Audrey Ward, Heather Meese and Vickie Leckie left the Brigham Young University-Hawai'i lecture hall Thursday with their eyes a little wider than when they went in.

They'd just heard a visiting professor talk about how the Dead Sea Scrolls are changing the way scholars look at the Bible.

"I'd love to learn more about it," said Meese. "... It's interesting how (the scrolls) compare with the Bible we know today."

In his lecture, "The Significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls Biblical Texts," Donald Parry talked about how scholars combing through the scrolls are supplying missing segments in Psalms. They've discovered six more Psalms, as well.

The scrolls also fascinate because they show discrepancies between the Old Testament scriptures found in the scrolls and the Masoretic text, used for the King James version of the Bible.

Parry, a Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible and an associate professor of Hebrew language and literature at BYU in Utah, is on an international team studying the Dead Sea Scrolls; he's translating the books of Samuel.

His lecture focused on how different some passages in the Bible could be read, now that the Dead Sea Scrolls' text can be shown side-by-side with Masoretic text, including scribbled-in portions that change the translation.

"That intrigued me the most," said Ward.

"How a stupid little error affects the whole world so much later," added her friend, Leckie.

This and future lectures on the scrolls coincide with a traveling exhibit at the nearby visitor's center for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in La'ie.

The exhibit — which includes artifacts and replicas, but no scrolls or scroll pieces — was organized by LDS scholars and has been around the world, beginning in Oakland, Calif. It was scheduled to be part of a larger exhibit to be seen during the 2004 Olympics in Salt Lake City, but Parry said those plans were scuttled when officials raised terrorism concerns in having part of Israel's "national treasure" on display.

With that one phrase, Parry waded right into a controversy long brewing on the international scene: Who owns the Dead Sea Scrolls?

In 1997, during a conference celebrating 50 years since the discovery of the scrolls, the head of the Israel Antiquities Authority stated that Israel would keep the 2,000-year-old documents because they were legally inherited and an inseparable part of Jewish tradition.

His Palestinian counterpart insisted Israel's capture of the scrolls in the 1967 Mideast War amounted to "theft," according to news accounts from that time.

So why are LDS scholars so invested in study of the Dead Sea Scrolls? (Four of them are part of the 70-member international team.)

"The Dead Sea Scrolls include the world's oldest Christian Bible," explained Parry. "We love the Old Testament, all the scriptures ... (and the Old Testament) contains prophesies of Jesus Christ. The Old Testament, as well as the new, are important books."

Besides the Mormon love of scriptures, Victor Ludlow, another visiting Provo professor who's teaching several classes here, said there's some Mormon affinity with the Essenes, the Jewish splinter group believed to have written the scrolls between 250 B.C. and 70 A.D.

"This is a community criticized and ostracized by the larger community," said Ludlow, a professor of ancient scripture who is visiting through April.

Ludlow added that the Essenes were considered "religious zealots."

"We identify with that. Where we feel we're much a part of believers, much a part of Christendom, we're sometimes misunderstood."

And there's the importance of covenants, said Kerry Muhlestein, an assistant professor at BYU-Hawai'i's department of religious education. Covenants, or promises by God to humanity, are what these ancient Jews and LDS have in common, he said.

"In my experience, LDS puts a great emphasis on covenants," said Muhlestein. "Because we have such an emphasis on covenants, we take the Old Testament more seriously than many other Christian groups."

While some Christians believe the Bible is the infallible word of God, LDS offers this caveat in the Mormon articles of faith — "We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly" — which explains why the trio of students were so fascinated by the explanations offered by the Dead Sea Scrolls.

"We know there's stuff missing from the Bible," said Meese, adding that within the Bible are references to other biblical books, no longer found.