Passage Since the 1950s, Scholars Have Been Engaged in Reconstructing a a Multifarious

Passage
Since the 1950s, scholars have been engaged in reconstructing a multifarious collection of ancient sacred texts, now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, from a welter of as many as 100,000 fragments of disparate size and shape.  With some fragments no larger than a postage stamp and covered with barely decipherable writing, the formidable paleographic project presents a jigsaw puzzle of epic proportions and frustrating intricacy.  Yet, despite the fragmentary condition of the scrolls, their discovery has turned out to be the most important religious archaeological windfall of the 20th century.The scrolls were found in large pottery jars hidden inside the caves that dot the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, at a site called Khirbet Qumran, 13 miles east of the city of Jerusalem, by Bedouin goatherds in late 1946.  In the desert near Qumran, members of a Jewish sect known as the Essenes had established a small community during the latter half of the Second Temple period that began in the 6th century BCE and lasted into the first century CE.  The Essenes are noted in the works of the Roman statesman and historian Pliny the Elder, the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo, and the Jewish historian Josephus.  In the first century, Pliny described the Qumran community as a monastic brotherhood that followed an ascetic lifestyle of work, prayer, and the study of sacred law and esoteric doctrine.  The Essenes differed from the mainstream Jewish community in objecting to animal sacrifices and subscribing to the heretical dictum that fate is "the mistress of all."  The group had migrated to the desert, eschewing urban areas, as Philo reports, "because of the ungodliness customary among the city-dwellers."The scrolls date from approximately 250 BCE to 68 CE.  Scholars speculate that they represent either the library of the Essene community or the collected works of various local Jewish groups.  It is likely that the Essenes stashed the scrolls in jars and placed these inside the caves when they fled the imminent destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple (Herod's Temple) by the Romans in 70 CE.  The more than 900 identified manuscripts include parts of every book in the Old Testament canon except the Book of Esther, some with as many as 39 copies.  Only one scroll, the Great Isaiah Scroll, offers a virtually intact book: its 24 feet of parchment features all 66 chapters of the Book of Isaiah.  Other scrolls contain noncanonical texts, including apocrypha and pseudepigrapha-late pseudonymous writings ascribed to various biblical prophets and patriarchs.  Before the scrolls' fortuitous discovery, some of these works were known only through translations, or even translations of translations.  A few scrolls contain extra-biblical texts, chiefly sectarian manuals cataloguing the rules of the Essene community.Over 75% of the parchment and papyrus scrolls are written in Hebrew; most of the others are in Aramaic (a related language that had become the standard linguistic currency in the Near East) , while a smaller number are inscribed in ancient Greek.  The writing on the scrolls moves from right to left with only the occasional paragraph break for punctuation, which makes deciphering the manuscripts almost as daunting a task as piecing together their fragments.The manuscripts demonstrate remarkable consistency with the Masoretic or medieval Hebrew text used for many English translations of the Bible, notably the King James Version. Thus, the scrolls, which predate the Masoretic text by about 1,000 years, largely substantiate its reliability and authoritative status.  They also offer a window onto a critical period in Judeo-Christian culture; in particular, they confirm the religious diversity of the time and the similarity of an eschatological, messianic Jewish sect of the first century to early Christian communities.
-Based on the passage, one can most reasonably infer that the discovery of the scrolls was of great significance because it:

A) changed which books are included in the biblical canon.
B) showed that multiple copies exist of some biblical texts.
C) provided specific evidence of biblical authenticity.
D) stimulated the use of new methods of paleography.