively pristine and in really good condition, and this is
the famous Isaiah scroll, the whole book of Isaiah preserved unto us and so forth.
And people talk a lot about that.
That one is known as 1Q Isaiah A. That's the scholarly designation for it.
But there's also a 1Q Isaiah B that was found in the same cave.
And here's what has been found.
1Q Isaiah B matches up with what we have today, Masoretic, you know, traditional Hebrew
Old Testament that our King James is translated from.
Whereas scroll A was written by the people at the sect themselves, and this is evidenced
by the fact that the language had been updated to their style of language at that
time.
See, the book of Isaiah had been written centuries before.
They had updated the language to their time period and made changes.
So you literally have right next to each other in the same cave, the right one that
was in worse shape so it doesn't get as much publicity because it's more beat up and had
more fragments from it and everything.
And then you have this other nicer, newer one that's the one that they've changed.
Now you can tell that they changed it because of the fact that they had their
own style of Hebrew that they used in this Qumran sect.
Now religions have done this throughout history where they developed their own way of speaking.
Like for example, the Quakers are a good example of this, where the Quakers would
use the and thou forms and they would talk differently than everyone else around them
basically as a style to kind of set them apart, where they want to dress funny and
talk funny just to kind of distance themselves from normal people.
So these people had their own style of Hebrew, and in this style of Hebrew they made
it sound old but they violated grammar to do so.
It's sort of like when people try to talk like the King James but they don't really
understand the King James language.
So they're like, well I thinketh.
You know, they don't understand that in the King James, you know, thinketh would be
he thinketh or she thinketh, thou thinkest, not thou thinketh.
It's thou think, thou thinks or you know, it's, they don't understand the difference
between like a first person, second person, third person, you know what I mean?
So they just kind of throw in a lot of these and thou's just to sound.
That's what these people do in their scrolls, where they try to make it sound all holy
and old fashioned.
So they have their distinct language style.
So you have right next to each other these two Isaiah's that don't match.
So does this sound like a trustworthy place to correct the Bible that we've all, millions
and millions and millions and millions and millions of people have?
No it's wrong.
Look at the one we dug up from Qumran.
Now when I explain this to my brother Clint, here's what he said.
He said it's sort of like if you dug up a Mormon church and you found a King James
and then you found, you know, a Book of Mormon and then you found a Joseph Smith
translation of the Bible and said, oh well this is the real Bible or I'm going to trust
them for their King James.
Because the Book of Mormon, 75% of the Book of Mormon is plagiarized from the King James.
Hello?
So, but you know, I'll take it a step further because at least the Mormons have
like what, 10 million members.
This is 200 people.
This would be more like if you went up to Northern Arizona to the fundamental LDS
where they follow Warren Jeffs, the cult up there and it would be like if you trusted
them to tell you where the real Bible is.
I mean would any of you drive up to Northern Arizona where the polygamous FLDS cult is,
Warren Jeffs I think is now in prison, the cult leader, but I think he's still
the leader from prison.
Would you drive up there and trust all those people that are marrying, you know,
marrying all the 11, 12 and 13 year olds to have 18 wives and 20 wives, all these
creepy, weird FLDS.
Are you going to go to them and say, would you show us the true Word of God?
But even that's not even a good enough example because at least there's about 10,000
of them.
We're talking about 200 weirdos and that's who you're trusting to just throw the historical
traditional Bible in the trash.
But doesn't it just sound so scholarly though?
The Dead Sea Scrolls.
I mean the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Brother, have you taken the Dead Sea Scrolls into account?
But see nobody knows what they really are when you actually look at the evidence.
Here's other books by the way that they had.
Not only did they have these 230 Bible manuscripts, they had 700 other books.
Well here's some of the other things they had.
They had a book called the Genesis Apocryphon which is basically just a rewriting of
the book of Genesis, just rewriting it in their own words, completely different wording.
But presenting it as scripture.
Not only that, they had another book called the Book of Jubilees which is a similar book.
Then they had a book called the Temple Scroll which is basically Deuteronomy with
a bunch of changes made and instead of God speaking to Moses, it's just God speaking
directly.
So it's claiming to be scripture and it's just a reworking, rewriting of tons of books
like this just twisting scripture.
Sort of like the Book of Mormon where they take scripture and just kind of change
it and rework it and so forth.
Not only that, but they had a giant copper scroll that's basically a buried treasure
map to 26 tons of gold.
Not only that, they had a book on horoscope information where you could tell what your
kids will look like depending on what time of year you conceive them.
So these people are real winners.
And then of course they had the Book of Enoch into the bargain, the so-called Book of Enoch
which they said, oh we have an original Hebrew Book of Enoch found in the Dead Sea
Scrolls.
That's a lie.
It's an Aramaic, not Hebrew.
Totally different language.
Related to Hebrew but not the same language.
But I got to hurry up.
I'm out of time.
But here's what blew me away as I was studying the Dead Sea Scrolls.
You know what a lot of the scholars were saying?
Well we believe, they said, that an earthquake may reveal more scrolls.
The right earthquake is going to reveal more scrolls.
So here's the thing.
These people are willing to change their Bible tomorrow.
I mean, look, if they dug up some new scroll at the Dead Sea tomorrow, James White would
change everything.
I mean we have him in New World Order Bibles and saying all research on textual criticism
before the Egyptian papyri is irrelevant.
He said Westcott and Hoare got it wrong because they were working before the papyri.
Everything's changed now.
Look, what if they dug up something tomorrow, they'll change everything.
Are you willing to just change the Bible?
No, it's been preserved.
It's been passed down to every generation.
And the thing that's so weird about this, where they're ready to just change, think
about it.
The devil had this stuff, the devil had all this junk in that cave.
He knew it was there and he pulls it out at the right time.
When the devil wants to pull it out, when he's ramping up for the end times, he's
getting the false Jewish state together.
All right, let's get out those stupid scrolls from 2,000 years ago from that weird cult
so we can change the Bible.
Now you say, well Pastor Anderson, I've always heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls confirming
the Word of God.
Yeah, confirming the Word of God to the faithless.
To people who had no faith, basically it showed that there was some kind of Old Testament
manuscript that went back 2,000 years.
But did we ever doubt that?
No.
That's just for the faithless.
And they say, well, it's pretty close to what we have today.
Well, close but no cigar.
Because you need to have every word.
I don't care about the archeological discovery because it's junk.
Because it's from a weird cult and it should be completely rejected out of hand
as being totally irrelevant to what we have today in the traditional received, passed
down Bible.