CNN is featuring a cover story on the latest Dead Sea Scrolls theory. The gist of this claim is that the Essenes, the Jewish fundamentalist group given credit for the scrolls in one of the first origin theories, never existed at all. The group came from the imagination of Josephus, a Jewish historian writing in Rome. He wanted to introduce something his Roman audience could identify with in his history of the 70CE Jewish War, so he "invented" the Essenes. Other sources from the period, like Pliny, just copied this idea. There was no specific mention of the Essenes in the scrolls, so Rachel Elior claimed that the scrolls were placed in the caves in Qumran by another group.
There are probably more DDS theories than actual scrolls, so I don't want to get into the endless permutations. What I would like to discuss is how history gets contaminated. There just isn't enough hard evidence to say where the scrolls came from and who put them in the caves and there probably never will be. There is a general consensus on the date (the first or second century BCE), but there are some scholars that place some of the scrolls in the first century CE. This is the way ancient history should work. The evidence gets foggier the farther back you go, so it is more a debate on various theories than a series of facts.
Unfortunately, we do not approach ancient history that way. The collective "we" want certainty, so "we" regurgitate highly debatable ancient events as facts when what evidence we have do not support that level of certainty. The Battle of Thermopylae is a good example. We only have one primary source for this, the historian Herodotus, who wrote of the battle at least forty years after the fact. There is no archeological evidence to support that it ever happened and there is no mention of it by the Persians. Does that mean it didn't happen? No, but it does mean it shouldn't be taken as a proven fact. The existence of Jesus is another example. There is no archeological or textual evidence outside the four gospels that someone named Jesus who did all those things ever existed. The gospels are dated by most scholars after 70CE and other sources that mention Jesus (such as Josephus) are highly debatable. Again, that does not mean Jesus never existed, but it does mean we shouldn't be taking his existence as fact.
I'm sure all of you are familiar with the line that history is written by the victors. That, in my view, is the reason that many stories of dubious veracity are clung to by our culture as fact, such as the glorious battle of Thermopylae and the life of the Christian messiah. We can even extrapolate this notion of cultural corruption of history into the modern era, like our founding fathers being interested in everyone's freedom instead of just white male property holders, or that dropping the atomic bomb on Japan was necessary to end WWII and not as a warning to the Soviet Union. We have better evidence to argue both those cases than we do Thermopylae and Jesus, which makes these issues even more open for debate. History is far more interesting, and more accurate, when it is debated and not regurgitated.