The Vatican Library is displaying the Dead Sea Scrolls, which include some of the fragments discovered in 1947. This fact is proof of the new interest that the documents of the Essene sect of Qumran have aroused, and shows that the Bible that has come down to us has always been transmitted with extraordinary fidelity.

Most of the fragments, more or less extensive, correspond to the Old Testament (OT); however, there is a marked interest in checking whether any book of the New Testament (NT) is documented in Qumran.

As for the OT, all the Hebrew books of the Bible are documented in Qumran, except for Esther. Not all in the same way: some, like the book of Isaiah, are practically intact; of the majority, there are only small fragments. Many of these fragments are known only from provisional and scattered publications; if the editors’ predictions are met, they will appear in volumes X and XII of Discoveries.

The discovery of the biblical documents is of enormous importance, since the oldest complete copies known to us were from around the 9th-10th centuries AD. With the Qumran manuscripts, which date back to the 1st and even 2nd centuries BC, we have gained more than a thousand years in the antiquity of the testimonies. It is therefore of great interest to check whether the texts found at Qumran coincide with those known until now; and, in the event of any discrepancy, to assess what the factors and causes of the variations might be.