Roughly fifteen manuscripts of Jubilees were recovered from five of the Qumran caves between 1947 and 1956, all in Hebrew. That count is high. Only a handful of biblical books are represented by more copies, and the comparison is the strongest available evidence that the community treated Jubilees as authoritative rather than as edifying reading. The Damascus Document reinforces it by citing the book by name and directing the reader to it for exact reckoning of Israel's times of blindness, one of the rare instances of one Second Temple text explicitly commending another.
Transmission thereafter is fragmentary everywhere except Ethiopia. The Hebrew original is lost apart from the cave fragments. A Greek version is known only through quotations in Christian chronographers. A Latin translation survives for about a quarter of the work, and Syriac writers preserve scattered references. The complete text exists only in Geez, in some twenty-seven manuscripts, and every modern translation rests on it. Where the Hebrew fragments overlap the Geez, the agreement is close, which gives reasonable confidence that the Ethiopic represents the ancient work.
Dating rests on internal evidence. The book knows the Hellenising crisis and the resistance to it, shows no knowledge of the Hasmonean priest-kings at their height, and depends on parts of 1 Enoch; most scholars place it around 160 to 150 BCE, some slightly earlier.
Mainstream Judaism and the Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches assign it no scriptural status. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church receive it as canonical, and Beta Israel tradition holds it likewise, so that a book excluded everywhere else has been read as scripture continuously in the Horn of Africa.