A book that has made waves especially in German speaking countries was written by two journalists, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. They claimed not only that the vicissitudes of the early Christians are reflected in the scrolls but that because of this the Vatican was preventing their publication. The delay in publication had much more prosaic and complicated reasons than a Vatican conspiracy to withhold the truth. There were questions of Jordanian and Israeli rights, several wars, legal ownership of the scrolls, limited financing for the study and publication of the documents, difficulty of deciphering and comprehending fragments of text, teaching and other commitments of the editors, ill health, and sometimes sheer procrastination. At last, since the fall of 1991, open access to photographs of all the scrolls is available.
Interested scholars can also inspect the original manuscripts, mostly in Jerusalem.
Since then some very interesting fragments have been published. Some of them are important for a better understanding of early Christianity as well as Judaism. However, they are not Christian but Jewish documents, from a time period ranging from the third century BC to about 68 A.D. From a historian's perspective our first question in its present form is unanswerable. While many scholars see a possible and even probable Essene influence in the life and teachings of John the Baptist, no direct involvement of Jesus with Essenes and Essene teachings can be demonstrated. John the Baptist's ministry of preaching and baptizing for all who came to him is in stark contrast to the strict membership and purity requirements evidenced by various writings from Qumran that reflect Essene teachings.