Discovery.

In 1947 a Bedouin youth discovered some manuscripts in a cave at Qumran in the Dead Sea area of British-occupied Palestine. The developing tension in Palestine, the creation of the new Jewish state of Israel, and the resulting Arab-Israeli War all diverted attention from the quiet announcement in April 1948 by Millar Burrows of Yale University that the earliest known manuscript of the Book of Isaiah had been found in the Syrian monastery of Saint Mark in Jerusalem. (The Arab-Israeli War that followed the declaration of Israel's independence caused scholars interested in the manuscript fragments to disguise their source.)

Edmund Wilson.

While academics in religious circles grew excited about the potential light the Dead Sea Scrolls would shed on Jewish culture and religion at the time of Jesus, the general public paid little heed until May 1955, when Edmund Wilson published a lengthy article in the New...