Dead Sea Scrolls

This past Thursday I had the opportunity to visit the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit currently on display at Union Station in Kansas City, MO. It was a very well done exhibit including over 150 artifacts, models, and reconstructions. At the end of the exhibit there were also a number of hands-on displays for the children. The exhibit also used multimedia by using film and a device that plays prerecorded meesages giving the visitors a self-guided tour of the exhibit.

The highlight of the exhibit of course were the scrolls themselves. The exhibit included 4 replicas of the Dead Sea Scrolls and six of the actual scrolls. There were also a number of other interesting biblical texts such as: a Gutenberg Bible, a 3rd edition Luther Bible, a first edition (1611) King James Version, a Geneva Bible and a parallel Tyndale/Erasmus' Latin New Testament. The Geneva and Tyndale Bibles are English translations that predate the King James Version.

The exhibit was well worth the time and money. I highly recommend that if you are in Kansas City you take the time to visit the exhibit. Victory FWB Church has a group that will be visiting the exhibit in April, and I look forward to visiting the exhibit again.

Probably the thing that struck me the most from this exhibit, was the sense of how God must oversee the transmission and preservation of his word. The Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts are over 2000 years old, and yet there is very little divergence from the Masoretic Text, the Hebrew text from the middle-ages that forms the basis of most English translation of the Old Testament now.