Dr Paul Allen

Qumran in the West Bank, Middle East. In this cave the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. In dieser Höhle in Qumran wurden die Schriftrollen gefunden. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) In the 1948 printing of his excellent book Our Bible and Ancient Manuscripts, Sir Frederic Kenyon , the textual scholar, had this to say, “There is indeed no probability that we shall find manuscripts of the Hebrew text going back to a period before the formation of the text which we know as Massoretic. We can only arrive at an idea of it by a study of the earliest translations made from it… ” (cited by Pfeiffer, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible, p. 107).  At the same time his book was being printed, discoveries began in 1947 that would render any further statements like Kenyon’s impossible. Until this time, scholars had only the clay tablets of Babylon and the Egyptian papyri to help them understand background information on the Bible, since no ancient Old Testament manuscripts were known to have survived

TEMPLE Mount : It’s the hill at the heart of much of the Middle East ’s turmoil. Now, for the first time, archaeologists say they have found evidence of King Solomon’s temple . The veracity of the Old Testament ’s accounts of King Solomon building the First Temple has long been questioned. While remnants of the Second Temple abound, only uncertain hints of an earlier structure have previously been found . The Bible states Solomon’s Temple was destroyed by Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II . This has been dated to about 587BC. The Second Temple, remnants of which include the Jerusalem’s famous Wailing Wall, was razed by the Romans about AD70. But the Times of Israel is today reporting a secret archaeological excavation  on Temple Mount has unearthed the first ever artefacts conclusively dated to the First Temple — some 2600 years ago. The paper says the dig was done with the permission of the Islamic organisation that administers the 7th Century Dome of the Rock , from which the p