On the 6th of February 2025, BBC headline: “First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2,000 years”. A report by science editor Rebecca Morelle and Senior Science Journalist Alison Francis.

A volcanic eruption 2000 years ago destroyed the town of Herculaneum. In that town, there was a house, in that house, there was a library, in that library, there was a scroll, and in that scroll… nobody knew what was in that scroll because it was burnt to a charcoal crisp, but today Rebecca and Alison excitedly report, we finally know. Or will know. Because the work is ongoing but everyone is highly optimistic that hi-tech will reveal the secrets of the scroll.

Hi, my name is Terence and I’m your host for the Daily Monsoon, a podcast where I connect current events to matters of faith. Today, we join a select group of people excited to finally be able to read a 2,000 year old scroll.

From the article:

Hundreds of carbonised scrolls were discovered in Herculaneum, which like its neighbour Pompeii was buried beneath metres of volcanic ash.

In the past, some of the documents, which are made from a thick paper-like material called papyrus, were prised open but they crumbled into pieces.

But now mankind has developed a solution, which I think is pretty cool. Let me read this:

Inside this huge machine, which is called a synchrotron, electrons are accelerated to almost the speed of light to produce a powerful X-ray beam that can probe the scroll without damaging it.

“It can see things on the scale of a few thousandths of a millimetre,” explained Adrian Mancuso, director of physical sciences at Diamond.

The scan is used to create a 3D reconstruction, then the layers inside the scroll – it contains about 10m of papyrus – have to be identified.

Isn’t that cool?

Then the article goes on to say how A.I. is used to separate the ink from the paper because both have been carbonised. So it sounds like separating black from black.

And if everything works, the team would be able to reveal and read the scroll which they expect to be about Greek Epicurean philosophy.

Let’s just take a moment to marvel at how our understanding of electrons, and our ability to harness electrons, and the use of A.I. to open up the past.

Other than the Herculaneum scrolls, there is another collection of scrolls that I am more excited to have them open up, and that is the Dead Sea Scrolls.

As I understand it, many have not been opened up out of fear they will crumble. Many are in fragments. But thankfully, there is ongoing work to scan and digitalise all these scrolls for future generations.

You may be wondering, “Why all this fuss over a bunch of scrolls? Why look at the past when the future is ahead of us?”

I think being able to read scrolls burnt from a volcanic eruption is pretty cool in itself. If they can discover literature that has never appeared before, that can add to the richness of human culture. This would be true for Greek Epicurean philosophy or Aztec cooking recipes or Maori war chants.

So I think there is value in itself, even when I struggle to see its significance, I can’t answer the “so what?” question if you are looking for a practical purpose behind bombarding expensive electrons on a piece of charcoal.

But I can give you one example where reading long lost scrolls has eternal implications.

In 1947, a 12-year old Bedouin shepherd boy was looking for his lost goat. He reached a dark cave. Not knowing what was in that cave, he threw a stone into the cave. What he heard next was not the sound of rock striking rock, nor bleating goat, but smashed pottery.

In his book, “Is Atheism Dead?”, Eric Metaxas shares the extraordinary discovery of that young shepherd boy. The Dead Sea Scrolls.

Let me quote from his book:

As a result of this dramatically unexpected boon, scholars suddenly might answer the question they had been wondering about forever, one they assumed would never be answered: Had the original biblical documents been tampered with over the centuries? And if so, how much? To what extent, if any, had the oft-cited “monks in the Middle Ages” been guilty of working with church authorities to alter the texts to better suit the theological narrative they wished to promote? Scholars had forever wished they might have copies of such texts from two millennia earlier, but knowing how manuscripts deteriorate, they knew this was frankly impossible. So the discovery of these scrolls— intact and legible, hidden in this cave for twenty centuries—was not merely stunning, but seemed providential to the point of miraculous.

Later on he writes:

But those biblical skeptics who argued that the documents were altered also held that because of this, the Old Testament prophecies predicting the future did nothing of the kind. For them all such prophecy was invented—by an “all-powerful Church” in order to control the ignorant faithful—and all examples of it were a simple case of later scribes inserting whatever they wished, centuries after the fact. But the scrolls’ discovery meant such accusations must be set aside, and the bizarre parallels between what had been said and that centuries later seemed to have really happened must be dealt with seriously.

And so, the Dead Sea Scrolls became a powerful defence of the truthfulness of the Bible.

Recently, in a Joe Rogan podcast episode, Joe interviewed Wesley Huff, a Christian apologist who became famous for utterly destroying the credibility of Billy Carson, a New Age proponent.

Billy said Christianity is not true because he has studied the ancient texts.

Wesley is an expert on ancient texts and asks which one?

Billy says he refers to the Gospel according to Thomas and ancient texts.

Wesley then shows that these texts are actually late. They were later fabrications. And he explained how people know these were late.

This is in contrast with the Bible. The text that forms the Bible are documents written within a generation of the original events.

Basically, who would you trust to tell you about World War 2? Someone who has actually lived through it? Or someone born in 2010 and has watched many movies on it. Real scholars of World War 2 would depend on sources written when Churchill and Hitler were alive. Similarly, the Gospels were written, read and distributed when the apostles were still alive.

So, ancient documents can be amazing stuff. In a strange and mysterious way, the movement of electrons and the application of A.I. can open up the secrets of the past and give us confidence in the present and hope for the future.

This is the Daily Monsoon, a podcast where I connect current events to matters of faith. Thank you for listening.