On Thursday, the Gretna Prairie Centre held its monthly potluck supper, with a special presentation from Dr. Jeremy Penner.

Jeremy Penner was born and raised in Winkler and completed his PhD in Religious Studies at McMaster University in 2010. He has published work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Old Testament, and ancient Judaism.

Penner said he has always been interested in literature, history and archaeology. It was during an archaeology class that he first came across the Dead Sea Scrolls. He volunteered to participate in an archeological dig in Israel around 1998 and fell in love with the topic.

"That's how I got into... the Dead Sea Scrolls, it's kind of this crossroads between archaeology and literature," Penner said.

"The more you get into it, the more you explore, the more you learn, the more fascinating it gets."

Jeremy Penner speaking at the Gretna Prairie Centre

Penner explains that the Dead Sea Scrolls are a group of scrolls that were found about 70 years ago in the area around the Dead Sea. They were written in three different languages; Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic. About 900 were found, but it is likely that more exist. The scrolls can also be divided into different categories.

"One category would be the Biblical text, so the text we know from our modern Bibles today, that number is about 240. The rest of them are texts that are not in our Bible but were important to... the group that copied and stored them at Qumran," he explained. "Quite a few of those texts would have been known and important to other Jews in the area, not just that particular group that was located there," said Penner

When asked which part of the discovery he is most fascinated with, Penner said he likes to think of the Dead Sea Scrolls as a time capsule.

"It transports you to a different time, a different place, it might as well have been on Mars. I mean their culture, their way of looking at life, was so vastly different than ours. It's just a wonderful thought experiment to sit down and try to enter the mind of, you know, a person that would have been reading this text 2,000 years ago, " he said.

According to Penner, scribes would sometimes make errors while copying down the sacred texts

Penner noted he even started to recognized a scribe's handwriting.

"You start to actually get to know a scribe that was alive 2,000 years ago. Not well, but you're beginning to recognize their handwriting and that's already, I think, extraordinary."

Another lesson that Penner takes away from the Dead Sea Scrolls is that people are diverse and do things differently.

"What I was trying to present today is that religious texts aren't inherently static. They change over time, just like everything changes," he said.

In his presentation, Penner explained that scribes would accidentally make mistakes as they were copying down sacred texts. For example, a scribe might accidentally leave out a word or sentence. Even a small spelling error could change the entire meaning of a story. Scribes would also take liberties and add to the text or take away from it as they saw fit.

"Texts slowly change over time, and that's one of the great things that the Dead Sea Scrolls illustrate so well," Penner explained.

Penner added that people continue to be fascinated by the Dead Sea Scrolls, and many people want to see them when they are displayed. He believes the fascination with the scrolls are tied to their age and their connection with Christianity and Jewdaism.