BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY REVIEW WINTER 2021 47 Dead Sea Scroll Similarities IT IS EASY TO FORGET THE INITIAL SKEPTICISM regarding the antiq- uity of the collection of ancient manuscripts that we now call the Dead Sea Scrolls. e first texts were discovered accidently by three Bedouin shepherds in a cave just northwest of the Dead Sea in the winter of 1946–1947. One of the ten clay jars in the cave contained six scrolls, another was filled with soil, and the rest were empty. When first discovered, the scrolls had the appearance of dark oblong lumps wrapped in lengths of linen and coated with a black layer of what seemed to be wax or pitch—“wrapped up like mummies,” as recounted by John Trever, one of the first scholars to examine the scrolls. 1 Muhammad edh-Dhib, the youngest of the three shepherds, initially took three of the bundles and hung them in a bag from a tent pole at their Bedouin camp south of Bethlehem—thinking they might be worth something. e skepticism was understandable. How could it be possible for such texts, which by all appearances dated back to the first century B.C.E. or earlier, to be so well preserved for more than two millen- nia? It seemed just too good to be true. However, today, the skeptics have largely vanished, and the Dead Sea Scrolls continue to shape our understanding of Judaism and early Christianity in the Second Temple period. We are convinced that a similar manuscript discovery, which might be of even greater significance and antiquity than the Qumran scrolls, has been understandably, but mistakenly, dismissed as a 19th-century e Shapira Scrolls e Shapira e Shapira e  e Case for Authenticity IDAN DERSHOWITZ AND JAMES D. TABOR* THE CASE FOR FORGERY See the counter–argument on p. 39 * For this coauthored article, James Tabor wrote the introductory section “Dead Sea Scroll Similarities,” and Idan Dershowitz contributed the section “Genuine Manuscripts.”