ABSTRACT
Père Roland de Vaux of the École Biblique and Mr. G. Lankester Harding of the Department of Antiquities, now Jordanian, not Transjordanian, lost no time, when the war was over and the time of year was favorable-February, 1949—in visiting the cave where the scrolls had been found. They worked there for nearly a month, and collected many smaller fragments and a good deal of broken pottery. This was thought to be mostly late Hellenistic, but there were also some pieces of a Roman lamp and a Roman cooking pot, and these latter gave rise to a theory—for which there was no real evidence—that they had been left in the cave by Origen, the early Church Father and editor of the Biblical texts, who fled from persecution to Palestine in the first half of the third century and who says that he found near Jericho some Biblical manuscripts in a jar. The predominantly Greek pottery seemed to show that the manuscripts could not have been written later than the first Christian century. From the shards of the jars they calculated that the cave must once have contained a collection of at least two hundred scrolls.
