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Dusty witnesses to a powerful truth

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  In 1947, while searching for a stray goat or exploring the cliffs in the Judean Desert, a Bedouin shepherd boy threw a rock into a cave near Qumran. The sound of breaking pottery led him and his companions inside, where they discovered several cylindrical clay jars containing ancient, wrapped manuscripts. What they stumbled upon would become one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century: the Dead Sea Scrolls. Following the initial find, both Bedouin treasure hunters and official archaeologists scoured the region, eventually uncovering a total of 12 scroll-bearing caves in the cliff faces between 1947 and 1956. The caves yielded an estimated 972 texts, fragments or complete copies of every book in the Hebrew Bible except Esther. These texts predated previously known biblical manuscripts by about a thousand years. The texts were incredibly well-preserved due to the hot, arid, and dark conditions of the desert caves. Scholars were stunned; would the scrolls re...
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It Will Come to Pass

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            Picture a cold, dimly lit prison cell in 1536. A man, gaunt from months of confinement, wraps himself in a thin cloak. His name is William Tyndale, and he’s about to pay the ultimate price for one unshakable belief: that the Bible is God’s perfect, error-free Word and that everyone, even the common ploughboy, should be able to read it. Tyndale had dared to do what was illegal in England at the time: translate the Bible into English. The Church feared that if ordinary people read the Scriptures for themselves, it would undermine their control. But Tyndale believed the exact opposite. He once said to a clergyman, “If God spares my life, I will cause a boy that drives the plough to know more of the Scripture than you do.” He was convinced not only that the Bible should be accessible, but that it could be trusted down to the smallest word. That it was free from error because it was God’s Word, not man’s invention. Tyndale wasn’t just translati...
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