Describe the history of the discovery of the scrolls, which has plenty of drama. In 1947, a shepherd boy went into a cave near the region of Qumran and discovered some clay pots. Opening them, he found scrolls that he later learned contained Hebrew writings that were about 2,000 years old. Explain where the Dead Sea is located and why it has that name -- the high salinity of the water permits very little marine life.
Teach them about the contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It includes all of the books of the Bible in use today, except for the book of Esther, as well as several other religious writings, such as parabiblical and sectarian manuscripts, of which there were no previous records. Describe the age of these texts and the method, carbon dating, used to determine their age.
Tell who the writings of these texts are attributed to and their possible implications. The biblical texts reinforce the antiquity of the Bible, and some would say its authority, but scholars continue to debate what the other writings mean. Who wrote them? Ancient Jews, early Christians, some other group, such as the Essenes, or perhaps a community whose identity is lost in the sands of time? The texts are clearly religious in nature, speaking of an imminent arrival of a Messiah, but it is unclear whether they are referring to Jesus or some other figure. There are significant discrepancies between the content of the texts, both for Judaism and Christianity.
Process the implications of these texts with an open-ended discussion. Maintaining that these texts uniformly support the foundations of any contemporary religion would be a distortion of the facts, but neither do the texts challenge these religions in any meaningful way. Ask your audience what it would mean if they lived in the distant future, for example, and discovered an ancient library that contained a copy of the Bible as well as J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" series. What would that say about the beliefs of the person who read those books? Probably not much, except that both those books were circulating at the time they were stored.