More than any other archaeological find, the Dead Sea Scrolls sit at the pinnacle of discoveries important to Christianity. Found over 60 years ago, the Scrolls still generate controversy, whether it be over their publication (or lack of), authorship, or interpretation.
Debate has been stirred up by recent claims of Professor Rachel Elior (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) that the Scrolls were not written by the Jewish sect of Essenes living at the nearby settlement of Khirbet Qumran. Rather, she holds that they belonged to Sadducees from Jerusalem who believed the Temple had been corrupted, and thus removed their valuable library of manuscripts in the second century BC.
She is not the first scholar to highlight a disconnect between the Scrolls, their archaeological context of the caves and commonly accepted theories regarding those who wrote them. While a large body of scholarship attributes their authorship to the Essenes, other theories have circulated for a long time. Even today this issue is not settled. In the absence of further scientific or archaeological evidence, debate is likely to rage on.
The mass media enjoy a good academic dog-fight. Journalists (and readers) love it when fur starts to fly, legal writs are issued, and the normally rarefied atmosphere of the academe is sullied by the kind of unseemly behavior that besets the rest of us.
The question of authorship is undoubtedly interesting from a range of scholarly perspectives. For us, however, such debates change little about the overall importance of the Scrolls for the transmission of the Bible through antiquity.