Did the Dead Sea Scrolls contain some early copies of the gospels? Not apocryphal ones, the main four.

By the way, in looking this up I came across all that ‘St. Jerome and the Dead Sea Scrolls’ stuff. I can’t find the website related to the book now which is really annoying – will have to recreate my trail of links. Don’t know if anyone’s read it, but it’s a bit difficult to assess the arguments unless you’re a scholar of New Testament Greek and the meanings of the words used for durations of time. Though apparently there’s a lot more to it than that if you read to the end. It sounds like an interesting read whatever.

I think that you mean ‘much later’, but I believe that you inadvertently gave an accurate description of our primary sources(Gospels,Acts,Paul) You seem to make the assumption we can get behind it, but where can we go(Gospel of Thomas????) to get ‘behind it’? We don’t have contemporary eyewitness accounts, and the ones we do have are nothing but coloured, and they don’t appear to be too afraid to use their own paint set.