The Acts of the Apostles or simple Acts is a book in the New Testament that comes immediately after the four Gospels. Luke is accredited as the author, and the date of writing is usually estimated to be at between 80 and 90 AD (Dunn, 2016). The book primarily focuses on documenting the good deeds of the apostles and the significant roles that other believers played. It mainly chronicles the important part played by Peter and Paul in the decades following the ascension of Christ into heaven. It, therefore, plays a vital role in explaining the history of the early church and the various challenges and hostilities that the founders faced. By focusing on Peter and Paul, Acts narrates how the Church spread from Jerusalem to other parts of the Roman Empire. It shows how people depicted commitment to Jesus Christ, a factor that influenced the spread of Christianity leading to the contemporary churches seen today (Dunn, 2016).
The Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered in 1947 in a village called Qumran east of Jerusalem and adjacent to the Dead Sea. It consists of a collection of Jewish documents written in various languages such as Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek and has many literary styles and subjects. It is also regarded as a biblical manuscript that contained all the books found in the Hebrew Bible except Esther (Wilson, 2016). The manuscripts were created almost a thousand years earlier before any known biblical texts existed. Another importance of this artifact is the fact that it contains the first-ever biblical commentary on books such as Habakkuk amongst other Jewish religious works. The scrolls further play a significant role because through them, people have confidence and reliability of the Old Testament because the information is congruent to that found in the Qumran manuscripts. It, therefore, serves as a testament to how God has preserved his word for many centuries thereby protecting it from extinction and errors.
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References
Dunn, J. D. (2016). The Acts of the Apostles . Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing.
Wilson, E. (2017). Israel and the Dead Sea scrolls . Routledge.