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A group of 70 or so "books", each with between five and 15 lead leaves bound by lead rings ....

About 70 Codices comprised of lead leaves, bound by lead rings, is most probably not going to be an early Christian collection. The early church didn't have the kind of financial resources to produce such a work. What one would expect from the first 3 centuries of the church would be Papyrus manuscripts -- probably prepared as codices -- and not something made from lead. Anything later and you're into the imperial period of Christianity, and we know a great deal about that period already.

For manuscripts to contain anything about Jesus that might be different from the New Testament, they will need to come from either (1) the first century, (2) a minor sect that had divergent views from the mainstream, (3) a less minor heretical sect, like the gnostics. If these are gnostics writings, then what we're looking at would be something from the mid-2nd through the 4th centuries and largely useless for determining anything about the historical Jesus. If these are the writings of some minor sect, then how they were prepared in lead and bound with lead rings becomes a major mystery ... minor Christian sects didn't have the resources for a major and expensive undertaking like that. And, finally, if the collection comes from the first century, then it's almost certainly NOT Christian for every reason stated in point 2. Besides, for the most part Christianity was just barely into the process of codifying a a book of Scriptures even by the end of the first century (all we had by then were the collected letters of Paul and each region had its favorite Gospel). It wan't until the mid-2nd Century that the 4 canonical Gospels and the Letters of Paul and the Catholic Epistles were generally recognized as being authoritative, and it wasn't until the mid 4th century (the 360s AD) that what we now have in the NT was accepted across the church as being the Christian Canon.

My guess is that what they have is a collection of Jewish -- probably late Second Temple period -- Priestly commissioned manuscripts that were spirited out of Jerusalem just prior to the Roman's sacking of the city in 70 AD. This would make these mss of extreme importance for Israel and for those interested in the religious history of the period (including Christians), however they would also be prime targets for destruction amongst the Palestinians who assert that Israel has NO historic claim to the region.

Ping

Agreed. I read somewhere that the symbols of Sukkot depictions on the cover suggest they were probably related to the Bar Kochba Revolt or could be the secret writings of the Talmudic mystic Shimon bar Yachai.

The code too would suggest the codices are Kabbalist, though early Christians did use code too, of course.