First discovered by teenage Bedouin shepherds in the 1940s, the Dead Sea Scrolls were extracted from 11 caves near the ancient settlement of Qumran in the West Bank. Consisting of tens of thousands of papyrus and parchment fragments from nearly 1,000 separate manuscripts, the scrolls date from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D. and include passages from every book of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, except for the Book of Esther.

“They’re by far the earliest copies of the books of the Hebrew Bible that have ever been found,” says Jodi Magness, a biblical archaeologist at the University of North Carolina. She points out that the next oldest surviving biblical texts date to the ninth and 10th centuries.

In addition to biblical passages written in Hebrew, the Dead Sea Scrolls contain Greek and Aramaic translations, as well as apocryphal writings not included in the biblical canon and sectarian writings, such as biblical commentaries. Most scholars believe the scrolls were composed by a Jewish group that inhabited Qumran prior to its destruction by Roman troops around A.D. 70, though other theories have been put forth as well.

While translations differ, all modern Jewish Bibles published in Hebrew are identical. “Every letter, every word, it’s all exactly the same,” Magness says. But the Dead Sea Scrolls show that this wasn’t the case in ancient times and that the idea of having one standard text is a more modern phenomenon.

Scholars have long debated whether David and Solomon were actual kings of ancient Israel or mythical characters, akin to Romulus and Remus and King Arthur. In 1993, archaeologists unearthed a broken stone slab in northern Israel, known as the Tel Dan Stele—engraved with the oldest known non-biblical reference to the “House of David.” Written in Aramaic around the ninth century B.C., the stele celebrates an alleged victory by a king in present-day Syria over the kings of Israel and Judah.

“That inscription is very important, in essence confirming that there was a real David,” Rollston says. “It also confirms the fact that he was a king.”

David is believed to have lived around 1000 B.C., a century or a century-and-a-half before the Tel Dan Stele was inscribed. “It’s highly unlikely that within that relatively short amount of time he would have been fabricated as a made-up figure,” Magness says. “It’s not universal, but it’s fair to say that most biblical scholars and archaeologists would accept this as evidence, even if they still disagree about the size of the kingdom he ruled.”

Now housed at the Louvre in Paris, the cracked stone Mesha Stele commemorates another alleged victory over the Israelites in the ninth century B.C.—this one by King Mesha of Moab, whose kingdom bordered Israel to the east. “If a king or ruler was victorious in battle, they would brag about it by setting up big stone slabs”—otherwise known as steles—“and inscribing the details of the victory on the stone slab,” Magness says.

Written in the Moabites’ own language, the Mesha Stele states that the Moabites were once under the hegemony of the Omride kings of Israel, but gained their independence under Mesha. This version of events parallels that found in the Bible’s Books of Kings. “It dovetails really well—not perfectly, but really well—with the narratives in the Bible,” Rollston says.

He says the Mesha Stele is among the artifacts demonstrating there is “historical material” in the Bible and that it’s “certainly not just myth and legend.” Even so, “that doesn’t mean every word or phrase . . . in the Bible is historically accurate,” Rollston says, “The writers of the Bible took some literary license at times.”

Written in Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Merneptah Stele is even older than the Tel Dan Stele and the Mesha Stele, dating to the 13th century B.C. Discovered in 1896, this stone slab describes the military triumphs of Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah, who went to war with several of his neighbors. Among other supposed victories, the stele claims that “Israel is laid waste.” “This is the earliest reference that we have to Israel as a people,” Magness says. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell us anything about who these people were.”

No conclusive archaeological discovery confirms the Bible’s account of enslaved Israelites and their Exodus out of Egypt. Yet Rollston believes such an event likely did occur not long before the Merneptah Stele’s inscription. “For me, I think the evidence is sufficient to suggest that there was an Exodus and that Moses was a historical figure,” he says.

According to Magness, many biblical scholars claim that if there was an Exodus, it involved only a small group of people fleeing Egypt.

Even more ancient is the Epic of Gilgamesh, a mythic poem on clay tablets believed to date back over 4,000 years, which makes it among the world’s oldest surviving works of literature. Originally composed in Sumerian cuneiform, the earliest known writing system, it tells the story of Gilgamesh, a ruler of Uruk in present-day Iraq who’s depicted as one-third man and two-thirds god.

As part of a quest in which he slays monsters and searches for the key to eternal life, Gilgamesh meets a man named Utnapishtim, who, like Noah in the Book of Genesis, survived a great flood by building a boat. Another similarity with Genesis is that a snake “takes the plant that would have allowed Gilgamesh to become immortal,” Rollston says.

Flood stories have been found in other ancient Mesopotamian texts as well. “The scribes of ancient Israel were plugged into ancient Near Eastern literature,” Rollston says. “So they knew about these pieces, and it made it fairly straightforward for them to reflect and refract in various ways.”

A settlement on the Sinai Peninsula that dates to the eighth or ninth century B.C., Kuntillet Ajrud was excavated in the 1970s and contains multiple references to “Yahweh” and “his Asherah” on pottery shards and plaster fragments. (Yahweh is the Hebrew name for God and is traditionally not said aloud by Jews, while Asherah is an ancient Near Eastern mother goddess.)

These inscriptions have been hotly debated, and interpretations vary widely. Some scholars believe that, in this case, Asherah refers not to a deity but rather to a symbol or object. Rollston, however, suggests that at least some ancient Israelites practiced henotheism—the belief in the supremacy of a single god without denying the existence of other gods—and that they apparently thought God had a wife or female consort.

“People often are taught that ancient Israel was a monotheistic religion even at the point of its origins, [but] that’s actually not the way the Bible frames it,” Rollston says. He adds that when he covers this subject in his classes it can be “jarring for the students.”

In the New Testament, Pontius Pilate infamously condemns Jesus to death by crucifixion. Non-biblical evidence shows that Pilate was likely a real person, who served as the Roman prefect of Judea from around A.D. 26 to 36. In 1961, for example, archaeologists working in Caesarea, Israel, encountered a limestone block with Pilate’s name and title etched on it in Latin.

The wording on the Pilate Stone implies that it was once part of a temple or shrine dedicated to the Roman Emperor Tiberius. However, it was later repurposed as a step in an ancient theater, with the inscription placed face down. “This was very common in antiquity, to recycle building pieces you didn’t need anymore,” Magness says.

Other discoveries of Pontius Pilate-related artifacts include coins minted by him and a 2,000-year-old copper alloy ring inscribed with his name. Pilate is also mentioned in multiple non-biblical texts.

In 1968, archaeologists excavating a Jerusalem tomb uncovered a 2,000-year-old heel bone with a nail sticking though it into a piece of olive wood—the first direct physical evidence of crucifixion. The heel bone belonged to a man named Jehohanan, not to Jesus Christ. But it shed light on how Jesus would have been killed. “It gives some information about how crucifixion victims were actually affixed to a cross,” Magness says. “There’s all sorts of debates about what the pose was.”

In 2017, another Roman-era skeleton was found with a nail hammered through the heel bone, this time in England. Evidence of crucifixion has likewise been found in Italy.

The Shroud of Turin, a linen cloth purportedly adorned with the image of a crucified man, first surfaced in 14th-century France and has been housed since 1578 in Turin, present-day Italy. Some have considered it to be Jesus’ actual burial garment. But even the Vatican usually considers the shroud an “icon” rather than an authentic “relic.”

Scientists in Italy used infrared light and spectroscopy to date the shroud to around Jesus’ lifetime. But other scientists from three different laboratories carbon-dated the shroud to the Middle Ages. Still another recent study used forensic techniques to cast doubt on the shroud’s origins.

Since there’s no chain of custody prior to the 14th century, Magness says, “it’s impossible to know where it came from.”