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The one that has bugged me since I found out about it was the story about the Dead Sea Scrolls backing up the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Scriptures. The Isaiah scroll was the big one mentioned. That story came out in something like 1947 and was retracted in 1948. Yet I heard about it as though it had never been retracted in 1982, and it is still repeated.
I am currently involved in the publication project of the two Isaiah Scrolls from Qumran Cave 1 (due to be released by Oxford Clarendon Press sometime in late 2007), and I spent MONTHS compiling variants for all 21 copies of the book of Isaiah, and my list for Isa-a (the aforementioned Great Isaiah Scroll) is 111 pages with over 4,200 entries.
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The Dead Sea Scroll of Isaiah represents a 3rd text type, different from both the Masoretic and Septuagint. However, concerning Jeremiah, where the difference between the two texts is much greater, consisting of seven entire different chapters, the Dead Sea Scrolls backed up the Septuagint. That story's true, but no one repeats it, because it's not what we want to hear.
This little bit about Jeremiah is not quite accurate. There were six copies found of the Book of Jeremiah, and all of them are highly fragmentary. While very little remains from any signle scroll, there is enough extant for scholars to have determined that forms of BOTH the pre-Masoretic Jeremiah and the LXX Jeremiah were in circulation at Qumran. This is particularly interesting to me, as it confirms that this particular sect was well aware of the existenc eof multiple editions, and it seems that they did not have a preference as far as this particular work is concerned.
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