[music playing] It is considered by millions
to be the actual word of God, the holy testament, the
sacred Scripture, the Bible. For centuries, men and women
have argued its meanings, its lessons, and its
historical accuracy. But has the Bible been
translated, edited, and even censored so many times that
its original stories have been compromised by time? People want to know. This is what God said,
I'm going to do it. That's it. It's in the Bible. The Bible may be
divinely inspired, but there are human
fingerprints all over it. It's very dangerous
to use the Bible as a pretext for anything. We really don't know who
the people are who put the New Testament together. NARRATOR: It is one of the most
important books ever written. Its contents have been studied,
debated, and fought over for thousands of years. But does the Bible
also contain secrets? Secret promises? Secret characters? Secret texts? Now, for the first time,
an extraordinary series will challenge everything we
think, everything we know, and everything we
believe about the Bible. Qumran, British mandate
Palestine, 1947. Ancient caves dot the
parched hillsides a mile from the Dead Sea. A Bedouin shepherd
stumbles into a cavern and discovers a collection
of antique clay jars, and with them are seven
handwritten scrolls. When examined, the scrolls
reveal something not only of historical significance, but
of great religious consequence, because they're written
on crumbling parchment and papyrus. It's the oldest and perhaps
most accurate version of what is widely referred to as
the Old Testament of the Bible. The most significant
archaeological discovery of the 20th century, in
fact, of modern times, has been the Dead Sea Scrolls. They're books written by Jews
living in about the same time and about the same
place as Jesus himself. ROBERT R. CARGILL: With the
discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars got a glimpse
of actual biblical texts, handwritten texts, that
were 1,000 years older than the previously
oldest texts that we had. NARRATOR: The scrolls
found at Qumran contain fragments of
all but one of the 39 books of the so-called
Old Testament, and are written in Hebrew,
Aramaic, and the Greek. But also found were
contradictions, discrepancies of detail and language that
have left theologians and Bible scholars scratching their heads. People want to know,
this is what God said. I'm going to do it. That's it. It's in the Bible. What they don't realize
that lying behind that Bible that they buy in the store is
just centuries and centuries of scholars arguing over how
the Bible should actually be interpreted. We have to understand that
when we talk about Scripture, we are talking about
sacred history, not what we today would refer
to as history, verifiable dates and events. NARRATOR: The Old Testament
is the cornerstone of faith for millions of
people across the globe. For more than
2,000 years, it has formed the basis for
what we now refer to as Western civilization. For centuries, it was
believed that the author of the first five books
was the prophet Moses. But in recent years, that
belief has been questioned by most biblical scholars. The Bible is
basically anonymous. For the most part, we don't
know who wrote the Bible. Even the most
conservative person can say that there was no
eyewitnesses at the account of creation, so we can say
that the Bible was written after the fact. NARRATOR: Like many
works that are translated from another language,
otherwise simple words are often subjected to intense
scrutiny and widely differing interpretations. In Genesis, the very first
statement made about humanity. It says that God made Adam,
which is often translated man, in His image, is
male and female. And in fact, this
word is a common noun meaning the entire human
race, not a single individual. So that's an example
of the translation that was made misled people
into misunderstanding what the text is saying. DAVID WOLPE: There's
a lot in the Bible that tells you that whatever
part of God is in there, some human being
is in there, too. And you also know it by some
of the ideas and the way that they develop and evolve-- some of the contradictions, some
of the same stories told twice. NARRATOR: One Bible
tale containing curious contradictions is the
story of the young King David and his deadly battle against
the Philistine giant Goliath. David gets his slingshot. He throws the rock. It hits the Goliath in the head
and it knocks him out and kills him. And if you read 1
Samuel 17:49 and 50, it says, "and he killed
him with the stone." And then it specifically says
there was no sword in his hand. Goliath is dead without a sword. And if you read the
very next verse, it then says David then
took Goliath's sword and cut off his
head and killed him. So now you've got Goliath
being killed twice. However, in 2 Samuel 21,
we have a different name-- Elhanan, instead of David-- as the one who killed Goliath. So now the question is,
who really killed Goliath? Was it David or was it Elhanan? NARRATOR: Curiously, in a
later book of the Hebrew Bible, Chronicles, the
question of who killed Goliath appears to be answered. In the account of
Elhanan killing Goliath, the Hebrew text is very clear. Elhanan kills Goliath. But in the English
translations, it actually says that he kills the
brother of Goliath. That way David gets the credit
for killing Goliath and Elhanan gets credit for killing
Goliath's brother. NARRATOR: Is this an example
of a simple historical mistake, or might the story
of David and Goliath have been deliberately altered
to give the future Hebrew King David credit for performing
an act of bravery? We know these books are
not historically accurate because they have
discrepancies in them and contradictions
among themselves. They are at odds
with one another. They're clearly told from
a particular religious perspective. They're not disinterested
history the way we would think of it today. NARRATOR: Similar
confusion and controversy surround the four gospels of
the so-called New Testament. For centuries,
theologians and scholars believed them to be actual
firsthand accounts of the life of Jesus, as written by
the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It's a nice, neat package. And that's the tradition. The problem is that
that's not the reality. That's not what happened. NARRATOR: Most
biblical scholars now agree that the first of
the gospels to be written was the Gospel of Mark
in approximately 70 AD. For this reason, it is
considered highly unlikely, if not impossible,
that any of them were actual first-hand accounts. CANDIDA MOSS: So we have
four gospels, written by four different authors,
decades, maybe as long as a century, after he died. And none of these authors
actually met Jesus. ELAINE PAGELS: We really don't
know who the people are who put the New Testament together. In fact, we had
Christianity for 300 years before we had a New Testament. NARRATOR: But if, as most
Bible scholars and theologians believe, the accounts
of Jesus' life weren't written by people
who actually knew him, then who were the authors? And why did they give credit to
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? ROBERT R. CARGILL:
Nobody's going to listen to the gospel of Bob. But if I put I, Paul,
or I, Peter, or I, Moses, if I put it into the name
of someone who has authority, then whatever I'm saying
will be taken more seriously. BART EHRMAN: Many scholars are
reluctant to call these books forgeries, and so they call them
pseudepigrapha, because nobody knows what pseudepigrapha means. Pseudepigrapha is a word that
literally means of writing inscribed with a lie,
because the author's lying about his own identity. These authors had
a goal in mind. They had an agenda. And they included the
stories that met that agenda. NARRATOR: In first
century Palestine, Jews and early Christians were
living under Roman occupation. And those who followed
the teachings of Jesus were often put to death. But even though he was
believed by his followers to be the one, true Messiah,
the savior whose coming had been foretold in the
Hebrew testaments, the oldest known
accounts of Jesus' life were not written in Aramaic, the
language he spoke, or Hebrew, but in Greek. REZA ASLAN: Greek was the Lingua
Franca of the Roman Empire. And it was certainly the most
common language of the Roman elite. FRANCESCA
STAVRAKOPOULOU: They're going to get more
money to support their missionary activities
by writing in Greek and spreading the word in Greek. They're not interested
particularly in how many Jewish people
they have in their movement. They want Romans with money. NARRATOR: In 313 AD,
Emperor Constantine I ended the persecution of
Christians in the Roman Empire and declared Christianity
to be the official religion. ROBERT R. CARGILL: Constantine
gets credit for basically saying, look, I don't care what
you guys say that you believe, just give me a Bible so
I can tell people here's what we believe. ROBERT MULLINS: So you get this
melding of religious belief with political control. NARRATOR: An emperor
authoring the Bible? Is the Holy Bible
really the inspired word of an almighty God or a
collection of stories authored by a number of
largely anonymous men? For the answer, it is necessary
to examine the religious texts more closely and seek the
truth that lies hidden behind the holy words. [music playing] NARRATOR: Born in a stable,
surrounded by animals, angels, and three wise men, the
story of the birth of Jesus is familiar to millions
around the world. But as far as many religious and
Bible scholars are concerned, there is quite a different story
behind the written accounts of the nativity. DALE MARTIN: A lot of the
things that people assume are in the Bible are
later Christian traditions that developed, for
example that there were three wise men at Jesus' birth. JEFFREY GEOGHEGAN: According
to the Gospel of Matthew, wise men come and visit Jesus
perhaps months, even years, after Jesus' birth. We're told that they bring
gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Three gifts, so why
not three kings? We actually don't know
how many kings there were who came to visit Jesus. DALE MARTIN: One of
the misconceptions is that when you see a
Christmas creche, all of the different
people and things who are there at a
Christmas creche-- the lambs, the sheep,
the stable and the kings and the angels and Mary and
Joseph and the baby Jesus-- they were all there in
some place in the Bible. There are angels in a stable and
animals and shepherds in Luke. But in Matthew, Jesus seems
to be born in a regular house, and the wise men come
to visit him there. REZA ASLAN: The childhood
nativity stories that we find in Matthew and Luke
are full fictions. But here's the important
thing to understand, for the ancient writers of the
time, for the gospel writers, it was perfectly acceptable
to write stories about gods and goddesses whose underlying
facts were universally and widely seen as untrue,
but whose underlying truths were seen as eternally true. NARRATOR: If such details have
been confused by mixing the, accounts is it also possible,
as some scholars believe, that various translations
over the centuries have misreported other key
facts about the birth of Jesus? FRANCESCA STAVRAKOPOULOU:
Christians claim that Jesus was born of a virgin. And this claim comes
from a prophetic text, the book of Isiah, Chapter 7. And the word that's
used in the Hebrew text to talk about this
young woman is almah, which basically
means a woman who is of marriageable age. ELAINE PAGELS: But when
you translate the Hebrew into Greek, it becomes virgin. And that's when it can
become for Matthew and Luke a sort of bolt of lightning
saying, oh, it was a miracle, his mother was a virgin. So that's where you get
a different translation. BART EHRMAN: The English
reader is getting a translation of the text that's from a
different language, which meant something slightly different
in the other language. The Bible may be
divinely inspired, but there are human
fingerprints all over it. FRANCESCA STAVRAKOPOULOU:
Combined with the beginnings of what starts to become quite a
misogynistic religious culture, you begin to get the idea
that Jesus must have been born of a virgin. But it's essentially
a mistranslation. NARRATOR: A mistranslation? Is it possible that
the stories of Jesus, like many other Bible stories,
have been told and retold, translated and read
translated, so many times that their historical accuracy
has become muddled, lost to time? BART EHRMAN: The
problem is that it's all a matter of translation. For example, in
the Gospel of Mark, Jesus says that the
Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Therefore, the son of man
is Lord of the Sabbath. Why would that make Jesus
the Lord of the Sabbath? ROBERT R. CARGILL: Remember
that Jesus speaks Aramaic. So the New Testament
is written in Greek with a few Aramaic
words thrown in there. But Jesus speaks Aramaic, and
in Aramaic, Barenos, son of man, is just a way of saying a dude. The secret about
the word son of man is that in Aramaic it's just
the way that you say a person. BART EHRMAN: If you translate
this passage back into Aramaic, the word for son of man
and the word for man is the same word, barenos. In other words, humans have
priority over the Sabbath. When this got
translated into Greek, that meaning got changed so
that now all of a sudden Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath. The Bible is always
about interpretation, the biblical text written
either in Hebrew or in Aramaic or in Greek, but
every translation is an interpretation. NARRATOR: According to
many biblical scholars, imprecise translations
are only partly to blame. They also point to the fact that
the New Testament was written not on scrolls, but on
individual pages, known as a codex. LORI ANNE FERRELL: Throughout
the history of Christianity, what we see is that Christians
love new technology. They're the first to embrace
the codex, a book with pages. And this is because
the way that Christians read the Bible is that they have
to be able to compare passages. And the best way to do that
is put your finger on one part of the book and
flip back to another. They're the first
people to hyperlink. CHRIS KEITH: One of the reasons
I think that the Christians preferred the codex was because
they had a physical artifact that marked out their
distinction from people who used another book form
for their holy text. Christians used the codex. Jews used the scrolls. [music playing] NARRATOR: All four gospels
of the New Testament-- Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John-- recount how Jesus was crucified
and his body buried in a tomb. They also describe his
appearance to the women mourning at his grave-- three days after his death. The original Gospel of Mark
ends with Chapter 16, Verse 8, in which the women go
to wash Jesus's body. And when they get
to the tomb, they see that the tomb
has been rolled back. It's empty. And the Gospel actually ends
with Verse 8, in which Mark writes, "The women
went away from there and said nothing to anyone,
for they were afraid." It says the women run
away, said nothing to anyone for they were afraid. And then it just stops. NARRATOR: But why
would this story come to such an abrupt end? Some scholars believe
it might simply be that the original ending
was written on a page that was deleted or destroyed. A very old theory was that
Mark's gospel was in a codex and the back page fell off. REZA ASLAN: It was
many, many years later that a later redactor,
very likely unsatisfied by that ending in
the Gospel of Mark, added eight more verses to the
Gospel of Mark, in which you have this resurrection
appearance. MARK GOODACRE: So the
earliest scribes of Mark added fresh endings on. One of them became very
popular, the ending that you see in most Bibles today. You might say that the
story of the resurrection actually emerges as an
interesting literary story, partly because people are so
dissatisfied with Mark's story. NARRATOR: Is it possible
that the account of Jesus' divine resurrection, one of
the most important tenets of Christianity, was the
consequence of a missing page? Many scholars now believe
that as Christianity became more popular and more powerful,
it became common practice to edit the New Testament
in ways that would support evolving religious beliefs. But deliberately
altering the Bible could also have deadly
consequences, particularly if the changes ran afoul
of traditional thought or political agendas. [music playing] NARRATOR: Oxford, England,
1382, philosopher and biblical scholar John Wycliffe is under
suspicion for his radical ideas to reform the Catholic Church,
including his own translation of the New Testament. After his death two years later,
the Catholic Church officially declares his version of
the Bible to be heresy. LORI ANNE FERRELL: Wycliffe
died in his bed, safe and sound. So the Church judges Wycliffe
a heretic after his death. He has a posthumous judgment
made against him for heresy. The state digs him
up and puts what's left of his body in the flames. And that's a message to his
followers, that heresy must be expunged, dead or alive. ROBERT MULLINS: The Church
wanted to keep control over the message of the Bible. And so there was an
official translation. That was the only one
that was to be used. And the priests
were the ones that were to do the
interpretation and so forth. NARRATOR: What was the
nature of Wycliffe's heresy? What had he done that caused
his very soul to be condemned for all eternity? Believe it or not,
his crime was simply that he had translated the
Bible from the Vulgate, or the traditional
Latin, into English, a crime punishable by death. Prior to the translation
of the Bible into German, et cetera, what you have
is the Bible in Latin or the Bible in Greek
or the Bible in Hebrew. And the only people
who had access to that were generally people who
were priests or officiants in the Church. BART EHRMAN: The Roman Catholic
Church wanted the Latin Bible to be the Bible. And the idea of putting
the Bible into a vernacular language so an average
person could read it was strictly forbidden. NARRATOR: Even as late
as the 16th century, possession of an unlicensed
Bible carried a death sentence. In 1529, English scholar
and linguist William Tyndale was, like Wycliffe, accused
of heresy for his translation of the New Testament. ROBERT MULLINS: The
feeling amongst many of the Protestant reformers,
including Tyndale, is that the Bible should
be read by every person. It should be in the
hands of everyone. And so Tyndale himself set out
to make his own translation of the Bible from the original
Hebrew and Greek scriptures into an English
translation and even took advantage of the printing
press to disseminate his Bible. NARRATOR: But
Tyndale's translation was not the only threat facing
the Roman Catholic Church. A few years earlier, the
English king, Henry VIII, had become embroiled in a
bitter battle with Pope Clement VII over his request
for an annulment of his childless marriage
to Catherine of Aragon. Henry's desire to
take a new, young wife would eventually lead
to a break with Rome and the creation of
the Church of England. ROBERT R. CARGILL: We need to
remember that the Protestant Reformation wasn't just
a religious battle. It was also a political battle. The Vatican had a lot of power. And as different countries,
different kings came to power, they needed the blessing
of the pope at the Vatican to do certain things, like,
for instance, get divorced. And when the pope said no, there
were some, like Henry VIII, who said you know what, I'm
going to form my own church, and we're going to have our own
clergy and our own hierarchy. And we're going to use the
Bible as the foundation of it. And we're going to
do our own thing. BRADLEY HALE: The
pope essentially has investments in England. He is interested in the
real estate of England. The Church owns land. The Church is making
money off land in England. If Henry splits from
the Roman church, then the revenues from England
aren't going to make it back to Rome. And this is a
danger for the pope. LORI ANNE FERRELL:
Henry VIII is the person who is associated with the
first production of a Bible in English. But he took some persuading. Henry makes a proclamation of
1530 that says, in essence, you can translate the Bible when
I tell you to and not before. NARRATOR: One of
those who disobeyed the much married monarch's
orders was William Tyndale. In 1536, he was tried
for heresy, found guilty, and was sentenced to be
burned to death at the stake. LORI ANNE FERRELL:
William Tyndale died because he made
it possible for people to read the Bible in English. And he was still doing
translation work in the prison before he was taken
for execution. The way that he was
killed, as a form of mercy, he was strangled before
the flames reached him. And this was probably because of
some respect that was accorded to him as a great scholar. To translate the
Bible into English was a life or death proposition. People died for this cause. NARRATOR: Ironically, within
three years of Tyndale's death, Henry VIII, now the head
of the Church of England, authorized his own English
translation of the Bible to be used throughout
the new church. BRADLEY HALE:
Eventually, Henry VIII decides that it's not
so bad having the Bible, especially if he can control it. LORI ANNE FERRELL: In
1539, Henry brings out, with his picture on the
title page, a Bible that has been commissioned by him. And it's called the Great
Bible, or the King's Bible. It shows the king
in what we think of as the prime real estate
place of a title page, sort of top and center. And he is holding out copies
of the translated Bible to his statesman on one side
and his churchmen on the other. It is definitely a
portrait of power. And after him, all monarchs
want their own Bible. NARRATOR: Half a century
later, in 1604, King James I of England assembled
a group of 47 scholars to begin work on yet
another English language translation of the Bible-- the King James Version. But it too was not without
its share of controversy. BART EHRMAN: As a very famous
example of the problem that we have with the King
James translation, probably the most familiar
story to people from the gospels is the story of Jesus and the
woman taken in adultery, John, Chapter 7 and 8. CANDIDA MOSS: In
the Gospel of John, there's this really charming
story of the scribes and the pharisees bringing
to Jesus this woman that they caught in the act of
committing adultery. And they're going
to stone her, which is the punishment for adultery. And Jesus says, let the
person who is without sin cast the first stone. BART EHRMAN: This is a
beautiful story about Jesus. It's in every movie ever made
about Jesus from Hollywood. And it wasn't originally
in the New Testament. It was added to the New
Testament by later scribes. It's not in our earliest
manuscripts of the New Testament. But the King James
translators didn't have access to these early manuscripts. They translated the story, put
it into John, Chapter 7 and 8, even though originally
it wasn't there. CANDIDA MOSS: It was
a traditional story that people told
about Jesus, but it wasn't in the Gospel of John. It probably never
happened at all. NARRATOR: Just as many in
the early Church feared and predicted, translating
the Bible into vernacular English, French, and other
languages opened the door to many more translations,
revisions, and interpretations. And with those interpretations
came new religions and the promise of a new world
in which to practice them. [music playing] NARRATOR: As the King James
Bible spread the word of God and the power of the
Church of England, it also changed the
English language. LORI ANNE FERRELL: Most people
don't realize that they quote the Bible every day. There is so much of it that has
slipped into everyday language that we wouldn't even
recognize it as biblical, words like at my wit's
end, or bite the dust, by the skin of your teeth,
put your house in order. These all derive from
the King James Bible. NARRATOR: The King
James Bible also enabled English-speaking
Christians to develop their
own interpretations and to break away
into their own sects. ROBERT R. CARGILL: It opens
the floodgates for all these different groups to say,
well, we don't agree with what you guys say, so we're
going to go do this and we're going to do this. And this is how you get all
of the Christian denominations today. NARRATOR: Many of these
independent worshippers, like Puritans and
Quakers, sought to find a home for their
religious beliefs in America. LORI ANNE FERRELL: King James
would have never thought the very people who left his
country to get away from him would make his Bible the
centerpiece of their worship. That's the great irony
of American history. BRADLEY HALE: In America,
books are very expensive. If a family is
going to own a book, they're going to own a Bible. And it's going to be
a King James Bible. NARRATOR: But just as King
Henry and King James insisted on their own translations
of the Bible, there were now a
growing number of others who were intent on publishing
their own interpretations. Even Thomas Jefferson, while in
office as the third president of the United States,
secretly decided to edit his own American
version of the Bible. JENNIFER WRIGHT-KNUST:
Thomas Jefferson went through the Bible,
the New Testament, and cut out in the gospels
all the stuff that he thought was right and that was true
and that Jesus really said, and he made his
own New Testament. LORI ANNE FERRELL: Thomas
Jefferson famously took issue with anything in the gospels
that made Jesus sound like a miracle worker. He liked his Jesus
to be a philosopher. He called it a
morsel of the gospel. NARRATOR: Although to some,
Thomas Jefferson's version of the Bible may have been an
example of biblical sacrilege, it was only intended for
his own personal use. But there were others, like New
Englander Joseph Smith, who not only altered the Bible,
they even rewrote it. In 1830, Smith published the
Book of Mormon, a sacred text that included passages from
both the Old and New Testaments. It asserted that during the
time of his resurrection, Jesus made an appearance
in the New World. What followed was a new
religion called Mormonism, which although it recognizes and
incorporates both the Old and New Testaments
in its teachings, believes the Judaeo-Christian
Bible to be incomplete and only part of God's
message for mankind. JENNIFER WRIGHT-KNUST:
The Book of Mormon is yet another re-encounter
with biblical narratives that are then retold
in a new setting. In the case of the
Book of Mormon, that's setting is America
at a particular moment in American history as
Americans are expanding West and understanding
themselves to be fulfilling a kind of divine destiny. NARRATOR: But not all of
the various interpretations and translations of the Bible
were as benevolent or benign as those of Joseph Smith
or Thomas Jefferson. Some were used to justify
bigotry, intolerance, and, in the case of a verse
in Genesis, Chapter 9, even slavery. BART EHRMAN: Today, nobody
knows about the curse of Ham. It's a passage in
which after the flood, Noah curses his son Ham for
something the Ham has done and says that his son will
be subservient to his two brothers. Well, this was used to say that
the Black race came from Ham and so it's supposed to be
subservient to the white races. ROBERT MULLINS: If
you take Genesis 9, there's this idea that
Ham, who is considered the father of the African
nations, was cursed. And this is why the
Africans have black skin. But, in fact, when
you read the text, it's not Ham that was
cursed, but his son Canaan that was cursed. NARRATOR: Believe it or not, it
was the biblical story of Ham that convinced many in the
1800s that God's will supported the arguments for African
slavery, an issue that bitterly divided the country and became
a catalyst for the bloody Civil War. [music playing] JONATHAN KIRSCH: The Civil
War offers a very interesting example for Americans. The Union thought
God was on its side. And the Confederacy thought
God was on its side too. Common sense tells
you that God couldn't have been on both sides, or
maybe he was on neither side. But that's what the Bible
and religious true belief encourages us to do, to
claim God for ourselves, for our own political purposes. FRANCESCA STAVRAKOPOULOU: To
say that some biblical text supports certain political
decisions today is basically adopting a pick and mix
attitude to the Biblical text. It's very dangerous
to use the Bible as a pretext for anything. NARRATOR: Throughout
the centuries, the Bible has been trimmed,
cut, embellished, translated, and some would say mythologized. But where is the truth? There are many who believe
the answer was found in a desert cave more
than half a century ago, written on the fragile parchment
and papyrus of the Dead Sea Scrolls. [music playing] NARRATOR: According
to scholars, what we know as the Bible probably
began as stories passed down from generation to generation,
stories that were eventually written down by
anonymous authors and variously altered by
editors and translators. But despite the human tampering,
or perhaps because of it, the Bible is still the most
powerful and influential book the world has ever known. The biggest
secret of the Bible is probably that the
Bible itself, its impact, has far surpassed what any one
of the authors that contributed to it or whose text became part
of it could have ever imagined. With each new generation,
each bit of new technology, the Bible sort of gets
updated TO new technologies. So now, we have apps. And one of the things that
happens when you have apps, because they're sort of
close enough to other kinds of entertainment,
is they get rated. And believe it or not, the
Bible app got a 17 plus rating, for mature audiences only
because of some of the scenes in the Bible. NARRATOR: But could there
still be secrets written on the scrolls and within
the pages of the Holy Bible? It is this question that has
fueled the interest of scholars and theologians for centuries. And it is why, even
after decades of study, the Dead Sea Scrolls
remain objects of both intense curiosity
and controversy. PNINA SHOR: In
the first version, we've put online all
the infrared images of the '50s that we scanned and
1,000 new images all the data that we had in our
state collections. Now, we're on the second
version, whereby we already have 8,000 more images
ready to go online. NARRATOR: But not every
piece of the Dead Sea Scrolls is accounted for. In the months and years since
they were first discovered in 1947, many fragments
and perhaps entire scrolls may have been stolen or sold
off before they were secured. Might there be important
information out there, missing or perhaps lost forever? FRANCESCA
STAVRAKOPOULOU: Scholars are looking for new
gospels whenever we find any scrap of a text, any
fragment of an inscription that might vaguely relate somehow
to the biblical world, whether it's ancient Israel
or the Greco Roman Jerusalem associated with Jesus. There's always things
coming onto the market, quite often via the black market
actually, lots of illegal digs go on, as well as
legitimate digs. One of the great mysteries
of biblical scholarship is that there are
treasures out there and there may be yet
more treasures that now and again come to light. And they cast a whole new
light on what we thought we knew about antiquity. YUVAL PELEG: I believe that
there are some more scrolls in the desert we didn't find. Lots of caves weren't
excavated yet. And maybe somewhere there's a
cave with more scrolls and more fragments. Who knows? [music playing] NARRATOR: Could a new discovery
of biblical texts or even a new translation really
change or even undermine the overall impact of the
Bible and its teachings? Or is the Bible
even more powerful than anything that could be
added or altered by mankind? REZA ASLAN: Why is it that 5,000
years after these stories were written, we still read them,
we still believe in them? It's not because they are true,
though many people believe them as true. It's because they are
infinitely malleable. That's the power of scripture,
that it can mean anything to anyone depending on the
time in which they live, depending on the context
in which they live. JEFFREY GEOGHEGAN: There seem
to be two misconceptions. One is is that the Bible
somehow dropped from heaven in its pristine shape and was
picked up by Moses or Jesus and then handed on
to their followers. The other misconception is
that the Bible has been copied and recopied so that
it's hopelessly corrupt, and we don't know what
the original texts say. The reality is
somewhere in the middle. ROBERT R. CARGILL:
Look, the Bible is a powerful, powerful book. And it's revered by millions
around the world, Judaism and Christianity. And it's in that
regard, it's living. It's a book that gives
tremendous meaning and tremendous identity
to millions and billions of people around the world. In that way, it's alive. It gives life to people. [music playing] NARRATOR: Perhaps the
Bible's ultimate secret is that it is not only a
collection of ancient stories and morality tales,
it is also proof of mankind's faith
in an almighty God and a testament to humanity's
desire to live in moral clarity and peace. [music playing]
