Refutation of current religions X; the Dead Sea Scrolls  

I am pretty sure a lot of Christians would prefer if there was no evidence to suggest that their sacred bible might not be the complete truth.
I was in a church this morning and was going to ask them a few questions that I am interested in but as they are friends as well it is difficult to approach it in a tactful way, so I might put them up here later.
It might be interesting to see what you have to say about them!

Very nice text, as the others in the series.

Since I was out of mylot because of Brazil´s Carnival I will read it (all the series, today).

Very good job.

To me, Jesus has always been some mythical character in the same vein as Robin Hood or William Tell. A single character created by several stories about various people, either real or imagined.

Here is a fairly good web page I found: http://nobeliefs.com/exist.htm
The conclusion is pretty good in my opinion, and I'd like to quote a part of it:

"Of course a historical Jesus *may* have existed, perhaps based loosely on a living human even though his actual history got lost, but this amounts to nothing but speculation. However we *do* have an abundance of evidence supporting the mythical evolution of Jesus. Virtually every detail in the gospel stories occurred in pagan and/or Hebrew stories, long before the advent of Christianity. We simply do not have a shred of evidence to determine the historicity of a Jesus 'the Christ.' We only have evidence for the *belief* of Jesus."

I think it sums it up quite nicely.

usual excellent work, will be adding this to the rest of the series.

Okay, I read this again, and this time I have to ask, how do we know that the scrolls aren't created to obscure particular text and omit any wording or working of Jesus, you say they talk of every self proclaimed prophet, including John the Baptist and Paul and yet no Jesus? That leaves us with two conclusions to me made, Jesus was expunged or added.

I see you taking the path that Jesus was added... How do you reconcile that with the Magdalene Gospel?

Am I following too close or not close enough?

the new 'gospels' are

THE NAG HAMMADI LIBRARY:

"The Nag Hammadi library (popularly known as The Gnostic Gospels) is a collection of early Christian Gnostic texts discovered near the town of Nag Hammâdi in 1945. That year, twelve leather-bound papyrus codices buried in a sealed jar were found by a local peasant named Mohammed Ali. The writings in these codices comprised fifty-two mostly Gnostic tractates (treatises), but they also include three works belonging to the Corpus Hermeticum and a partial translation / alteration of Plato's Republic. The codices are believed to be a library hidden by monks from the nearby monastery of St Pachomius when the possession of such banned writings denounced as heresy was made an offense. The zeal of Athanasius in extirpating non-canonical writings and the Theodosian decrees of the 390s may have motivated the hiding of such dangerous literature.

The contents of the codices were written in Coptic, though the works were probably all translations from Greek. The best-known of these works is probably the Gospel of Thomas, of which the Nag Hammadi codices contain the only complete text. After the discovery it was recognized that fragments of these sayings of Jesus appeared in manuscripts discovered at Oxyrhynchus in 1898, and matching quotations were recognized in other early Christian sources. Subsequently, a 1st or 2nd century date of composition circa 80 AD for the lost Greek originals of the Gospel of Thomas has been proposed, though this is disputed by many if not the majority of biblical matter researchers. The once buried manuscripts themselves date from the **3rd and 4th centuries."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nag_Hammadi_library

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THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS:

"The Dead Sea scrolls (Hebrew: ?????? ?? ????) comprise roughly 825-872 documents, including texts from the Hebrew Bible, discovered between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves in and around the Wadi Qumran (near the ruins of the ancient settlement of Khirbet Qumran, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea) in the West Bank. The texts are of great religious and historical significance, as they are practically the only known surviving Biblical documents written before AD 100."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_sea_scrolls

and..

"The Scrolls can be divided into two categories—biblical and non-biblical. Fragments of every book of the Hebrew canon (OLD TESTAMENT) have been discovered except for the book of Esther.

5. There are now identified among the scrolls, 19 copies of the Book of Isaiah, 25 copies of Deuteronomy and 30 copies of the Psalms .

6. Prophecies by Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Daniel not found in the Bible are written in the Scrolls.

7. The Isaiah Scroll, found relatively intact, is 1000 years older than any previously known copy of Isaiah. In fact, the scrolls are the oldest group of Old Testament manuscripts ever found.

8. In the Scrolls are found never before seen psalms attributed to King David and Joshua.

9.There are nonbiblical writings along the order of commentaries on the OT, paraphrases that expand on the Law, rule books of the community, war conduct, thanksgiving psalms, hymnic compositions, benedictions, liturgical texts, and wisdom writings."
http://www.centuryone.com/25dssfacts.html