Scholar: The Essenes, Dead Sea Scroll 'Authors,' Never Existed

Prof. Rachel Elior says Josephus, inspired by descriptions of life in the Greek city of Sparta, made sect up.

Ofri Ilany 13.03.2009 01:46

read more: http://www.haaretz.com/scholar-the-essenes-dead-sea-scroll-authors-never-existed-1.272034

Scholarship suggesting the existence of the Essenes, a religious Jewish group that lived in the Judea before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, is wrong, according to Prof. Rachel Elior, whose study on the subject will be released soon.

Elior blasts the predominant opinion of Dead Sea Scrolls scholars that the Essenes had written the scrolls in Qumran, claiming instead that they were written by ousted Temple priests in Jerusalem.

"Sixty years of research have been wasted trying to find the Essenes in the scrolls. But they didn't exist, they were invented by [Jewish-Roman historian] Josephus. It's a history of errors which is simply nonsense," she said.

In his book "The Jewish War," Flavius Josephus describes the Essenes as an ascetic, mystical religious sect that lived in abstinence from worldly pleasures, including sex.

The Essenes are commonly believed to have written the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered in a Qumran cave in 1947 and are considered the most significant archaeological discovery of the past century.

The scrolls consist of numerous religious documents including preserved copies of the Hebrew Bible, untouched from as early as 300 BCE.

Many scholars claim that the Essenes were the first Christians, or were related to John the Baptist and to Jesus Christ. Prof. James Charlesworth, a senior Bible scholar who also specializes in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus and the Gospel of John, believes John the Baptist lived among the Essenes for at least a year and drew some of his central ideas from them.

While mainstream scholarship maintains the Essenes or the Qumran sect that lived near the Dead Sea wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, a few scholars believe the scrolls had been written in Jerusalem or elsewhere and were brought to the Dead Sea at a later stage.

Last week the controversy over the identity of the scrolls' authors was thrust into the headlines with the arrest of Raphael Golb, son of Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Prof. Norman Golb of the University of Chicago, on suspicion of impersonating a rival scholar.

Norman Golb has claimed the Dead Sea Scrolls had not been written by the Essenes and that scholars who oppose him are trying to silence him. He described the senior scrolls' scholars as a united sect or guild, no less fanatic that the Qumran sect they claim has written the scrolls.

"Golb presents his approach in a radical way and is therefore not considered legitimate among the scholars," Elior said. She accepts some of his criticism about the mainstream scrolls scholars.

Elior says Josephus, inspired by descriptions of life in the Greek city of Sparta, made the Essenes up.

"There is no historical testimony in Hebrew or Aramaic of the Essenes. It is unthinkable that thousands of people lived abstemiously, contrary to Torah laws, and nobody wrote anything about it," she said.

Then who did write the scrolls?

Elior says the Sadducees, a sect descending from the high priest Zadok, who anointed Solomon as king, are the true authors. The scrolls belonged to the Temple and were brought to the Dead Sea to protect them, she says.

"The scrolls speak in clear Hebrew of the priests, sons of Zadok. So why call them Essenes?" asked Elior. "That's a distortion of history. It's like saying that the State of Israel wasn't established by Mapai, but by the Greens."

The apocalyptic prophecy cited in the scrolls of a war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness is a war between Zadok's sons, who served as high priests until 175 BCE, when they were ousted by the Hasmoneans, the descendants of Matityahu, she said. Prof. Hanan Eshel of Bar-Ilan University claims that denying the Essenes' existence is groundless.

"Almost 70 scholars accept the statement that one of the Essenes' groups lived in Qumran and some say we're all morons and only they understand," he said. One of the scrolls, "describes a small group of people living communally. Can anyone explain to me how this could have come from Jerusalem?"

read more: http://www.haaretz.com/scholar-the-essenes-dead-sea-scroll-authors-never-existed-1.272034

 http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/scrolls_deadsea/deadsea_scrollsdeception/scrollsdeception.htm

by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh

from Scribd Website

Map of Qumran and the Dead Sea

THE DECEPTION
 

1 - The Discovery of the Scrolls

East of Jerusalem, a long road slopes gradually down between barren hills sprinkled with occasional Bedouin camps. It sinks 3800 feet, to a depth of 1300 feet below sea-level, and then emerges to give a panoramic vista of the Jordan Valley. Away to the left, one can discern Jericho. In the haze ahead lie Jordan itself and, as though seen in a mirage, the mountains of Moab.

To the right lies the northern shore of the Dead Sea. The skin of water, and the yellow cliffs rising 1200 feet or more which line this (the Israeli) side of it, conduce to awe - and to acute discomfort. The air here, so far below sea-level, is not just hot, but palpably so, with a thickness to it, a pressure, almost a weight.

The beauty, the majesty and the silence of the place are spellbinding. So, too, is the sense of antiquity the landscape conveys - the sense of a world older than most Western visitors are likely to have experienced. It is therefore all the more shocking when the 20th century intrudes with a roar that seems to rupture the sky - a tight formation of Israeli F-16s or Mirages swooping low over the water, the pilots clearly discernible in their ****pits. Afterburners blasting, the jets surge almost vertically upwards into invisibility.

One waits, numbed. Seconds later, the entire structure of cliffs judders to the receding sonic booms. Only then does one remember that this place exists, technically, in a state of permanent war - that this side of the Dead Sea has never, during the last forty-odd years, made peace with the other. But then again, the soil here has witnessed incessant conflict since the very beginning of recorded history. Too many gods, it seems, have clashed here, demanding blood sacrifice from their adherents.

The ruins of Qumran (or, to be more accurate, Khirbet Qumran) appear to the right, just as the road reaches the cliffs overlooking the Dead Sea. Thereafter, the road bends to follow the cliffs southwards, along the shore of the water, towards the site of the fortress of Masada, thirty-three miles away. Qumran stands on a white terrace of marl, a hundred feet or so above the road, slightly more than a mile and a quarter from the Dead Sea.

The ruins themselves are not very prepossessing. One is first struck by a tower, two floors of which remain intact, with walls three feet thick - obviously built initially with defense in mind. Adjacent to the tower are a number of cisterns, large and small, connected by a complicated network of water channels. Some may have been used for ritual bathing. Most, however, if not all, would have been used to store the water the Qumran community needed to survive here in the desert. Between the ruins and the Dead Sea, on the lower levels of the marl terrace, lies an immense cemetery of some 1200 graves.

Each is marked by a long mound of stones aligned - contrary to both Judaic and Muslim practice - north—south.

Even today, Qumran feels remote, though several hundred people live in a nearby kibbutz and the place can be reached quickly and easily by a modern road running to Jerusalem - a drive of some twenty miles and forty minutes. Day and night, huge articulated lorries thunder along the road, which links Eilat in the extreme south of Israel with Tiberius in the north. Tourist buses stop regularly, disgorging sweating Western Europeans and Americans, who are guided briefly around the ruins, then to an air-conditioned bookshop and restaurant for coffee and cakes. There are, of course, numerous military vehicles. But one also sees private cars, both Israeli and Arab, with their different colored number-plates. One even sees the occasional 'boy racer' in a loud, badly built Detroit monster, whose speed appears limited only by the width of the road.

The Israeli Army is, needless to say, constantly in sight. This, after all, is the West Bank, and the Jordanians are only a few miles away, across the Dead Sea. Patrols run day and night, cruising at five miles per hour, scrutinizing everything - small lorries, usually, with three heavy machine-guns on the back, soldiers upright behind them.

These patrols will stop to check the cars and ascertain the precise whereabouts of anyone exploring the area, or excavating on the cliffs or in the caves. The visitor quickly learns to wave, to make sure the troops see him and acknowledge his presence. It is dangerous to come upon them too suddenly, or to act in any fashion that might strike them as furtive or suspicious.

The kibbutz - Kibbutz Kalia - is a ten-minute walk from Qumran, up a short road from the ruins. There are two small schools for the local children, a large communal refectory and housing units resembling motels for overnight tourists. But this is still a military zone. The kibbutz is surrounded by barbed wire and locked at night. An armed patrol is always on duty, and there are numerous air-raid shelters deep underground.

These double for other purposes as well. One, for example, is used as a lecture hall, another as a bar, a third as a discotheque. But the wastes beyond the perimeter remain untouched by any such modernity. Here the Bedouin still shepherd their camels and their goats, seemingly timeless figures linking the present with the past.

In 1947, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, Qumran was very different. At that time the area was part of the British mandate of Palestine. To the east lay what was then the kingdom of Transjordan. The road that runs south along the shore of the Dead Sea did not exist, extending only to the Dead Sea's north-western quarter, a few miles from Jericho. Around and beyond it there were only rough tracks, one of which followed the course of an ancient Roman road. This route had long been in total disrepair. Qumran was thus rather more difficult to reach than it is today.

The sole human presence in the vicinity would have been the Bedouin, herding their camels and goats during the winter and spring, when the desert, perhaps surprisingly, yielded both water and grass. In the winter, or possibly the early spring, of 1947, it was to yield something more - one of the two or three greatest archaeological discoveries of modern times.

The precise circumstances attending the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls have already passed into legend. In a number of particulars, this legend is probably not entirely accurate, and scholars were bickering over certain points well into the 1960s. It remains, however, the only account we have. The original discovery is ascribed to a shepherd boy, Muhammad adh-Dhib, or Muhammad the Wolf, a member of the Ta'amireh tribe of Bedouin.

He himself later claimed he was searching for a lost goat. Whatever he was doing, his itinerary brought him clambering among the cliffs at Qumran, where he discovered an opening in the cliff-face. He tried to peer inside but, from where he stood, could see nothing. He then tossed a stone into the blackness, which elicited a sound of breaking pottery. This, needless to say, impelled him to further exploration.

Hoisting himself upwards, he crawled through the aperture, then dropped down to find himself in a small cave, high-ceilinged and narrow, no more than six feet wide and perhaps twenty-four long. It contained a number of large earthenware jars, about two feet tall and ten inches wide, many of them broken. Eight are generally believed to have been intact, though the quantity has never been definitively established.

According to his own account, Muhammad became frightened, hauled himself back out of the cave and fled. The next day, he returned with at least one friend and proceeded to explore the cave and its contents more closely. Some of the earthenware jars were sealed by large 'bowl-like' lids. Inside one of them, there were three leather rolls wrapped in decaying linen - the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls to see the light in nearly two thousand years.1

During the days that followed, the Bedouin returned to the site and at least four more leather rolls were found. At least two jars were removed and used for carrying water. When proper archaeological excavation began, it revealed a substantial number of sherds and fragments - enough, according to reliable estimates, to have constituted no fewer than forty jars.

There is no way of knowing how many of these jars, when first discovered, were empty and how many actually contained scrolls. Neither is there any way of knowing how many scrolls were taken from the cave and, before their significance became apparent, secreted away, destroyed or used for other purposes. Some, it has been suggested, were burned for fuel. In any case, we were told that more scrolls were taken from the cave than have previously been recorded, or than have subsequently come to light. Altogether, a total of seven complete scrolls were to find their way into the public domain, along with fragments of some twenty-one others.

At this point, accounts begin to grow increasingly contradictory. Apparently, however, thinking the scrolls might be of some value, three Bedouin took all they had found - three complete parchments according to some sources, seven or eight according to others - to a local sheik. He passed the Bedouin on to a Christian shopkeeper and dealer in curios and antiques, one Khalil Iskander Shahin, known as 'Kando'. Kando, a member of the Syrian Jacobite Church, contacted another Church member residing in Jerusalem, George Isaiah. According to reliable scholars, Kando and Isaiah promptly ventured out to Qumran themselves and removed a number of additional scrolls and/or fragments.2

Such activities were, of course, illegal. By the law of the British mandate - a law subsequently retained by both Jordanian and Israeli governments - all archaeological discoveries belonged officially to the state.

They were supposed to be turned over to the Department of Antiquities, then housed in the Palestine Archaeological Museum, known as the Rockefeller, in Arab East Jerusalem. But Palestine was in turmoil at the time, and Jerusalem a city divided into Jewish, Arab and British sectors. In these circumstances, the authorities had more pressing matters to deal with than a black market in archaeological relics. In consequence, Kando and George Isaiah were free to pursue their clandestine transactions with impunity.

George Isaiah reported the discovery to his ecclesiastical leader, the Syrian Metropolitan (i.e. Archbishop) Athanasius Yeshua Samuel, head of the Syrian Jacobite Church in Jerusalem. Academically, Athanasius Yeshua Samuel was a naive man, untutored in the sophisticated scholarship needed to identify, much less translate, the text before him. The late Edmund Wilson, one of the earliest and most reliable commentators on the Qumran discovery, wrote of Samuel that he 'was not a Hebrew scholar and could not make out what the manuscript was'.3

He even burned a small piece of it and smelled it, to verify that the substance was indeed leather, or parchment. But whatever his academic shortcomings, Samuel was also shrewd, and his monastery, St Mark's, contained a famous collection of ancient documents. He thus had some idea of the importance of what had passed into his hands.

Samuel later said he first learned of the Dead Sea Scrolls in April 1947. If chronology has hitherto been vague and contradictory, however, it now becomes even more so, varying from commentator to commentator. But some time between early June and early July Samuel requested Kando and George Isaiah to arrange a meeting with the three Bedouin who'd made the original discovery, to examine what they'd found.

When the Bedouin arrived in Jerusalem, they were carrying at least four scrolls and possibly as many as eight - the three they'd originally found themselves, plus one or more from whatever they or Kando and George Isaiah had subsequently plundered. Unfortunately, the Metropolitan had neglected to mention the Bedouin's impending visit to the monks at the monastery of St Mark.

When the Bedouin appeared with their dirty, crumbling and ragged parchments, themselves unshaven and insalubrious-looking, the monk at the gate turned them away. By the time Samuel learned of this, it was too late. The Bedouin, understandably resentful, wanted nothing further to do with Metropolitan Samuel. One of them even refused to have any further dealings with Kando, and sold his portion of the scrolls - a 'third' share which amounted to three scrolls - to the Muslim sheik of Bethlehem.

Kando managed to purchase the shares of the remaining scrolls, and sold them in turn to the Metropolitan for a reported £24. This cache was believed at first to consist of five scrolls, but proved eventually to contain only four, one of them having broken in two. Of the four texts, one was a well-preserved copy of the book of Isaiah from the Old Testament, the parchment of which unrolled to a length of twenty-four feet. The other three, according to the nomenclature later adopted by scholars, included the 'Genesis Apocryphon', a commentary on the 'Book of Habakkuk' and the so-called 'Community Rule'.

Shortly after the Bedouin's abortive visit to Jerusalem - in late July according to some reports, in August according to others -Metropolitan Samuel sent a priest to return with George Isaiah to the cave at Qumran. Being engaged in illicit activities, the pair worked by night. They examined the site at length and found at least one additional jar and some fragments; they also conducted, apparently, some fairly extensive excavations.

When the first official research party reached the location a year later, they discovered an entire section of the cliff-face had been removed, making a large entrance into the cave below the smaller hole originally explored by the Bedouin. What this enterprise may have yielded remains unknown. In researching this book, we interviewed certain people who insisted that George Isaiah, during the course of his nocturnal explorations, found a number of other scrolls, some of which have never been seen by scholars.

Having obtained at least some of the scrolls, Metropolitan Samuel undertook to establish their age. He first consulted a Syrian expert working at the Department of Antiquities. In this man's opinion, the scrolls were of fairly recent date. The Metropolitan then consulted a Dutch scholar working with the Ecole Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jérusalem, an institution run by Dominican monks and financed, in part, by the French government.

He was intrigued, but remained skeptical about the scrolls' antiquity, describing subsequently how he returned to the Ecole Biblique and consulted 'a prominent scholar' there, who lectured him about the prevalent forgeries floating around amongst dodgy antique dealers.4 As a result, he abandoned his research on the matter, and the Ecole Biblique lost its opportunity to get involved at the beginning. Only the relatively untutored Metropolitan, at this point, seems to have had any inkling of the scrolls' age, value and significance.

In September 1947, the Metropolitan took the scrolls in his possession to his superior, the Patriarch of the Syrian Jacobite Church in Horns, north of Damascus. What passed between them is not known, but on his return the Metropolitan again dispatched a party of men to excavate the cave at Qumran. Presumably he was acting on the Patriarch's instructions. In any case, he obviously believed there was more to be discovered.

Metropolitan Samuel's visit to Syria in September had coincided with the arrival there of Miles Copeland, who had joined the OSS during the Second World War, had remained with that organization when it became the CIA and went on to become a long-serving operative and station chief. In a personal interview, Copeland told how, in the autumn of 1947, he had just been posted to Damascus as the CIA's representative there. In the circumstances then prevailing, there was no need to operate under particularly deep cover, and his identity seems to have been pretty much an open secret.

According to Copeland, a 'sly Egyptian merchant' came to see him one day and claimed to possess a great treasure. Reaching into a dirty sack, the man then pulled out a scroll, the edges of which were already disintegrating - fragments were flaking off into the street. When asked what it was, Copeland, of course, couldn't say. If the merchant left it with him, however, he promised he would photograph it and get someone to study it.

In order to photograph it, Copeland and his colleagues took the scroll up on to the roof of the American Legation in Damascus and stretched it out. A strong wind was gusting at the time, Copeland remembered, and pieces of the scroll peeled away, wafted over the roof and into the streets of the city, to be lost for ever. According to Copeland, a substantial portion of the parchment vanished in this manner. Copeland's wife, an archaeologist herself, said she could not help wincing every time she heard the story.

Using photographic equipment supplied by the American government, Copeland and his colleagues took, he reported, some thirty frames. This, he said, was not sufficient to cover the entire length of the scroll, which must, therefore, have been considerable. Subsequently, the photographs were taken to the American embassy in Beirut and shown to a prominent official there, a man versed in ancient languages.

The official declared the text to be part of the Old Testament book of Daniel. Some of the writing was in Aramaic, he said, some in Hebrew. Unfortunately, however, there was no follow-up. Copeland returned to Damascus, but the 'sly Egyptian merchant' was never seen again and the photographs were left in a drawer.5 No one, to this day, knows what became of them, or of the scroll itself, although fragments of a Daniel scroll were subsequently found at Qumran, five years after the incident Copeland described.

If the scroll Copeland saw and photographed was indeed a text of Daniel, it has never become public.

Although it was precisely at this time that Metropolitan Samuel was in Syria with the scrolls he had purchased, it is unlikely that the scroll Copeland saw was one of these, since only three of the scrolls in his possession could be unrolled at all, and only one - the twenty-four-foot-long Hebrew text of Isaiah - would have taken more than thirty frames of film to photograph. If this is what Copeland saw, why should it have been identified as Daniel, not Isaiah, and why should the writing have been identified as both Hebrew and Aramaic? It is possible, of course, that the CIA official was mistaken.

But when we repeated Copeland's story to a prominent Israeli researcher, he was intrigued.

'It might be very interesting,' he said, in confidence. 'It might be a scroll that hasn't been seen yet.'

If we could obtain any further information, he said,

'I'll exchange with you... additional data concerning missing scrolls.'6

Which implies, needless to say, that such data exist and have never been made public.

While Copeland's photographs were being examined in Beirut, Metropolitan Samuel was persisting in his efforts to confirm the age of the scrolls in his possession. A Jewish doctor who visited his monastery put him in touch with scholars from Hebrew University. They in turn put him in touch with the head of Hebrew University's Department of Archaeology, Professor Eleazar Sukenik.

On 24 November, before Sukenik came to view the scrolls held by the Metropolitan, a secret meeting occurred between him and a figure subsequently identified only as an Armenian antique dealer. Neither had had time to obtain the requisite military passes. They were therefore obliged to meet at a checkpoint between the Jewish and the Arab zones of Jerusalem, and to talk across a barrier of barbed wire. Across this barrier, the Armenian showed Sukenik a fragment of a scroll on which Hebrew writing could be discerned.

The Armenian then explained that an Arab antique dealer from Bethlehem had come to him the day before, bringing this and other fragments alleged to have been found by Bedouin. Sukenik was asked if they were genuine and if Hebrew University were prepared to purchase them. Sukenik requested a second meeting, which occurred three days later. This time he had a pass, and was able to look closely at a number of fragments. Convinced they were important, he resolved to go to Bethlehem to see more, dangerous though such an undertaking was at the time.

On 29 November 1947, Sukenik slipped furtively out of Jerusalem and made the clandestine trip to Bethlehem. Here he was told in detail how the scrolls had been discovered and was shown three scrolls which were for sale - those which the Metropolitan had missed - and two of the jars that contained them. He was allowed to take the scrolls home, and was studying them when, at midnight, dramatic news came over the radio: a majority of the United Nations had voted for the creation of the state of Israel.

At that moment, Sukenik resolved to purchase the scrolls. They seemed to him a kind of talismanic portent, a symbolic validation of the momentous historical events that had just been set in motion.7

This conviction was shared by his son, Yigael Yadin, then chief of operations for the Haganah - the semi-clandestine militia which during the struggle for independence in 1948 was to evolve into the Israeli Defence Forces.

For Yadin also the discovery of the scrolls was to assume an almost mystical significance:

I cannot avoid the feeling that there is something symbolic in the discovery of the scrolls and their 
acquisition at the moment of the creation of the State of Israel. It is as if these manuscripts had 
been waiting in caves for two thousand years, ever since the destruction of Israel's independence, 
until the people of Israel had returned to their home and regained their freedom.8

Towards the end of January 1948, Sukenik arranged to view the scrolls held by Metropolitan Samuel. The meeting, again, was to be clandestine. It was to occur in the British sector of Jerusalem, at the YMCA, where the librarian was a member of the Metropolitan's congregation. Security was particularly tight here, the YMCA being situated directly across the road from the King David Hotel, which had been bombed, with great loss of life, in 1946. To enter the zone, Sukenik had to obtain a pass from the British District Officer, Professor Biran.

Endeavoring to pass himself off as just another scholar, Sukenik carried a handful of library books with him and made his way to the YMCA. Here, in a private room, he was shown the Metropolitan's scrolls and allowed to borrow them for inspection. He returned them to the Metropolitan on 6 February, unable to raise sufficient funds to purchase them. By that time, the political and economic situation was too tense for any bank to authorize the requisite loan. The local Jewish authorities, faced with the prospect of impending war, could not spare anything. No one else was interested.

Sukenik tried to bring down the price, and the Syrian agent representing the Metropolitan arranged to meet him a week later. By that time, Sukenik had contrived to raise the money required. He heard nothing, however, from the Metropolitan or the agent, until some weeks later a letter arrived from the Syrian declaring that the Metropolitan had decided, after all, not to sell.

Unknown to Sukenik, negotiations were already in train by then with American scholars who had photographed the scrolls and insisted a much better price could be elicited for them in the United States. Sukenik, needless to say, was mortified by the lost opportunity.

Metropolitan Samuel had contacted the Jerusalem-based Albright Institute (the American School of Oriental Research) in February, and a complete set of prints had been sent by the Institute to the acknowledged expert in the field, Professor William F. Albright, at Johns Hopkins University. On 15 March, Professor Albright replied confirming Sukenik's conviction of the importance of the discovery, and setting the seal of approval on the Qumran texts.

He also, unwittingly, provided support for those intent on attributing to the scrolls the earliest date possible:

My heartiest congratulations on the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times! There is no 
doubt whatever in my mind that the script is more archaic than that of the Nash Papyrus... I 
should prefer a date around 100 BC... What an absolutely incredible find! And there can happily 
not be the slightest doubt in the world about the genuineness of the MS.9

On 18 March, a suggested press release was drawn up. In the meantime, the scrolls had been taken to Beirut and placed in a bank there for safekeeping. Later in the year, Metropolitan Samuel was to pick them up, and in January 1949 he took them to the United States, where they were to spend the next few years in a New York bank vault.

On 11 April, the first press release appeared, issued by Yale University, where Professor Millar Burrows - director of the Albright Institute - was head of the Department of Near Eastern Languages. The press release was not entirely truthful. No one wanted swarms of amateurs (or rivals) to descend on Qumran, and so the discovery was alleged to have been made in the library of Metropolitan Samuel's monastery. But for the first time, fully a year after they'd initially surfaced, the existence of the Dead Sea Scrolls became known to the general public.

On page 4 of its edition for Monday, 12 April 1948, The Times ran the following article under the headline 'ancient mss. found in palestine':

New York, April 11

Yale University announced yesterday the discovery in Palestine of the earliest known manuscript 
of the Book of Isaiah. It was found in the Syrian monastery of St Mark in Jerusalem, where it had 
been preserved in a scroll of parchment dating to about the first century BC. Recently it was 
identified by scholars of the American School of Oriental Research [the Albright Institute] at 
Jerusalem.

There were also examined at the school three other ancient Hebrew scrolls. One was part of 
a commentary on the Book of Habakkuk; another seemed to be a manual of discipline of some 
comparatively little-known sect or monastic order, possibly the Essenes. The third scroll has not 
been identified.

It was not an article calculated to set the world of scholarship aflame. So far as most readers of The Times were concerned, it would have meant little enough, and would anyway have been effectively up-staged by other news on the same page.

2 - The International Team

Yigael Yadin recounted the events of 1967 to David Pryce-Jones in an interview conducted early in 1968. He was aware, he said, that other scrolls were around, and that Kando, the dealer involved in the original discovery, knew where they were.

He therefore sent other staff members from Hebrew University, accompanied by three officers, to Kando's house in Bethlehem. Kando was taken under escort to Tel Aviv. When he emerged after five days of interrogation, he took the officers back to his home and produced a scroll which had been hidden there for six years. This proved to be an extremely important discovery - the 'Temple Scroll', first published in 1977.!

Pryce-Jones also interviewed Father de Vaux, who was highly indignant at what had occurred. According to Pryce-Jones, de Vaux called the Israelis 'Nazis':

'His face flushed as he claimed the Israelis would use the conquest of Jerusalem as a pretext to move all the Dead Sea Scrolls from the Rockefeller and house them in their Shrine of the Book. '2

He also feared for both his own position and his access to the Qumran texts, because, as Pryce-Jones discovered,

'Father de Vaux had refused to allow any Jews to work on the scrolls in the Rockefeller’.3

De Vaux's fears, in fact, proved groundless. In the political and military aftermath of the Six Day War, the Israelis had other matters on their plate. Yadin and Professor Biran, who from 1961 to 1974 was director of the Israeli Department of Antiquities, were therefore prepared to maintain the status quo, and de Vaux was left in charge of the scrolls, with the stipulation that their publication be speeded up.

A cache of some eight hundred scrolls had been discovered in Cave 4 in 1952. To deal with the sheer quantity of this material, an international committee of scholars had been formed, each member of which was assigned certain specific texts for study, interpretation, translation and eventual publication.

Owing nominal allegiance to the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, the committee in reality functioned under the virtually supreme authority of Father de Vaux. He subsequently became editor-in-chief of the definitive series on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the multi-volume Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, published by Oxford University Press. He was to retain his prominence in the field until his death in 1971.

Roland de Vaux was born in Paris in 1903 and studied for the priesthood between 1925 and 1928 at the seminary of Saint Sulpice, learning Arabic and Aramaic in the process. In 1929, he joined the Dominican Order, under whose auspices he was sent to the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem. He began teaching regularly at the Ecole in 1934 and served as its director from 1945 until 1965. Between 1938 and 1953, he edited the Ecole's magazine, Revue biblique.

To those who met or knew him, de Vaux was a striking and memorable personality, something of a 'character'. A heavy smoker, he wore a bushy beard, glasses and a dark beret. He also, invariably, wore his white monk's robes, even on excavations. A charismatic man, known for his vigor and enthusiasm, he was an eloquent lecturer and an engaging raconteur, with a flair for public relations. This made him an ideal spokesman for the enterprise on which he was engaged. One of his former colleagues described him to us as a good scholar, if not a particularly good archaeologist.

But behind his personable façade, de Vaux was ruthless, narrow-minded, bigoted and fiercely vindictive. Politically, he was decidedly right-wing. In his youth, he had been a member of Action Franchise, the militant Catholic and nationalist movement which burgeoned in France between the two world wars, which extolled the cult of 'blood and soil' and expressed more than a little sympathy for the dictatorships in Germany, Italy and, on Franco's triumph, Spain. 

Certainly he was ill-suited to preside over research on the Dead Sea Scrolls. In the first place, he was not just a practicing Catholic, but also a monk, and this could hardly conduce to balance or impartiality in his handling of extremely sensitive, even explosive, religious material. Moreover, he was hostile to Israel as a political entity, always referring to the country as 'Palestine'.

On a more personal level, he was also anti-Semitic. One of his former colleagues testifies to his resentment at Israelis attending his lectures. After interviewing de Vaux, David Pryce-Jones stated that 'I found him an irascible brute, slightly potty too.'4 According to Magen Broshi, currently director of the Israeli Shrine of the Book, 'de Vaux was a rabid anti-Semite and a rabid anti-Israeli - but was the best partner one could ask for'.5

This was the man, then, to whom responsibility for the Dead Sea Scrolls was entrusted. In 1953, the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Museum, whose president at the time was de Vaux himself, had requested nominations from the various foreign archaeological schools - British, French, German and American - then active in Jerusalem. No Israelis were invited, despite the proximity of the well-trained staff of Hebrew University. Each school was asked for funds to help sustain the cost of the work.

The first scholar to be appointed under de Vaux's authority was Professor Frank Cross, then associated with McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago and with the Albright Institute in Jerusalem. Cross was the Albright's nominee, and began to work in Jerusalem in the summer of 1953. The material assigned to him consisted of specifically biblical texts - scroll commentaries, that is, found in Cave 4 at Qumran, on the various books of the Old Testament.

Material of a similar nature was assigned to Monsignor Patrick Skehan, also from the United States. At the time of his appointment, he was director of the Albright Institute.

Father Jean Starcky, from France, was nominated by the Ecole Biblique. At the time, he was attached to the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique. Starcky, an expert in Aramaic, was assigned the corpus of material in that language.

Dr Claus-Hunno Hunzinger was nominated by the Germans. He was assigned one particular text, known as the 'War Scroll', as well as a body of material transcribed on papyrus rather than on parchment. He subsequently left the team and was eventually replaced by another French priest, Father Maurice Baillet.

Father Josef Milik, a Polish priest resettled in France, was another nominee of the Ecole Biblique, with which he was also affiliated. A disciple and close confidant of de Vaux, Milik received an especially important corpus of material. It included a quantity of Old Testament apocrypha. It also included 'pseudepigraphical' writings - texts in which a later commentator would try to impart authority to his words by ascribing them to earlier prophets and patriarchs. Most important of all, it included what was called 'sectarian material' - material pertaining specifically to the community at Qumran, their teachings, rituals and disciplines.

The British nominee to the team was John M. Allegro, then working for his doctorate at Oxford under Professor Godfrey R. Driver. Allegro went to Jerusalem as an agnostic. He was the only member of the team not to have specific religious affiliations. He was also the only philologist in the group and already had five publications to his credit in academic journals. He was thus the only one to have established a reputation for himself before working on the scrolls. All the others were unknown at the time, and made their names only through their work with the texts assigned them.

Allegro was assigned biblical commentaries (which proved in fact to be 'sectarian material' of the kind assigned to Milik) and a body of so-called 'wisdom literature' - hymns, psalms, sermons and exhortations of a moral and poetic character. Allegro's material seems to have been rather more explosive than anyone at the time had anticipated, and he himself was something of a maverick. He had, certainly, no compunction about breaking the 'consensus' de Vaux was trying to establish and, as we shall see, was soon to be ousted from the team and replaced by John Strugnell, also enrolled in a doctoral program at Oxford. Strugnell became a disciple of Frank Cross.

According to what principles was the material divided, distributed and assigned? How was it determined who would deal with what?

Professor Cross, when asked this question on the telephone, replied that the matter was resolved with 'discussion and easy consensus and with the blessing of de Vaux':

Certain things were obvious; those of us who had full-time professorships could not take unknown 
and more complex problems. So we took biblical, the simplest material from the point of view of 
identification of material and putting stuff into columns and what-not. The people who were 
specialists in Aramaic, particularly Starcky - obviously the Aramaic stuff went to him. The 
interests of the several scholars, the opportunities for research, pretty much laid out what each of 
us would do. This was quickly agreed to and de Vaux gave his blessing. We didn't sit down and 
vote and there was no conflict in this. Basically the team worked by consensus.6

Professor Cross makes it clear that each member of the team knew what all the others were doing. All the material had been laid out and arranged in a single room, the 'Scrollery', and anyone was free to wander about and see how his colleagues were progressing.* They would also, of course, help one another on problems requiring one or another individual's special expertise.

* 'Scrollery' was a large room containing some twenty trestle tables where scroll fragments were pressed under sheets of glass. Photographs dating from the 1950s show a complete and appalling lack of any environmental control for the material, much of which was already deteriorating. Windows are open, for example, curtains blowing in the breeze. No attempt has been made to exclude heat, humidity, wind, dust or direct sunlight. It is all a far cry from the conditions in which the scrolls are housed today. They are now in a basement room, under a special amber light. Temperature and humidity are rigorously controlled. Each fragment is held between sheets of thin silk stretched in perspex frames.

But this also meant that if any one of the team were dealing with controversial or explosive material, all the others would know. On this basis, Allegro, to the end of his life, was to insist that important and controversial material was being withheld, or at least delayed in its release, by his colleagues. Another independent-minded scholar who later became involved reports that he was in the 1960s instructed 'to go slow', to proceed in a deliberately desultory fashion 'so that the crazies will get tired and go away'.7

De Vaux wanted, so far as it was possible, to avoid embarrassing the Christian establishment. Some of the Qumran material was clearly deemed capable of doing precisely that.

It was certainly convenient for de Vaux that until 1967 the Rockefeller Museum lay in the Jordanian territory of East Jerusalem. Israelis were forbidden to cross into the sector, and this provided the anti-Semitic de Vaux with a handy pretext to exclude Israeli experts, even though his team of international scholars was supposed, at least theoretically, to reflect the widest diversity of interests and approaches. If politics kept the Israelis out of East Jerusalem, they could easily have been provided with photographs, or with some other access to the material. No such access was granted.

We raised the issue with Professor Biran, governor of the Israeli sector of Jerusalem at the time and subsequently director of the Israeli Department of Antiquities. He stated that the Jordanian authorities had been adamant in refusing to let Sukenik, or any other Israeli scholar, enter their sector of Jerusalem. In his capacity of governor, Biran had replied by authorizing de Vaux's committee to meet in the Israeli sector and offering them safe conducts.

The offer was refused. Biran then suggested that individual scrolls or fragments be brought over, to be examined by Israeli experts. This suggestion was similarly rejected. 'Of course they could have come,' Professor Biran concluded, 'but they felt that they had possession [of the scrolls] and would not let anyone else take them.'8 In the existing political climate, the scrolls were a fairly low priority, and no official pressure was brought to bear on this academic intransigence.

The situation was rendered even more absurd by the fact that the Israelis, first at Hebrew University and then at the specially created Shrine of the Book, had seven important scrolls of their own - the three originally purchased by Sukenik, and the four Yigael Yadin managed to purchase in New York. The Israelis seem to have pursued and published their research more or less responsibly - they were, after all, accountable to Yadin and Biran, to the government, to public opinion and the academic world in general.

But the team at the Rockefeller emerge in a rather less favorable light. Funded by substantial donations, enjoying time, leisure and freedom, they convey the impression of an exclusive club, a self-proclaimed elite, almost medieval in their attitude to, and their monopolization of, the material. The 'Scrollery' in which they conducted their research has a quasi-monastic atmosphere about it. One is reminded again of the sequestration of learning in The Name of the Rose. And the 'experts' granted access to the 'Scrollery' arrogated such power and prestige to themselves that outsiders were easily convinced of the justness of their attitude.

As Professor James B. Robinson (director of another, more responsible, team which translated the texts found in the Egyptian desert at Nag Hammadi) said to us:

'Manuscript discoveries bring out the worst instincts in otherwise normal scholars.'9

If the international team were high-handed in monopolizing their material, they were no less so in interpreting it.

In 1954, just when the team were beginning their work, the dangers had already been anticipated, by a Jesuit scholar, Robert North:

Regarding the date of the scrolls, or rather the triple date of their composition, transcription, and 
storage, there has recently attained a relative consensus which is both reassuring and disquieting. 
It is reassuring insofar as it proceeds from such a variety of converging lines of evidence, and 
provides a 'working hypothesis' as basis of discussion. But there is danger of a false security. It is 
important to emphasize the frailty of the evidences themselves...10

North's warnings were to be ignored. During the course of the subsequent decade, a 'consensus' view - to use his term and Robert Eisenman's - was indeed to emerge, or be imposed, by the international team working under de Vaux at the Rockefeller. A rigid orthodoxy of interpretation evolved, from which any deviation was tantamount to heresy.

This orthodoxy of interpretation, which grew progressively more dogmatic over the years, was enunciated in its entirety by Father Milik and published in France in 1957 under the title Dix ans de découvertes dans le désert de Juda. Two years later, Milik's work was to be translated into English by another member of de Vaux's international team, John Strugnell. By that time, the first English formulation of the consensus view had already appeared – The Ancient Library of Qumran, by Professor Frank Cross, Strugnell's mentor, in 1958.

The consensus view was summarized and given its final polishing touches by Father De Vaux himself in a series of lectures given to the British Academy in 1959 and published in 1961 as L'archéologie et les manuscrits de la Mer Morte. By then, its tenets were soundly entrenched. Anyone who presumed to challenge them did so at severe risk to his credibility.

In 1971, on Father De Vaux's death, an extraordinary situation developed. Although he did not in any legal sense own the scrolls, he nevertheless bequeathed his rights to them to one of his colleagues, Father Pierre Benoit, another Dominican and subsequently de Vaux's successor as head of the international team and of the Ecole Biblique. For Father Benoit actually to inherit de Vaux's rights, privileges and prerogatives of access and control was, as a scholastic procedure, unprecedented. From a legal point of view, it was, to say the least, extremely irregular. More extraordinary still, however, the scholarly world did not contest this 'transaction'. When we asked Professor Norman Golb of the University of Chicago why so dubious a procedure was allowed to occur, he replied that opposing it would have been 'a lost cause'.11

With de Vaux's behavior as a precedent, other members of his team followed suit. Thus, for example, when Father Patrick Skehan died in 1980, he bequeathed rights to the scrolls in his custody to Professor Eugene Ulrich of Notre Dame University, Indiana. The scrolls that had been the preserve of Father Jean Starcky were similarly bequeathed - or, more euphemistically, 'reassigned' - to Father Emile Puech of the Ecole Biblique. Thus the Catholic scholars at the core of the international team maintained their monopoly and control, and the consensus remained unchallenged. Not until 1987, on the death of Father Benoit, were their methods to be contested.

When Father Benoit died, Professor John Strugnell was designated his successor as head of the international team. Born in Barnet, north London, in 1930, Strugnell received his BA in 1952 and his MA in 1955, both from Jesus College, Oxford. Although admitted to the PhD program at Oxford's Faculty of Oriental Studies, he never completed his doctorate, and his candidature lapsed in 1958. In he had been admitted to de Vaux's team, had gone to Jerusalem and remained there for two years.

In 1957, after a brief stint at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, he returned to Jerusalem, becoming affiliated with the Rockefeller Museum where he worked as epigraphist until 1960. In that year, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Old Testament Studies at Duke University's Divinity School. In 1968, he moved to Harvard Divinity School as Professor of Christian Origins.

Strugnell's appointment as head of the international team was not entirely unimpeded. Since 1967, the Israeli government had been legally authorised to ratify all such appointments. In Father Benoit's case, the Israelis hadn't bothered to exercise their authority. In Strugnell's, for the first time, they asserted their own rights over the material.

According to Professor Shemaryahu Talmon, a member of the committee that vetted Strugnell, his appointment was not ratified until certain conditions were met.12 Among other things, the Israelis were troubled by the way in which certain members of the international team tended to play the role of 'absentee landlord'. Since the 1967 war, for example, Father Starcky had refused to set foot in Israel. Father Milik, de Vaux's closest confidant and protege, had for many years lived in Paris, with photographs of some of the most vital scroll material, to which he alone has access.

No one else is allowed to make photographs. Without Milik's consent, no one, not even on the international team, is allowed to publish on the material of which he has custody. To our knowledge, he has never, since the 1967 war, returned to Jerusalem to work on this material. Time Magazine describes him as 'elusive'.13 Another publication, Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR), has twice reported that he refuses even to answer letters from the Israeli Department of Antiquities.14

He has treated both other scholars and the general public with what can only be described as disdain.

Anxious to discourage such behavior, the Israelis insisted that the new director of the scroll project spend at least some of his time in Jerusalem. Strugnell, who was reconsidering his position at Harvard in any case, complied by taking half-retirement from his post. He began to spend half of each year in Jerusalem, at the Ecole Biblique, where he had his own quarters.

But there were other obligations which he failed to discharge. He did not publish the texts entrusted to him. His commentary on one of these texts - a fragment of 121 lines - has been expected for more than five years and has still not appeared. He wrote only one 27-page article on the material in his possession. Apart from this, he published an article on Samaritan inscriptions, a translation of Milik's study of Qumran and, as we shall see, a long and hostile critique of the one member of the international team to challenge the interpretation of the consensus. It is not a very impressive record for a man who spent a lifetime working in a field which depends on publication. On the other hand, he allowed selected graduate students to work on certain original texts for their doctoral degrees - thus earning prestige for them, for their mentor and for Harvard University.

In general, under Strugnell's auspices, the international team proceeded pretty much as they did before. It is interesting to compare their progress with that of scholars working on a different corpus of texts, the so-called 'Gnostic Gospels' discovered in Egypt, at Nag Hammadi.

The Nag Hammadi Scrolls were found two years before the Dead Sea Scrolls, in 1945. By 1948, they had all been purchased by the Cairo Coptic Museum. There was initially an attempt to establish a Qumran-style monopoly over the material, again by an enclave of French scholars, and as a result, work on them was retarded until 1956. No sooner did it finally get under way than it was interrupted by the Suez crisis.

After this delay, however, the scrolls were in 1966 turned over to an international team of scholars for translation and publication. The head of this team was Professor James M. Robinson of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity at Claremont Graduate School, California. When we spoke to Professor Robinson about the team in charge of the Qumran texts, he was scathing. The Qumran scholars, Professor Robinson said, 'no longer have to make reputations - all they can do is break them'.15

Professor Robinson and his team, in contrast, moved with impressive rapidity. Within three years, a number of draft transcriptions and translations were being made available to scholars. By 1973, the entire Nag Hammadi library was in draft English translation and was circulating freely amongst interested researchers. In 1977, the whole body of the Nag Hammadi codices was published, in facsimile and a popular edition - a total of forty-six books plus some unidentified fragments. It thus took Robinson and his team a mere eleven years to bring the Nag Hammadi Scrolls into print.16

Granted, the Qumran texts were more numerous and posed more complex problems than those from Nag Hammadi. But even allowing for this, the record of de Vaux's international team does not exactly inspire confidence. When they were formed in 1953, their declared objective and intention was to publish all the scrolls found at Qumran in definitive editions, forming a series to be issued by Oxford University Press as Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of Jordan.

The first volume appeared quickly enough, in 1955, and dealt with the fragments found in the original cave at Qumran, now officially designated Cave 1. Not until 1961, six years later, did the next volume appear; and this did not deal with Qumran texts at all, but with material found in the nearby caves of Murabba'at. In 1963, a third volume appeared, which dealt primarily with scroll fragments from Cave 2, Cave 3 and Caves 5-10. Of these fragments, the most complete and most important was the 'Copper Scroll', found in Cave 3.

Apart from the 'Copper Scroll', the lengthiest text amounted to just over sixty lines, and most came to something between four and twelve lines. But the fragments also yielded two copies of a text known as 'The Book of Jubilees'. A copy of the same text would later be found at Masada, revealing that the defenders of the fortress used the same calendar as the Qumran community, and establishing closer connections between the two sites than de Vaux felt comfortable acknowledging.

The fourth volume of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert appeared in 1965, under the editorship of James A. Sanders. But Professor Sanders was not a member of de Vaux's team. The scroll he dealt with - a volume of psalms - had been found by the Bedouin in Cave 11 by 1956 and brought, along with a number of fragments, to the Rockefeller Museum.

No purchaser being forthcoming, the material was locked in one of the museum's safes, to which no one was allowed access. Here it remained until 1961, when the Albright Institute was at last enabled to buy it, finance being provided by Kenneth and Elizabeth Bechtel of the Bechtel Corporation, a giant American construction company with many interests in the Middle East (though none in Israel), many connections with the American government and at least some associations with the CIA.

Professor Sanders's volume thus appeared independently of the framework and timetable established by de Vaux's international team.

In the meantime, however, the bulk of the most copious and most significant material - the material found in the veritable treasure trove of Cave 4 - continued to be withheld from both the public and the academic community. Now and again, small pieces and tantalizing fragments would leak into scholarly journals. But not until 1968 did the first official publication of material from Cave 4, albeit a very small proportion, appear. It did so under the auspices of the one 'renegade' or 'heretic' on de Vaux's team, John Allegro.

As delays in releasing the Qumran material persisted, and the time between published volumes continued to lengthen, suspicions began to proliferate that something was seriously amiss. Critics voiced three suspicions in particular. It was suggested that de Vaux's team were finding their material too difficult, too complex. It was also suggested that they might deliberately be proceeding slowly, suppressing or at least retarding the release of certain material in order to buy time.

And it was suggested that the team were simply lazy and idle, basking in comfortable sinecures which they would obviously be in no hurry to relinquish. It was further pointed out that no such delays had occurred with the pieces of Qumran material in American and Israeli hands. In contrast to de Vaux's team, American and Israeli scholars had wasted no time in bringing their material into print.

The sixth volume of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert did not appear until 1977, nine years after Allegro's work. A seventh volume was not issued until 1982, an eighth only in 1990 - and this latter did not deal with Qumran texts. As we have noted, draft translations of Nag Hammadi codices were in circulation within three years. In the case of the Qumran material, no such draft translations were ever made available by de Vaux's team, nor are they so today.

The entire Nag Hammadi corpus was in print within eleven years. It is now approaching thirty-eight years since de Vaux's team began their work, and they have so far produced only eight volumes - less than twenty-five per cent of the material in their hands.17

As we shall see, moreover, of the material which has appeared in print, very little of it is the material that really matters.

In an interview published in the New York Times, Robert Eisenman spoke of how 'a small circle of scholars has been able to dominate a field of research for several generations (even though some of these scholars have been defunct in this field for years) and to continue to do so through their control of graduate studies and placing their coterie of students and scholars in the most prestigious academic chairs'.18

Biblical Archaeological Review, an influential journal published by the Washington lawyer Hershel Shanks, described de Vaux's international team as being 'governed, so far as can be ascertained, largely by convention, tradition, collegiality and inertia'.19 According to BAR, the 'insiders' who hold the scrolls 'have the goodies - to drip out bit by bit.

This gives them status, scholarly power and a wonderful ego trip. Why squander it?'20

And at a conference on the scrolls at New York University in 1985, Professor Morton Smith, one of the most distinguished names in contemporary biblical studies, began by saying scathingly:

'I thought to speak on the scandals of the Dead Sea documents, but these proved too numerous, too familiar and too disgusting.'21

How have the members of the international team responded to such damning condemnation?

Of the original international team assembled in 1953, only three at present remain alive. Joseph Milik, who has since left the priesthood, maintains, as we have seen, the life of an 'elusive' recluse in Paris. ProfessorsJohn Strugnell and Frank Cross were at Harvard University Divinity School. Of these, Professor Cross proved the most accessible and allowed himself to be questioned about the delays in publication. In an interview with the New York Times, he admitted that progress had 'generally been slow' and offered two explanations.

Most members of the team, he said, were engaged in full-time teaching and could get to Jerusalem to work on the material only during summer holidays. And the scrolls that have not yet been published, he added, are so fragmented that it is difficult to fit them together, much less translate them.22

'It's the world's most fantastic jig-saw puzzle,' he remarked on another occasion.23

It would, of course, be rash to underestimate the complexity of the work in which Cross and his colleagues were engaged. The myriad fragments of Qumran texts do indeed constitute a daunting jigsaw puzzle. Nevertheless, Cross's explanations are not altogether convincing. It is certainly true that members of the international team are active in teaching and have only limited time to spend in Jerusalem; but Cross did not mention that most of the work now being done on the scrolls is done with photographs, which do not require the researcher to travel anywhere.

In fact, the state of photography at present often makes it easier, and more reliable, to deal with photographs than with original parchments. As for the complexity of the jigsaw, Cross himself contradicted his own argument. As early as 1958, he wrote that most of the scroll fragments then in the team's hands had already been identified -had been identified, in fact, by the summer of 1956.24

According to John Allegro, writing in 1964, assembly and identification of all Cave 4 material - the most copious corpus - was 'nearly complete' by 1960/61.25 Nor was the task of identifying material always as difficult as Cross might lead one to believe.

In a letter to John Allegro, dated 13 December 1955, Strugnell wrote that £3000 worth of Cave 4 material had just been purchased (with Vatican funds) and identified in one afternoon.26 Complete photographs of the material, he added, would require no more than a week.

Even before he breached the consensus of the international team, Allegro was anxious to speed things up and skeptical of the various reasons proffered for not doing so. But was it merely as a sop that de Vaux wrote to him on 22 March 1959 that all the Qumran texts would be published, and Discoveries in the Judaean Desert complete, by the middle of 1962, the date scheduled for StrugnelFs concluding volume?

In the same letter, de Vaux stated that work on the original texts would be finished by June 1960, after which they would be turned over to the various institutions that had paid for them. Today, more than thirty years after de Vaux's letter, survivors of his team and its new members still cling to the scrolls in their possession, insisting on the need for continued research. And, it is worth repeating, what has been voluntarily released is, for the most part, of least importance.

The Qumran texts are generally classified under two rubrics. On the one hand, there is a corpus of early copies of biblical texts, some with slightly variant readings. These are referred to as 'biblical material'.

On the other, there is a corpus of non-biblical material consisting for the most part of documents never seen before, which can be labeled 'sectarian material'.

Most outsiders, needless to say, instinctively assume the 'biblical material' to be of the greater interest and consequence - the simple word 'biblical' triggers associations in the mind which lead automatically to such a supposition. To our knowledge, Eisenman was the first to detect, and certainly the first to emphasize, the sophistry involved in this. For the 'biblical material' is perfectly innocuous and uncontroversial, containing no revelations of any kind. It consists of little more than copies of books from the Old Testament, more or less the same as those already in print or with only minor alterations.

There is nothing radically new here. In reality, the most significant texts comprise not the 'biblical' but the 'sectarian' literature.

It is these texts - rules, biblical commentaries, theological, astrological and messianic treatises - that pertain to the 'sect' alleged to have resided at Qumran and to their teachings. To label this material 'sectarian' is effectively and skillfully to defuse interest in it.

Thus, it is portrayed as the idiosyncratic doctrine of a fringe and maverick 'cult', a small, highly unrepresentative congregation divorced from, and wholly peripheral to, the supposed mainstream of Judaism and early Christianity, the phenomena to which it is in fact most pertinent. Outsiders are thus manipulated into accepting the consensus — that the Qumran community were so-called Essenes and that the Essenes, while interesting as a marginal development, have no real bearing on broader issues.

The reality, as we shall see, is very different, and the perfunctorily dismissed 'sectarian' texts will prove to contain material of an explosive nature indeed.

Among the scholars of Father de Vaux's original international team, perhaps the most dynamic, original and audacious was John Marco Allegro. Certainly he was the most spontaneous, the most independent-minded, the most resistant to suppression of material.

Born in 1923, he saw service in the Royal Navy during the war and in 1947 - the year the first Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered - entered Manchester University as an undergraduate studying Logic, Greek and Hebrew. A year later, he transferred to the honors course in Semitic Studies. He also developed an interest in philology, the study of the origins of language, its underlying structure and development.

Bringing his philological expertise to bear on biblical texts, he quickly became convinced that scripture could not be taken at face value and proclaimed himself an agnostic. In June 1951, he graduated with a BA, first-class honors, in Oriental Studies, and the following year received his MA for his thesis, 'A Linguistic Study of the Balaam Oracles in the Book of Numbers'.

In October of that year, he enrolled in the doctoral program at Oxford under the supervision of the distinguished Semitic scholar, Professor Godfrey R. Driver. A year later, Driver recommended him for the international team then being assembled by de Vaux, and Allegro was assigned the crucial material found in Cave 4 at Qumran. He departed for Jerusalem in September 1953. By that time, he had already published four acclaimed articles in academic journals - a track record more impressive than anyone else on the team could claim.

In 1956, Allegro published a popular book, The Dead Sea Scrolls, following this in 1968 with his own research on the texts and fragments from Cave 4 in the fifth volume of the definitive Oxford University Press series, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert. At this point, Allegro was one of the most esteemed and prestigious figures in the field of biblical scholarship. Yet within two years, he was to abandon his colleagues on the international team, turn his back upon the academic world and resign his university post at Manchester. He was also to be vilified and discredited. What had happened?

It quickly became clear, to the academic community in general as well as to the international team, that Allegro was the only one among them who was not only an agnostic, but also uninhibited about 'rocking the boat'.

Unconstrained by any personal religious bias, he explained things, often impetuously, as he saw them; and he rapidly lost patience with his colleagues' refusal to countenance any theories, or even evidence, that might contradict the accepted 'party line' on Christian origins. In particular, he grew exasperated with the strained attempts to distance Christianity from the scrolls and the Qumran community. He insisted on the obvious connection between the two, and suggested that connection might be closer than anyone had hitherto believed - or, at any rate, dared to suppose.

The first major storm occurred in 1956, when Allegro agreed to give a series of three short talks on the Dead Sea Scrolls, to be transmitted on radio in the north of England on 16, 23 and 30 January.

It was clear that he intended to accelerate the tempo of scroll research by injecting an element of excitement and controversy. 'I think we can look for fireworks', he wrote imprudently to John Strugnell, who was then in Jerusalem.9 That statement, as Allegro failed to appreciate, was bound to set alarm bells ringing in the Catholic-dominated 'Scrollery'. Oblivious of this, he went on to say that 'recent study of my fragments has convinced me that Dupont-Sommer is more right than he knew'.10

At the time, apparently, Strugnell was considering a career in the Church. Allegro quipped,

'I shouldn't worry about that theological job, if I were you: by the time I've finished there won't be any Church left for you to join.'11

Allegro's first and second broadcasts attracted little attention in Britain, but the second was written up by the New York Times, which misunderstood and misquoted him, yet generated a flurry of debate. The third talk, broadcast on 30 January, was followed on 5 February by an article in the New York Times which could not but cause a sensation.

'Christian bases seen in scrolls', the headline proclaimed:

The origins of some Christian ritual and doctrines can be seen in the documents of an extremist 
Jewish sect that existed for more than 100 years before the birth of Jesus Christ. This is the 
interpretation placed on the 'fabulous' collection of Dead Sea Scrolls by one of an international 
team of seven scholars... John Allegro... said last night in a broadcast that the historical basis 
of the Lord's Supper and part at least of the Lord's prayer and the New Testament teaching 
of Jesus were attributable to the Qumranians.12

The same article hinted at trouble to come, quoting a Catholic scholar as saying that 'any stick now seems big enough to use against Christianity' provided it could be used 'to dislodge belief in the uniqueness ofJesus'.13

Allegro, in fact, was beginning to trespass on very sensitive territory indeed. On 6 February, Time Magazine ran an article entitled 'Crucifixion Before Christ'.

Two days later, The Times reported that three American religious leaders, one Jewish, one Catholic and one Protestant, had joined forces to refute Allegro and warn against any attempt to depict 'the Essenes' as precursors of Christianity.14

All this controversy was, of course, finding its way back to de Vaux, together with requests that something be done. Allegro, however, appears to have been almost naively insouciant. On 9 February, he wrote to de Vaux claiming he was 'being accused of saying the most astonishing things, some of which are true, and are indeed astounding, others come from the bosoms of eager reporters'.15

It is clear in retrospect that Allegro never fully realized how sacrosanct the idea of Jesus' 'uniqueness' was, and that, as a result, he underestimated the lengths to which de Vaux and other members of the international team would go in order to distance themselves from his blunt approach. This was his only real mistake, so far - that of expecting his colleagues to accept his assertions without letting their own religious allegiances influence their judgment. In his own view, he was addressing his material as a disinterested scholar, and hoped they might eventually do likewise. His innocent gibe that, by the time he'd finished, there'd be no Church left for Strugnell to join, testifies to his conviction of how important and conclusive he felt his material to be - and to his excitement at the discovery.

On 11 February, de Vaux wrote back to Allegro, distinctly unamused. All the texts available to Allegro, de Vaux said, were also available to the other members of the team in Jerusalem. They had failed to find anything that supported Allegro's interpretation.

In his reply, on 20 February, Allegro attempted to stand his ground and at the same time repair the rift with his colleagues and defuse the public controversy:

'You will excuse me if I think that everyone in the world is going stark, raving mad. I am enclosing my broadcast talks, as you request, and if, after reading them, you are left wondering what all the fuss is about, you will be in precisely my position.'16

Noting that Strugnell and Milik were alleged to be preparing rebuttals of his statements, he commented,

'I am not waging any war against the Church, and if I were, you may rest assured I would not let any loopholes in... I stand by everything I said in my three talks but I am quite prepared to believe that there may be other interpretations of my readings.'17

On 4 March, de Vaux replied, warning Allegro that a rebuttal was indeed being prepared. It would not be just from Strugnell and Milik, however. Neither would it be confined to a scholarly journal. On the contrary, it would take the form of a letter to The Times in London and would be signed by all the members of the international team.

Instead of being intimidated, Allegro was defiant.

Not mincing words, he responded that a letter to The Times 'should be most interesting to the London public, who have never heard my broadcasts':

I have already pointed out to you that these broadcasts were made on the local Northern station...

You and your friends are now apparently going to draw the attention of the gutter press of this 
country to these passages, of which neither they nor the majority of their readers have heard, and 
start a witch hunt... I congratulate you. What will certainly happen is that the press, scenting 
trouble, will descend like hawks on me and want to know what it is all about... they will have 
added fuel in what appears on the face of it to be a controversy developing between the 
ecclesiastics of the Scroll team and the one unattached member.18

He went on to invoke Edmund Wilson, indicating just how worried de Vaux's team should be by the suspicions Wilson had voiced. In effect, he was attempting to use Wilson as a deterrent:

Having regard to what Wilson has already said about the unwillingness of the Church to tackle 
these texts objectively, you can imagine what will be made out of this rumpus.

With all respect I must point out to you that this nonsense of Wilson's has been taken seriously 
here. At every lecture on the Scrolls I give, the same old question pops up: is it true that the 
Church is scared... and can we be sure that everything will be published. That may sound silly 
to you and me, but it is a serious doubt in the minds of ordinary folk... I need hardly add what 
effect the signatures of three Roman priests on the bottom of this proposed letter will have.19

It seems clear that, by this time, Allegro was becoming nervous. On 6 March, he wrote to another member of the international team, Frank Cross, who had just been offered an appointment at Harvard University:

'I am awfully pleased about Harvard. Not only because this Christianity business is played out. '20

But in the same letter, he admitted that the barrage of criticism was wearing him down and that he was feeling, both physically and mentally, 'at the end of my tether'. Certainly he had no desire to see the publication of a letter which alienated him publicly from the other members of the team and, by so doing, impugned his credibility.

By now, of course, it was too late.

On 16 March 1956, the letter duly appeared in The Times, signed by Strugnell as well as by Fathers de Vaux, Milik, Skehan and Starcky, most of the team's 'big guns':

There are no unpublished texts at the disposal of Mr Allegro other than those of which the 
originals are at present in the Palestine Archaeological Museum where we are working. Upon the 
appearance in the press of citations from Mr Allegro's broadcasts we are unable to see in the 
texts the 'findings' of Mr Allegro.

We find no crucifixion of the 'teacher', no deposition from the cross, and no 'broken body of 
their Master' to be stood guard over until Judgment Day. Therefore there is no 'well-defined 
Essenic pattern into which Jesus of Nazareth fits', as Mr Allegro is alleged in one report to have 
said. It is our conviction that either he has misread the texts or he has built up a chain of 
conjectures which the materials do not support.21

To publish this sort of accusation - especially in a letter to The Times - is remarkable behavior. It patently reflects a conclave of academics 'ganging up' on one of their own members.

Forced on to the defensive, Allegro replied with a letter to The Times of his own, which explained and justified his position:

In the phraseology of the New Testament in this connection we find many points of resemblance 
to Qumran literature, since the sect also were looking for the coming of a Davidic Messiah who 
would arise with the priest in the last days. It is in this sense that Jesus 'fits into a well-defined 
messianic (not "Essenic" as I was wrongly quoted...) pattern'. There is nothing particularly new 
or striking in the idea.22

It is a reasonable enough statement, a legitimate correction of an important misquotation. It also indicates how eager Allegro's colleagues were to 'jump on him', to find an excuse for discrediting him. In any case, Allegro added,

'It is true that unpublished material in my care made me more willing to accept certain suggestions made previously by other scholars on what have appeared ... to be insufficient grounds.'23

The bickering and ill-feeling continued until finally, on 8 March 1957, Allegro wrote angrily to Strugnell:

You still do not seem to understand what you did in writing a letter to a newspaper in an attempt 
to smear the words of your own colleague. It was quite unheard of before, an unprecedented case 
of scholarly stabbing in the back. And, laddie, don't accuse me of over-dramatizing the business. I 
was here in England... Reuters' man that morning on the 'phone to me was classic: 'But I 
thought you scholars stuck together!...'

 

And when it was realized that in fact you were quoting 
things I never even said, the inference was plain. This letter was not in the interests of scholarly 
science at all, but to calm the fears of the Roman Catholics of America... And what it all boiled 
down to was that you guys did not agree with the interpretation I put on certain texts - where I 
have quite as much chance of being right as you.

 

Rather than argue it out in the journals and 
scholarly works, you thought it easier to influence public opinion by a scurrilous letter to a 
newspaper. And you have the neck to call it scholarship. Dear boy, you are very young yet, and 
have much to learn.24

As we have already noted, Allegro was the first of the international team to publish all the material entrusted to his charge. He remains the only one to have done so. John Strugnell, on the other hand, in accordance with the 'go-slow' policy of the team, has published virtually nothing of the substantial materials at his disposal. The only major work to which he did address himself, entitled 'Notes in the Margin', comprises 113 pages of criticism of Allegro, which Eisenman labels a 'hatchet-job'.

In the meantime, the damage had been done. The letter to The Times signed by de Vaux and three other ecclesiastics effectively gave free rein to the Catholic propaganda machine. Opprobrium and vilification intensified. In June 1956, for example, a Jesuit commentator published in the Irish Digest an article entitled 'The Truth about the Dead Sea Scrolls'.

He attacked Wilson, Dupont-Sommer and, especially, Allegro. He then went on to make the extraordinary statement that the,

'Scrolls add surprisingly little to our knowledge of the doctrines current among the Jews from, say, 200 BC to the Christian era'.25

He concluded in positively inflammatory fashion:

'It was not from such a sect that "Jesus learned how to be Messiah"... Rather, it was from soil such as this that sprang the thorns which tried to choke the seed of the Gospel.'26

Allegro was now being portrayed not merely as an erring scholar, but as a veritable Antichrist.

While this controversy was still raging around him, Allegro was already becoming involved in another. The new bone of contention was to be the so-called 'Copper Scroll', found in Cave 3 at Qumran in 1952. As we have noted, the two fragments that made up the 'Copper Scroll' remained unopened for three and a half years. Speculation was rife about their contents. One researcher attempted to read the indentations showing through the copper and visible on the outside of the roll. It seemed to say, he suggested, something about treasure. This suggestion elicited a salvo of derision from the international team. It proved, however, to be quite correct.

In 1955, a year before his public dispute with his colleagues on the international team, Allegro had discussed the problem of the 'Copper Scroll' with Professor H. Wright-Baker of Manchester College of Technology. Wright-Baker devised a machine that could slice the thin copper into strips, thus rendering the text legible. The first of the two fragments was accordingly sent to Manchester, in Allegro's care, in the summer of 1955.

Wright-Baker's machine performed its task, and Allegro quickly embarked on a translation of what had been revealed. The contents of the fragment proved so extraordinary that he kept them initially wholly to himself, not even divulging them to Cross or Strugnell, both of whom wrote to beg for details. His reticence cannot have improved his relations with them, but Allegro was in fact waiting for the second fragment of the scroll to arrive in Manchester.

Any partial or premature disclosure, he felt, might jeopardize everything. For what the 'Copper Scroll' contained was a list of secret sites where the treasure of the Temple of Jerusalem was alleged to have been buried.

The second fragment was received in Manchester in January 1956. It was quickly sliced open and translated. Both fragments, along with accompanying translations, were then returned to Jerusalem. Only then did the real delays begin. De Vaux and the international team were worried about three things.

Their first concern was valid enough. If the contents of the scroll were made public and stories of buried treasure began to circulate, the Bedouin would be digging up the entire Judaean desert, and much of what they found might disappear for ever or elude scholarly hands and slip into the black market. Something of this sort was, in fact, already occurring. On discovering or learning of a potentially productive site, the Bedouin would set up a large black tent over it, loot it, pick it clean and sell their plunder privately to antique dealers.

De Vaux and the international team were also worried that the treasure inventoried in the 'Copper Scroll' might actually exist - might be a real treasure rather than an imaginary one. If it were indeed real, it would inevitably attract the attention of the Israeli government, who would almost certainly lay claim to it. Not only might this remove it from the authority of the international team. It might also trigger a major political crisis; for while Israel's claim might be legitimate enough, much of the treasure, and the scroll specifying its location, would have been found in Jordanian territory.

If the treasure were real, moreover, there were theological grounds for concern. De Vaux and the international team had been intent on depicting the Qumran community as an isolated enclave, having no connection with public events, political developments or the 'mainstream' of 1st-century history.

If the 'Copper Scroll' did indeed indicate where the actual contents of the Temple lay hidden, Qumran could no longer be so depicted. On the contrary, connections would become apparent between Qumran and the Temple, the centre and focus of all Judaic affairs. Qumran would no longer be a self-contained and insulated phenomenon, but an adjunct of something much broader - something that might encroach dangerously on the origins of Christianity. More disturbing still, if the 'Copper Scroll' referred to a real treasure, it could only be a treasure removed from the Temple in the wake of the AD 66 revolt. This would upset the 'safe' dating and chronology which the international team had established for the entire corpus of scrolls.

The combination of these factors dictated a cover-up. Allegro at first colluded in it, assuming that delays in releasing information about the 'Copper Scroll' would only be temporary. In consequence, he agreed not to mention anything of the scroll in the book he was preparing - his general introduction to the Qumran material, scheduled to be published by Penguin Books later in 1956. In the meantime, it was arranged, Father Milik would prepare a definitive translation of the 'Copper Scroll', which Allegro would follow with another 'popular' book pitched to the general public.

Allegro had consented to a temporary delay in releasing information about the 'Copper Scroll'. He certainly didn't expect the delay to prolong itself indefinitely. Still less did he expect the international team to defuse the scroll's significance by dismissing the treasure it inventoried as purely fictitious. When Milik proceeded to do so, Allegro did not at first suspect any sort of conspiracy.

In a letter to another of his colleagues, dated 23 April 1956, he gave vent to his impatience, but remained excited and optimistic, and referred to Milik with cavalier disdain:

Heaven alone knows when, if ever, our friends in Jerusalem are going to release the news of the 
copper scroll. It's quite fabulous (Milik thinks literally so, but he's a clot). Just imagine the agony of 
having to let my [book] go to the press without being able to breathe a word of it.27

A month later, Allegro wrote to Gerald Lankester Harding, in charge of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, and de Vaux's colleague. Perhaps he already sensed something was in the wind and was trying to circumvent de Vaux personally, to appeal to an alternative and non-Catholic authority.

4 - Opposing the Consensus

Edmund Wilson, John Allegro and Geza Vermes all condemned the international team for secrecy, for procrastination and delay in releasing Qumran material and for establishing a scholarly monopoly over theDead Sea Scrolls. Wilson and Allegro both challenged the team's laboured attempts to distance the Qumran community from so-called 'early Christianity'.

In other respects, however, all three scholars concurred with the consensus of interpretation established by the international team. They accepted, for example, the team's dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls as being pre-Christian. They also accepted the team's contention that the members of the Qumran community were Essenes. And they accepted that the supposed Essenes at Qumran were of the traditional kind described byPliny, Philo and Josephus - ascetic, reclusive, pacifist, divorced from the mainstream of social, political and religious thought.

If Christianity were indeed somehow connected with the Qumran community, it therefore emerged as less original than had hitherto been believed. It could be seen to have drawn on Qumran, just as it was acknowledged to have drawn on 'conventional' Old Testament Judaism. Apart from that, there was no particular reason to modify one's image or conception of it.

By the 1960s, however, scholarly opposition to the international team's consensus had begun to arise from another quarter. Its questioning of that consensus was to be much more radical than anything submitted by Wilson, Allegro or Vermes. It was to challenge not only the dating of the Qumran scrolls as established by the international team, but also the allegedly Essene character of the Qumran community. The men responsible for this criticism were Cecil Roth and Godfrey Driver.

Cecil Roth was perhaps the most prominent Jewish historian of his era. After serving with the British Army during the First World War, he had obtained his doctorate from Merton College, Oxford, as an historian. For some years, he was Reader in Jewish Studies at Oxford - the post now occupied by Geza Vermes. He was a prolific writer, with more than six hundred publications to his credit. He was also editor-in-chief of theEncyclopaedia judaica. He commanded enormous respect in the academic world, and was recognized especially for his expertise in Judaic history.

Godfrey Driver was a figure of comparable academic stature. He, too, had served with the British Army during the First World War, seeing action particularly in the Middle East. He, too, taught at Oxford, at Magdalen College, becoming, in 1938, Professor of Semitic Philology. Until 1960, he also did three stints as Professor of Hebrew. He was joint director of the team which translated the Old Testament for the New English Bible. As we have noted, he was John Allegro's mentor, and recommended Allegro for the international team.

From the very first discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Professor Driver had advocated caution about the early, pre-Christian dates ascribed to them. In a letter to The Times on 23 August 1949, he warned that the pre-Christian date ascribed to the Qumran scrolls 'seems likely to win general acceptance before being subjected to critical examination'.1

In the same letter, he stated:

'The external evidence... for a pre-Christian date is extremely precarious, while all the internal evidence seems against it. '2

Driver stressed the risks of attributing too much accuracy to what he called 'external evidence' -to archaeology and paleography. He advocated, rather, a scrutiny of the 'internal evidence' - the content of the scrolls themselves. On the basis of such evidence, he was eventually to conclude that the scrolls dated from the 1st century of the Christian era.

In the meantime, Cecil Roth had been conducting his own research and, in 1958, published the results in a work entitled The Historical Background of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The historical background, he argued, was not pre-Christian, but, on the contrary, dated from the time of the revolt in Judaea, between AD 66 and 74. Like Driver, Roth insisted that the texts of the scrolls themselves were a more accurate guide than archaeology or paleography.

Availing himself of this guide, he developed a number of points that not only ran counter to the international team's consensus, but must also have outraged the Catholics among them. Citing textual references in one of the scrolls, for instance, he demonstrated that the 'invaders' regarded as adversaries by the Qumran community could only be Romans - and, further, could only be Romans of the Empire, of imperial rather than republican times.

He also demonstrated that the militant nationalism and messianic fervor in many of the scrolls had less in common with traditional images of the Essenes than with the Zealots described by Josephus. He acknowledged that the original community at Qumran might indeed have been established by Essenes of the traditional kind, but if so, he contended, they would have vacated the site when it was destroyed in 37 BC. Those who occupied it subsequently, after 4 BC, and who deposited the scrolls, would not have been Essenes at all, but Zealots.

Pursuing his argument a step further, he then endeavored to establish links between the Qumran community and the fierce defenders of Masada thirty miles to the south.

Such assertions, needless to say, provoked indignant criticism from Father de Vaux's team. One of de Vaux's associates, Jean Carmignac, in reviewing Roth's book, complained that Roth 'does not miss any occasion to closely link Masada and Qumran, but this is another weakness of his thesis'.3 Even when, eight years later, Yigael Yadin, in his excavations at Masada, found scrolls identical to some of those discovered at Qumran, the international team refused to consider Roth's thesis.

Quite clearly, some sort of connection had to exist between Qumran and Masada, yet the team, their logic now creaking painfully at the seams, insisted only one explanation was possible - 'some' of the Essenes from Qumran must have deserted their own community and gone to the defense of Masada, bringing their sacred texts with them!

So far as Masada was concerned, Roth was, then, to be vindicated by Yadin's excavations. But he was also quite capable of fighting his own battles. In an article published in 1959, he focused particularly on de Vaux's assertion, based on supposed 'archaeological evidence', that the scrolls could not have been deposited any later than the summer of AD 68, when Qumran was 'taken by the 10th Legion'.4 Roth demonstrated conclusively that the 10th Legion, in the summer of AD 68, was nowhere near Qumran.5

Roth's arguments may have infuriated de Vaux's international team, but they were shared by his colleague Godfrey Driver. The two worked closely together, and in 1965 Driver published his massive and detailed opus on the Qumran material, The Judaean Scrolls. According to Driver, 'arguments to establish a pre-Christian date of the Scrolls are fundamentally unsound'. The sole reasons for establishing such a date were, he pointed out, paleographical, 'and these cannot stand alone'.6

Driver agreed with Roth that the scrolls referred to the period of the revolt in Judaea, between AD 66 and 74, and were thus 'more or less' contemporary with the New Testament. He also concurred with Roth that the Qumran community must have consisted of Zealots, not traditional Essenes. He calculated that the scrolls could have been deposited at Qumran any time between then and the end of the second revolt in Judaea, the rebellion of Simeon bar Kochba between AD 132 and 135.

He was scathing about the scholarship of the international team, as exemplified especially by de Vaux.

Roth and Driver were both famous, acknowledged, 'heavyweights' in their respective historical fields, who could not be ignored or cavalierly dismissed. Their prestige and their learning could not be impugned or discredited. Neither could they be isolated. And they were too skilled in academic controversy to put their own necks into a noose, as Allegro had done. They were, however, vulnerable to the kind of patronizing condescension that de Vaux and the international team, closing ranks in their consensus, proceeded to adopt.

Roth and Driver, august though they might be, were portrayed as out of their element in the field of Qumran scholarship. Thus, de Vaux, reviewing Driver's book in 1967, wrote,

'It is a sad thing to find here once more this conflict of method and mentality between the textual critic and the archaeologist, the man at his desk and the man in the field. '7

Not, of course, that de Vaux spent so very much time 'in the field' himself. As we have seen, he and most others on the international team were content to remain ensconced in their 'Scrollery', leaving the bulk of the fieldwork to the Bedouin. But the 'Scrollery', it might be argued, was at least closer to Qumran than was Oxford.

Moreover, de Vaux and his team could claim first-hand familiarity with the entire corpus of Qumran texts, which Roth and Driver, denied access to those texts, could not. And while Roth and Driver had questioned the international team's historical method, they had not actually confronted its excessive reliance on archaeology and paleography.

Archaeology and paleography appeared to be the team's strengths, allowing de Vaux to conclude his review of The Judaean Scrolls by stating, confidently and definitively, that 'Driver's theory ... is impossible'.8 He could also, by invoking archaeology and paleography, dazzle other figures in the field and effectively hijack their support. Thus Professor Albright was persuaded to weigh in against Driver, whose thesis, Albright declared, 'has failed completely'.

Its failure, Albright went on, derived from,

'an obvious skepticism with regard to the methodology of archaeologists, numismatists, and paleographers. Of course, he [Driver] had the bad luck to run into head-on collision with one of the most brilliant scholars of our day - Roland de Vaux... '9

Moving on to the offensive, the international team and their colleagues continued to bombard Roth and Driver with increasingly contemptuous criticism. Both, as Eisenman has observed, 'were ridiculed in a manner unbecoming their situation and with such ferocity as to make one wonder'.10 No one dared support them.

No one dared risk the wrath of the now solidly entrenched consensus.

'And the scholarly sheep', as Eisenman says, 'fell into line.'11

So far as Roth and Driver were concerned, their interests and reputations weren't confined exclusively to Qumran research. In consequence, they simply retired from the arena, not deeming it worthwhile to pursue the matter further. That this should have been allowed to happen testifies to the timidity and docility of other researchers in the field. It remains a black mark in the record of Qumran scholarship.

If the international team had exercised a monopoly before, their position now appeared to be unassailable. They had outmaneuvered two of their most potentially formidable adversaries, and their triumph seemed to be complete. Roth and Driver had been driven to silence on the subject. Allegro had been discredited. Everyone else who might pose a threat had been intimidated into compliance. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the hegemony of the international team was virtually absolute.

By the mid-1980s, such opposition as existed to the international team was scattered and disorganized. Most of it found expression in the United States, through a single journal, Biblical Archaeology Review. In its issue for September/October 1985, BAR reported a conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls held at New York University the previous May. It repeated the statement by Professor Morton Smith made at that conference:

'I thought to speak on the scandals of the Dead Sea documents, but these proved too numerous, too familiar, and too disgusting.12 It observed that the international team were 'governed, so far as can be ascertained, largely by convention, tradition, collegiality and inertia'.13

And it concluded:

The insiders, the scholars with the text assignments (T.H. Gaster, professor emeritus of Barnard College, Columbia University, calls these insiders 'the charmed circle'), have the goodies - to drip out bit by bit. This gives them status, scholarly power and a wonderful ego trip. Why squander it? Obviously, the existence of this factor is controversial and disputed.14

BAR called attention to the residue of frustration and resentment built up among scholars of proven ability who had not been admitted to the 'charmed circle'. It also, by implication, called attention to the benefits reaped by institutions such as Harvard University, where both Cross and Strugnell were stationed and where 'pet' graduate students were granted access to Qumran material while far more experienced and qualified researchers weren't.

BAR ended its report by calling for 'immediate publication of photographs of the unpublished texts',15 echoing Morton Smith, who asked his colleagues to

'request the Israeli government, which now has ultimate authority over those scroll materials, immediately to publish photographs of all unpublished texts so that they will then be available to all scholars'.16

That Smith's exhortation was ignored again bears witness to academic faint-heartedness. At the same time, it must be mentioned that Smith's exhortation was unfortunate in that it implicitly passed the blame from the international team, the real culprits, to the Israeli government, which had more immediate problems on its hands.

The Israelis had kept their side of the bargain, made in 1967, that the international team would be allowed to retain their monopoly, provided they published; the international team had not. Thus, while the Israeli government might have been irresponsible in letting the situation continue, it was not to blame for the situation itself. As Eisenman soon came to realize, most Israelis - scholars and journalists alike, as well as government figures - were appallingly ignorant about the true situation, and, it must be said, indifferent to it.

Through this ignorance and indifference, an outdated status quo had been allowed to continue intact.

In 1985, however, the same year as the conference reported by BAR, a well-known Israeli MP, Yuval Ne'eman, began to take an interest in the matter, and in the process showed himself to be surprisingly well briefed. Ne'eman was a world-famous physicist, Professor of Physics and head of the Physics Department at Tel Aviv University until 1971, when he became President of the university.

Prior to that he had been a military planner, one of those responsible for evolving the basic strategic thinking of the Israeli Army. Between 1961 and 1963, he had been scientific director of the Soreq Research Establishment, the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission. Ne'eman raised the issue of the scrolls in the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, declaring it a 'scandal' that the Israeli authorities had not reviewed or updated the situation - that the international team had been left with a mandate and monopoly dating from the former Jordanian regime.

It was this challenge that finally forced the Israeli Department of Antiquities to investigate how and why an enclave of Catholic-oriented scholars should exercise so complete and exclusive a control over what was, in effect, an Israeli state treasure.

The Department of Antiquities proceeded to confront the international team on the question of publication. What accounted for the procrastination and delays, and what kind of timetable for publication could reasonably be expected? The director of the team at the time was Father Benoit, who on 15 September 1985 wrote to his colleagues.17

In this letter, a copy of which is in our possession, he reminded them of Morton Smith's call for immediate publication of photographs. He also complained (as if he were the aggrieved party) about the use of the word 'scandal', not just by Morton Smith, but by Ne'eman as well, in the Knesset. He went on to state his intention of recommending John Strugnell as 'chief editor' of future publications. And he requested a timetable for publication from each member of the team.

Compliance with Father Benoit's request was dilatory and patchy. The Department of Antiquities, prodded by Ne'eman, wrote to him again on 26 December 1985, repeating its request for a report and for answers to the questions it had raised.18 One cannot be sure whether Benoit based his reply on reliable information received from his colleagues, or whether he was simply improvising in order to buy time.

But he wrote to the Department of Antiquities promising definitively that everything in the international team's possession would be published within seven years - that is, by 1993.19 This timetable was submitted, in writing, as a binding undertaking, but of course no one took it seriously, and in personal conversation with us, Ne'eman stated he had heard 'on the grapevine' that the timetable was generally regarded as a joke.20 It has certainly proved to be so. There is no prospect whatever of all the Qumran material, or even a reasonable part of it, appearing by 1993.

Not even the whole of the material from Cave 4 has been published. Following Allegro's volume for Discoveries in the Judaean Desert back in 1968, only three more have been issued, in 1977, 1982 and 1990, bringing the total number of volumes to eight.

Nonetheless, the intensifying pressure engendered panic among the international team. Predictably enough, a search began for a scapegoat. Who had brought the Israeli government into the affair? Who had briefed Ne'eman and enabled him to raise the issue in the Knesset? Perhaps because of the repetition of the word 'scandal', the team concluded Geza Vermes to have been responsible. In fact, Vermes had had nothing whatever to do with the matter. It was Robert Eisenman who had briefed Ne'eman.

Eisenman had learned from the omissions of Roth and Driver. He appreciated that the entire edifice of the international team's consensus rested on the supposedly accurate data of archaeology and paleography. Roth and Driver had correctly dismissed these data as irrelevant, but without confronting them. Eisenman resolved to challenge the international team on their own terrain - by exposing the methodology and demonstrating that the resulting data were irrelevant.

He opened his campaign with the book that first brought him to our attention, Maccabees, Zadokites, Christians and Qumran, published by EJ. Brill in Holland in 1983. In this book, he posed the first serious challenge the international team had yet encountered to their archaeology and paleography. In his introduction, he explicitly flung down the gauntlet to the 'small group of specialists, largely working together' who had 'developed a consensus'.21

Given the text's limited audience and circulation, of course, the international team could simply ignore the challenge. Indeed, the likelihood is that none of them read it at the time, in all probability dismissing it as a piece of ephemera by an upstart novice.

Eisenman, however, refused to let his efforts be consigned to oblivion. By 1985, his second book, James the Just in the Habakkuk Pesher, had appeared in Italy, ironically under the imprint of one of the Vatican presses, Tipographia Gregoriana. It carried an Italian preface, and the next year, with some additions and a revised appendix, was brought out by EJ. Brill. That same year, Eisenman was appointed Fellow-in-Residence at the prestigious Albright Institute in Jerusalem. Here he began working behind the scenes to acquaint the Israeli government with the situation and raise the scrolls on their agenda of priorities.

The international team's stranglehold, he realized, could not be broken solely through decorous or even strident protests in learned journals. It would be necessary to bring external pressure to bear, preferably from above. Accordingly, Eisenman met and briefed Professor Ne'eman, and Ne'eman then forced the issue in the Knesset.

Later that year, Eisenman himself approached Father Benoit, and verbally requested access to the scrolls. Predictably enough, Benoit politely refused, adroitly suggesting that Eisenman should ask the Israeli authorities, and implying that the decision was not his to make. At this point, Eisenman was still unaware of the stratagems employed by the international team to thwart all applicants who wanted access to the scrolls. He was not, however, prepared to be excluded so easily.

All scholars during their tenure on the staff of the Albright Institute give one lecture to the general public. Eisenman's lecture was scheduled for February 1986, and he chose as his subject 'The Jerusalem Community and Qumran', with the provocative subtitle 'Problems in Archaeology, Palaeography, History, and Chronology'. As in the case of his book on James, the title itself was calculated to strike a nerve. In accordance with custom, the Albright Institute sent invitations to all important scholars in the field in Jerusalem, and it was a matter of courtesy for sister institutions, like the French Ecole Biblique, to be represented. Five or six turned up, a higher number than usual.

Since they were unfamiliar with Eisenman and his work, they may not have expected anything out of the ordinary. Gradually, however, their complacency began to crumble, and they listened to his arguments in silence.* They declined to ask any questions at the end of the lecture, leaving without extending the usual courtesy of congratulations. For the first time, it had become apparent to them that in Eisenman they faced a serious challenge. True to form, they ignored it, in the hope, presumably, that it would go away.

* For an outline of Eisenman's remarks, see Chapter 10, Science in the Service of Faith.

The following spring, one of Eisenman's friends and colleagues, Professor Philip Davies of Sheffield University, arrived in Jerusalem for a short stay. He and Eisenman went to discuss with Magen Broshi, director of the Shrine of the Book, their desire to see the unpublished scroll fragments still sequestered by the international team.

Broshi laughed at what apparently struck him as a vain hope:

'You will not see these things in your lifetime,' he said.22

In June, towards the end of his stay in Jerusalem, Eisenman was invited to tea at the house of a colleague, a professor at the Hebrew University who would later become a member of the Israeli 'Scroll Oversight Committee'. Again he took Davies with him. A number of other academics, including Joseph Baumgarten of Baltimore Hebrew College, were present, and early in the evening John Strugnell - Allegro's old adversary and subsequently the head of the international team - made his appearance.

Boisterous and apparently intent on confrontation, he began to complain about 'unqualified people' importunately demanding access to the Qumran material. Eisenman responded on cue. How did Strugnell define 'qualified'? Was he himself 'qualified'? Aside from his supposed skills in analyzing handwriting, did he know anything about history? Ostensibly, it was all a half-joking, more or less 'civilized' debate, but it was growing ominously personal.

The next year, 1986-7, Eisenman spent at Oxford, as Senior Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies and visiting Member of Linacre College. Through contacts in Jerusalem, he had been given two secret documents. One was a copy of a scroll on which Strugnell was working, part of his 'private fiefdom'.

This text, written apparently by a leader of the ancient Qumran community and outlining a number of the community's governing precepts, is known by those in the field as the 'MMT' document. Strugnell had shown it around at the 1985 conference, but had not published it.23 (Nor has he yet, though the entire text comes to a mere 121 lines.)

The second document was of more contemporary significance. It comprised a computer print-out, or list, of all Qumran texts in the hands of the international team.24 What made it particularly important was that the international team had repeatedly denied that any such print-out or list existed. Here was definitive proof that vast quantities of material had not yet been published and were being suppressed.

Eisenman had no hesitation about what to do:

Since I had decided that one of the main problems between scholars, which had created this 
whole situation in the first place, was over-protectiveness and jealously guarded secrecy, I decided 
to circulate anything that came into my hands without conditions. This was the service I could 
render; plus, it would undermine the international cartel or monopoly of such documents.25

Eisenman accordingly made available a copy of the 'MMT' document to anyone who expressed a desire to see it. These copies apparently circulated like wildfire, so much so that a year and a half later he received one back again from a third party who asked if he had seen it. He could tell by certain notations that this was one of the copies that he had originally allowed to circulate.

The print-out, like the 'MMT' document, was duly circulated, producing precisely the effect Eisenman had anticipated. He made a particular point of sending a copy of it to Hershel Shanks of BAR, thus providing the journal with ammunition to renew its campaign.

By this time, needless to say, Eisenman's relations with the international team were deteriorating. On the surface, of course, each maintained with the other a respectable academic demeanor of frosty civility. They could not, after all, publicly attack him for his actions, which had been manifestly disinterested, manifestly in the name of scholarship. But the rift was widening between them; and it wasn't long before a calculated attempt was made to freeze him out.

In January 1989, Eisenman visited Amir Drori, the newly appointed director of the Israeli Department of Antiquities. Drori inadvertently reported to Eisenman that he was about to sign an agreement with the team's new chief editor, John Strugnell. According to this agreement, the team's monopoly would be retained. The previous deadline for publication, accepted by Father Benoit, Strugnell's predecessor, was to be abrogated. All remaining Qumran material was to be published not by 1993, but by 1996.26

Eisenman was naturally appalled. Attempts to dissuade Drori, however, proved futile. Eisenman left the meeting determined to employ a new and more drastic stratagem. The only means of bringing pressure to bear on both the international team and on the Department of Antiquities, and perhaps stop Drori from proceeding with the contract, would be Israel's High Court of Justice, which dealt with miscarriages of justice and private appeals from individuals.

Eisenman explored the question with lawyers. Yes, they concluded, the High Court might be persuaded to intervene. In order for it to do so, however, Eisenman would have to present it with proof of a miscarriage of justice; he would have to show, preferably in writing, that access to the scrolls by a legitimate scholar had been refused. At the time, no such record existed - not, at least, in the legalistic sense the Court would require.

Other scholars had, of course, been refused access to the scrolls; but some of them were dead, others were scattered across the world, and there was none of the required documentation. Strugnell would therefore have to be approached with a series of new requests for access to specific materials - which, as a foregone conclusion, he would refuse. Now that Eisenman had the catalogue numbers, his task would be easier.

Not wishing to make this request alone, Eisenman felt it would be more impressive if he enlisted the support of others. He approached Philip Davies of Sheffield, who agreed to support him in what both recognized would be only the first shot of a prolonged engagement fought through the Israeli High Court.

On 16 March 1989, the two professors submitted a formal letter to John Strugnell.

They requested access to certain original fragments, and photographs of fragments, found at the Qumran site designated Cave 4, and listed in the computer print-out which Eisenman had leaked into circulation. In order to preclude any misunderstanding, they cited the reference numbers assigned by the print-out to the photographic negatives. They also requested access to a number of scroll commentaries, or commentary fragments, related to the primary text. They offered to pay all costs involved and promised not to publish any definitive transcription or translation of the material, which would be used only in their own research.

They promised, too, to abide by all the normal procedures of copyright law.

In their letter, Eisenman and Davies acknowledged the time and energy expended over the years by the international team - but, they said, they felt the team had 'already been adequately compensated' by enjoying such long and exclusive access to the Qumran material. They stated that thirty-five to forty years was long enough for other scholars to have waited for similar access, without which 'we can no longer make meaningful progress in our endeavors'.

The letter continued:

Surely your original commission was to publish these materials as quickly as possible for the 
benefit of the scholarly community as a whole, not to control them. It would have been different, 
perhaps, if you and your scholars had discovered these materials in the first place. But you did not; 
they were simply assigned to you...... The situation as it now stands is abnormal in the extreme.

 

Therefore, as mature scholars at 
the height of our powers and abilities, we feel it is an imposition upon us and a hardship to ask us 
to wait any longer for the research availability of and access to these materials forty years after 
their discovery.27

Eisenman and Davies expected Strugnell to refuse their requests. Strugnell, however, did not bother to reply at all. On 2 May, therefore, Eisenman wrote to Amir Drori - who earlier that year had renewed the international team's monopoly with the publication deadline of 1996.

Eisenman enclosed a copy of the letter to Strugnell, mentioning that it had been posted to both of Strugnell's addresses, at Harvard and in Jerusalem.

Of Strugnell's failure to reply, he wrote:

'Frankly, we are tired of being treated contemptuously. This kind of cavalier treatment is not really a new phenomenon, but is part and parcel of the process that has been going on for 20-30 years or more . . ,'28

Since Strugnell would not grant access to the Qumran material, Eisenman requested that Drori, exercising a higher authority, should do so. He then made two particularly important points. As long as the international team continued to control the Qumran texts, it would not be sufficient merely to speed up the publication schedule.

Nothing short of free scholarly access would be satisfactory - to check the international team's conclusions, to allow for variations in translation and interpretation, to discern connections the team themselves might perhaps have overlooked:

We cannot be sure... that they have exhausted all possible fragments in relation to a given 
document or that they are putting fragments together in proper sequence. Nor can we be sure if 
the inventories are in fact complete and that fragments may not have been lost, destroyed or 
overlooked in some manner or for some reason. Only the whole of the interested scholarly 
community working together can assure this.29

The second point would appear, at least with hindsight, to be self-evident. The international team insisted on the importance of archaeology and paleography. It was on the basis of their supposedly accurate archaeological and paleographical studies, as Eisenman had explained, that dates for the Qumran texts had been posited - and accepted.

Yet the texts themselves had been subject only to carbon-dating tests in use at around the time of the scrolls' discovery - tests which were very clumsy and consumed much manuscript material. Lest too much text be lost, therefore, only some of the wrappings found in the jars had been tested. These confirmed a date of around the beginning of the Christian era.

None of the texts had been tested by the more recent techniques of Carbon-14 dating, even though Carbon-14 dating had now been refined by the newer AMS (Accelerator Mass Spectroscopy) technique. Little material would now be lost in the process and greater accuracy could be achieved. Eisenman therefore suggested that Drori exercise his authority and perform new, up-to-date tests.

He also recommended that outsiders be brought into the process to keep it fair. He concluded his letter with a passionate appeal:

'Please act to release these materials to interested scholars who need them to proceed with professional research without prejudice and without distinction immediately. '30

No doubt prompted by Drori, Strugnell, in Jerusalem at the time, at last replied on 15 May. Despite the fact that Eisenman's letter to him had been posted to his address at both Harvard and Jerusalem, he blamed the delay on its having been sent to 'the wrong country'.31

According to BAR,

'Strugnell's imperious reply to Eisenman's request for access displays extraordinary intellectual hauteur and academic condescension.'32

In it, he declares himself 'puzzled' as to why Eisenman and Davies showed their letter to 'half the Who's Who of Israel'. He accuses them of not having followed 'acceptable norms' and refers to them as 'lotus-eaters', which, in Strugnell's Mandarin, presumably denotes Californians, though why this term should apply to Philip Davies at Sheffield is an open question.

Strugnell contrives not just to deny Eisenman's and Davies's request for access, but also to dodge each of the salient points they had raised. He advises them to take as their example the way 'such requests have been handled in the past' and go through established channels - ignoring the fact that all such requests 'in the past' had been denied. He also complains that the print-out Eisenman and Davies had used to cite reference numbers of photographic negatives was old and out of date.

He neglects to mention that this print-out, not to mention any new one, had been unavailable to non-members of the international team until Eisenman put it into circulation.33

Eisenman responded to Strugnell's brush-off by going as public as he possibly could.

By the middle of 1989, the issue had become a cause célèbre in American and Israeli newspapers, and, to a lesser degree, was picked up by the British press as well. Eisenman was extensively and repeatedly quoted by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Time Magazine and Canada's Maclean's Magazine.

He stressed five major points:

1. That all research on the Dead Sea Scrolls was being unfairly monopolized by a small enclave of scholars with vested interests and a biased orientation.

2. That only a small percentage of the Qumran material was finding its way into print and that most of it was still being withheld.

3. That it was misleading to claim that the bulk of the so-called 'biblical' texts had been released, because the most important material consisted of the so-called 'sectarian' texts - new texts, never seen before, with a great bearing on the history and religious life of the 1st century.

4. That after forty years, access to the scrolls should be made available to all interested scholars.

5. That AMS Carbon-14 tests, monitored by independent laboratories and researchers, should immediately be conducted on the Qumran documents.

As was perhaps inevitable, once the media had begun to sensationalize it, the affair quickly degenerated, with Eisenman being misquoted on two separate occasions, and a barrage of invective coming from both sides. But behind the clash of egos, the central issue remained unresolved.

As Philip Davies had written in 1988:

Any archaeologist or scholar who digs or finds a text but does not pass on what has been found 
deserves to be locked up as an enemy of science. After forty years we have neither a full and 
definitive report on the dig nor a full publication of the scrolls.34

 II

THE VATICAN'S REPRESENTATIVES

6 - The Onslaught of Science

Until now, this book has referred to the 'villains of the piece' as 'the international team'. In our conversations with them, however, Robert Eisenman and others would often allude to the Ecole Biblique, the French-Dominican archaeological school in Jerusalem. Indeed, the 'international team' and the Ecole Biblique were frequently used interchangeably; and Allegro, too, in his letters, would refer to the international team as the 'Ecole Biblique gang'.

We wondered why this association should constantly be made. Why were the international team and the Ecole Biblique treated as though they were the same thing? What was the relationship between them? Was it formally defined and delineated? Was the international team 'officially' an adjunct of the Ecole Biblique? Or was the overlap between them so great as to render any distinction superfluous? With some advice and pointers from Eisenman, we endeavored to clarify the matter.

As we have noted, the international team, from its very beginnings, was dominated by Father de Vaux, then director of the Ecole Biblique, and by his close friend and disciple, the then Father Milik. As Allegro complained, both men would constantly arrogate first claim to all incoming texts:

'All fragments are brought first to De V. or Milik, and... complete secrecy is kept over what they are till long after they have been studied by this group.'1

Even Strugnell stated that when fresh material came in, Milik would invariably pounce on it, claiming it fell within the parameters of his own particular assignment.2

Not surprisingly, then, Milik ended up with the lion's share of the most important material - and particularly of the controversial 'sectarian' material. The creation of his monopoly was facilitated by the fact that he was permanently resident in Jerusalem at the time, along with two of his staunchest supporters, de Vaux and Father Jean Starcky.

Father Skehan, though not permanently resident in Jerusalem, threw his weight behind this triumvirate. So did Professor Cross - who had been assigned 'biblical' rather than 'sectarian' material anyway. Allegro, of course, cast himself in the role of rebel, but his opposition was hampered by the fact that he was in Jerusalem only intermittently. Of those residing in Jerusalem during the crucial period of excavation, purchase of material, allocation of texts and collation of fragments, only the young John Strugnell (who would hardly have challenged de Vaux anyway) was not Catholic - and he subsequently converted.

All the others were, in fact, Roman Catholic priests, attached to, and residing at, the Ecole Biblique. Among the other current members of the team or writers in the area of Qumran studies working at the Ecole are Father Emile Puech and Father Jerome Murphy-O'Connor.

It was not just by virtue of being on the spot that this Catholic conclave came to dominate Qumran scholarship. Neither, certainly, was it by virtue of any outstanding pre-eminence in the field. Indeed, there was no shortage of no less competent or qualified scholars who, as we have noted, were excluded. A major determining factor was the Ecole Biblique itself, which systematically undertook to establish for itself, as an institution, a position of unrivalled pre-eminence.

The Ecole had its own journal, for example, Revue biblique, edited by de Vaux, who published in its pages some of the most consequential and influential early articles on Qumran - articles bearing the stamp of first-hand authority. And in 1958, the Ecole launched a second journal, Revue de Qumran, devoted exclusively to the Dead Sea Scrolls and related matters. Thus the Ecole officially controlled the two most prominent and prestigious forums for discussion of Qumran material.

The Ecole's editors could accept or reject articles as they saw fit, and were thereby enabled to exert a decisive influence on the entire course of Qumran scholarship. This situation was inaugurated at the very inception of Qumran studies.

In addition to its publications, the Ecole created a special research library oriented specifically towards Qumran studies. A card index was compiled, which documented every book, every scholarly article, every newspaper or magazine report published on the Dead Sea Scrolls anywhere in the world. All publications on the subject were collected and filed in the library - which was not open to the general public. Although some of the secret, unclassified and still unassigned scroll material was kept at the Ecole, most of it was housed at the Rockefeller Museum. Nevertheless, the Rockefeller was reduced to the status of a mere 'workshop'.

The Ecole became the 'headquarters', the 'offices', the 'school' and the 'nerve centre'. Thus the Ecole contrived to establish itself as the de facto and generally recognized centre of all Qumran scholarship, the focus of all legitimate and academically respectable research in the field. The Ecole's 'stamp of approval' could, in effect, underwrite, certify and guarantee a scholar's reputation. Withholding such endorsement was tantamount to destroying a man's credibility.

Officially, of course, the studies over which the Ecole presided were supposed to be non-denominational, non-partisan, impartial, unbiased. The Ecole presented to the world a façade of 'scientific objectivity'. But could such 'objectivity' in fact be expected on the part of a Dominican institution, with vested Catholic interests to protect? 'My faith has nothing to fear from my scholarship', de Vaux once stated to Edmund Wilson.3 No doubt it didn't, but that was never in fact the real question.

The real question was whether his scholarship, and its reliability, had anything to fear from his faith.

As we ourselves became au fait with the situation, we began to wonder if the correct questions were indeed being asked, if blame was indeed being correctly apportioned. Biblical Archaeology Review, for example, had focused on the Israeli government as a primary culprit. But if the Israeli government was guilty of anything, it was guilty only of an understandable sin of omission.

By virtue of John Allegro's success in persuading the Jordanian government to nationalize the Rockefeller Museum,4 and political and military circumstance - the Six Day War and its aftermath - Israel suddenly found itself, as a fait accompli, in possession of Arab East Jerusalem, where the Rockefeller Museum and the Ecole Biblique were situated. As 'spoils of war', the Dead Sea Scrolls thus became de facto Israeli. But Israel was fighting for its own survival at the time. In the turmoil of the moment, there were more urgent matters to deal with than the sorting out of scholarly disputes or the rectifying of academic inequities.

Neither could Israel afford to isolate itself further on the international scene by antagonizing a body of prestigious researchers and thereby provoking a reaction from the intellectual community - as well, quite possibly, as from the Vatican. In consequence, the Israeli government had taken the expedient course of doing nothing, of implicitly sanctioning the status quo. The international team had simply been asked to get on with their business.

It was, of course, more accurate to assign responsibility to the international team themselves - as, indeed, a number of commentators had not hesitated to do. But were the motives ascribed to the team wholly accurate? Was it simply a matter of what the New York Times called 'the vanity of scholars', and Professor Neusner in BAR 'arrogance and self-importance'?5

These factors undoubtedly played a part. But the real question was one of accountability. To whom, ultimately, were the international team accountable? In theory, they should have been accountable to their peers, to other scholars. But was that indeed the case? In reality, the international team seemed to recognise no accountability whatever, except to the Ecole Biblique. And to whom was the Ecole Biblique accountable?

Although he'd not investigated the matter himself, Eisenman prompted us, when we probed him, to explore the connection between the Ecole and the Vatican.

We approached other scholars in the field, some of whom had gone publicly on record to condemn the 'scandal'. Not one of them, it transpired, had thought to look into the Ecole Biblique's background and official allegiances. They had, of course, recognized that the Ecole was Catholic, but they did not know whether it had any direct or formal connection with the Vatican. Professor Davies at Sheffield, for example, confessed that he found the question intriguing. Now that he thought about it, he said, he found it striking how criticism was so often and so assiduously deflected away from the Ecole.6

According to Professor Golb at the University of Chicago,

'people hint... that there are connections' between the Ecole and the Vatican. 'A lot of events,' he said, 'fit the theory [of connection].'7

Like his colleagues, however, he had not explored the matter any further. Given the Ecole's undisputed dominance of Qumran scholarship, it seemed to us particularly important to ascertain the institution's official orientation, attitudes, allegiances and accountability. Here, we decided, was something we ourselves could undertake to investigate in detail. The results were to prove a major revelation, not just to us, but to other independent researchers in the field as well.

Today, in the late 20th century, one takes the procedures and methodology of historical and archaeological research more or less for granted. Until the mid-19th century, however, historical and archaeological research, as we understand such things today, simply didn't exist at all. There were no accepted methods or procedures; there was no coherent discipline or training; there was no real awareness that such research in any sense constituted a form of 'science', requiring the rigor, the 'objectivity', the systematic approach that any science does.

The 'field', such as it was, existed not as a sphere of formal academic study but as a happy hunting-ground for learned - and often not so learned - amateurs. The territory was as yet too uncharted to accommodate anything that might be called 'professionalism'.

Thus, for example, in the early 19th century, wealthy Europeans, on their 'grand tour', might rummage about at random for Greek or Roman artifacts to ship back to the chateau, schloss or country house at home. In their search for antiquities, a few ventured further afield, digging holes all over the fertile terrain of the vast and moribund Ottoman Empire. Such enterprises amounted, in effect, not to anything that might pass for archaeology, but to treasure-hunting.

Knowledge of the past was deemed less important than whatever booty it might provide; and funds for the plundering of such booty were supplied by, or for, various museums in quest of large and dramatic statues to place on display. Public demand for relics of this sort was considerable. Crowds would flock to museums to see the latest trophies, and the popular press would have a field day. But the trophies themselves were more an inspiration to the imagination, and to imaginative speculation, than to any form of scientific method.

Flaubert's Salammbô, for example, published in 1862, represents an extraordinary feat of 'literary archaeology', a grandiose imaginative attempt to reconstruct, with meticulous scientific precision, the splendor of ancient Carthage. But science itself had not yet caught up with Flaubert's aesthetic objectives. Certainly no historian had ever attempted to use scientific or archaeological data to bring ancient Carthage so vividly back to life.

Until the mid-19th century, what passed for archaeology was, more often than not, a sorry business indeed. Wall paintings, carvings and other artifacts would visibly disintegrate before the bemused eyes of their discoverers - who, of course, had no real concept of conservation. Priceless statues would be demolished in the search for some supposed treasure concealed within them. Or they might be hacked into fragments to make transportation easier - and then lost, when the barges transporting them sank. To the extent that any systematic form of excavation was practiced at all, it had not yet been yoked to history - to the principle of illuminating the past. The excavators themselves lacked the knowledge, the skill and the technology to turn their discoveries to account.

The acknowledged 'father of modern archaeology' was the German-born Heinrich Schliemann (1822-90), naturalized as an American citizen in 1850. From his boyhood, Schliemann had been a passionate admirer ofHomer's Iliad and Odyssey. He was firmly convinced that these epics were not 'mere fables', but mythologized history, chronicles inflated to legendary status, perhaps, but still referring to events, people and places which had once actually existed.

The Trojan War, Schliemann insisted, to the mockery and skepticism of his contemporaries, was an event in historical fact. Troy was not just a figment of a poet's imagination. On the contrary, it had once been a 'real' city. One could use Homer's work as a species of map. One could identify certain recognizable geographical and topographical features.

One could compute approximate speeds of travel at the time, and thereby estimate the distance between one point and another cited by Homer. By such means, Schliemann concluded, one could retrace the itinerary of the Greek fleet in the Iliad and locate the actual historical site of Troy. After performing the requisite calculations, Schliemann was firmly convinced he had found 'the X that marked the spot'.

Having amassed a fortune in commerce, Schliemann embarked on what his contemporaries regarded as a quixotic enterprise - to undertake a full-scale excavation of the 'X' he had located. In 1868, he went to Greece and proceeded, using a poem that was two and a half millennia old as his guide, to retrace the alleged route of the Greek fleet.

At what he believed to be the relevant site in Turkey, he began to dig. And to the world's consternation, astonishment and admiration, Schliemann there found Troy - or, at any rate, a city that conformed to Homer's account of Troy. As a matter of fact, Schliemann found a number of cities. In four campaigns of excavation, he uncovered no fewer than nine, each superimposed on the ruins of what had been its predecessor. Nor, after this initial spectacular success, did he confine himself to Troy.

A few years later, between 1874 and 1876, he excavated at Mycenae in Greece, where his discoveries were deemed to be perhaps even more important than those made in Turkey.

Schliemann demonstrated triumphantly that archaeology could do more than just prove or disprove the historical validity underlying archaic legends. He also demonstrated that it could add flesh and substance to the often bald, stark chronicles of the past - could provide a recognizably human and social context for them, could provide a matrix of daily life and practices that enabled one to understand the mentality and milieu from which they had issued. What was more, he demonstrated the applicability of strict scientific method and procedures, the careful observation and recording of data.

In addressing himself to the nine superimposed cities at Troy, Schliemann employed the same techniques that had only recently come into favor in geological studies. These enabled him to conclude what to the modern mind appears self-evident - that one stratum of deposits can be distinguished from others on the basic premise that the lowest is the earliest in time. Schliemann thus became the pioneer of the archaeological discipline known as 'stratigraphy'. Almost single-handed, he revolutionized archaeological thought and methodology.

It was quickly recognized, of course, that Schliemann's scientific approach could readily be brought to bear on the field of biblical archaeology. In 1864, four years before the discovery of Troy, Sir Charles Wilson, then a captain in the Royal Engineers, had been sent to Jerusalem, to survey the city and produce a definitive map. In the course of his work, Wilson became the first modern researcher to excavate and explore beneath the Temple, where he discovered what were believed to have been Solomon's stables.

His endeavors inspired him to help co-found the Palestine Exploration Fund, the chief patron of which was no less a person than Queen Victoria herself. At first, the work of this organization proceeded in a characteristically uncoordinated fashion. At the 1886 annual meeting, however, Wilson announced that 'some of the wealthy men of England would follow Dr. Schliemann's example' and apply his scientific approach to a specific biblical site.8 The enterprise was entrusted to the charge of a prominent archaeologist then active in Egypt, William Matthew Flinders Petrie. Adopting Schliemann's methods, Flinders Petrie, after two false starts, discovered a mound containing the ruins of eleven superimposed cities.

During his work in Egypt, Flinders Petrie had evolved another technique for the dating of ancient ruins, based on a pattern of gradual development and change in the shape, design and embellishment of household pottery. This enabled him to establish a chronological sequence not just for the artifacts themselves, but for the rubble surrounding them as well.

Although certainly not foolproof, Petrie's approach brought another manifestation of scientific methodology and observation to bear on archaeological research. It became one of the standard procedures employed by his team in Palestine - a team which, in 1926, was joined by the young Gerald Lankester Harding. As we have noted, Harding, eventually head of Jordan's Department of Antiquities, was to play a crucial role in the early excavation and compilation of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

While British archaeologists in Egypt and Palestine followed in Schliemann's footsteps, the Germans refined and elaborated his procedures. German archaeology endeavored to do, in fact, what Flaubert, in Salammbô, had done in fiction - to re-create, down to the most minute detail, the entire milieu and society from which specific archaeological artifacts had issued.

This, needless to say, was a slow, painstaking process, requiring much care and inexhaustible patience. It did not just involve the excavation of 'treasures', or of monumental structures. It also involved the excavation and reconstruction of administrative, commercial and residential buildings. Using this approach, Robert Koldeway, between 1899 and 1913, excavated the ruins of Babylon. From his work, there evolved a coherent and comprehensively detailed picture of what had previously, to all intents and purposes, been a 'lost civilization'.

The archaeological advances of the 19th century stemmed in large part from Schliemann's critical scrutiny of Homer's epics, his methodical scientific insistence on disengaging fact from fiction. It was, needless to say, only a matter of time before scripture itself was subjected to the same sort of rigorous scrutiny. The man most responsible for this process was the French theologian and historian Ernest Renan.

Born in 1823, Renan embarked on a career in the priesthood, enrolling in the seminary of St Sulpice. In 1845, however, he renounced his intended vocation, having been led by Germanic biblical scholarship to question the literal truth of Christian teaching. In 1860, Renan embarked on an archaeological journey to Palestine and Syria.

Three years later, he published his famous (or notorious) La vie de Jésus, {The Life of Jesus), which was translated into English the following year. Renan's book sought to demystify Christianity. It portrayed Jesus as 'an incomparable man', but still a man - an eminently mortal and non-divine personage - and formulated a hierarchy of values which today would be called a form of 'secular humanism'. Renan was no obscure academic or fly-by-night sensationalist. On the contrary, he was one of the most esteemed and prestigious intellectual figures of his age.

As a result, The Life of Jesus created one of the greatest upsets in the history of 19th-century thought. It became one of the half-dozen or so best-selling books of the entire century, and has never subsequently been out of print. For the 'educated classes' of the time, Renan became as much a household name as Freud or Jung might be today; and, in the absence of television, he was probably much more widely read.

At a single stroke, The Life of Jesus transformed attitudes towards biblical scholarship almost beyond recognition. And for the next thirty years of his life, Renan was to remain a thorn in the Church's side, publishing subsequent works on the Apostles, on Paul and on early Christianity in the context of imperial Roman thought and culture. He produced two epic series of texts, Histoire des origines du christianisme (1863-83) andHistoire du peuple d'Israel (1887-93). It is no exaggeration to say that Renan released from its bottle a genie which Christianity has never since managed to recapture or tame.

At the same time, of course, Rome was being buffeted from other quarters as well. Four years before The Life of Jesus, Charles Darwin had published The Origin of Species, and followed it in 1871 with The Descent of Man, a more theologically oriented work which questioned scriptural accounts of the creation.

In Darwin's wake, there followed the great age of English agnosticism, exemplified by Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer. Influential and widely read philosophers - Schopenhauer, for example, and particularly Nietzsche - were also challenging, even blasphemously demolishing, conventional Christian ethical and theological assumptions.

Under the doctrine of 'l'art pour l'art', the arts were becoming established as a self-contained religion of their own, moving into sacred territory which organized religion seemed increasingly to have abdicated. Bayreuth became, in effect, the temple of a new cult, a new creed; and well-educated Europeans deemed it quite as acceptable to be 'a Wagnerian' as to be a Christian.

The Church was under sustained political attack as well. In 1870-72, Prussia's shattering victory in her war with France, and the creation of the new German Empire, produced, for the first time in modern history, a supreme military power in Europe which owed no allegiance whatever to Rome. To the extent that the new empire was Christian at all, it was Lutheran; but the Lutheran Church, to all intents and purposes, was little more than an adjunct of the War Office.

7 - The Inquisition Today

As an antidote to the spreading 'infection' of Modernism, Pope Leo XIII, in 1902, had created the Pontifical Biblical Commission to supervise and monitor the progress (or lack thereof) of Catholic scriptural scholarship. It consisted originally of a dozen or more cardinals appointed by the Pope and a number of 'consultants', all deemed to be experts in their fields of research and study.

According to the New Catholic Encyclopaedia, the Commission's official function was (and still is),

'to strive... with all possible care that God's words... will be shielded not only from every breath of error but even from every rash opinion'.1

The Commission would further undertake to ensure that scholars 'Endeavour to safeguard the authority of the scriptures and to promote their right interpretation'.2

As we have noted, Father Lagrange, founder of the Ecole Biblique, was one of the earliest members of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. The Ecole Biblique's journal, Revue biblique, was also, until 1908, the Commission's official organ. Given the close affiliation between the two institutions, it is clear that the original Ecole Biblique was an adjunct of the Commission's propaganda machine -an instrument for promulgating Catholic doctrine under the guise of historical and archaeological research, or for enforcing the adherence of historical and archaeological research to the tenets of Catholic doctrine.

One might expect this situation to have changed during the last half-century, and especially in the years since the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s. In fact, it has not. The Ecole Biblique today retains as close an association with the Pontifical Biblical Commission as it did in the past. Degrees at the Ecole, for example, are conferred specifically by the Commission.

Most graduates of the Ecole are placed by the Commission as professors in seminaries and other Catholic institutions. Of the Commission's nineteen official 'consultants' today, a number are influential in determining what the general public learns of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thus, for instance, Father Jean-Luc Vesco, the current head of the Ecole Biblique and a member of the Revue biblique's editorial board, is also a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission.

So, too, is at least one other member of the journal's editorial board, Jose Loza. So, too, is a prominent writer on the scrolls, a Jesuit named Joseph Fitzmyer, who has compiled the official concordance for much of the Qumran material.3

In 1956, the name of Father Roland de Vaux, Director of the Ecole Biblique, appeared for the first time on the list of the Commission's 'consultants'.4 He would have been appointed the year before, in 1955, and he continued as a 'consultant' until his death in 1971.

The timing of de Vaux's appointment is interesting. In 1955, it must be remembered, much of the crucial and controversial 'sectarian' material from Cave 4 was still being purchased and collated. In December of that year, indeed, the Vatican laid out money for a number of important fragments. In 1955, too, the 'Copper Scroll' was unrolled in Manchester, under John Allegro's auspices, and Allegro himself was beginning to go public in a potentially embarrassing fashion. The Vatican thus became aware, for the first time, of the kind of problems it might have to face in connection with the Qumran material then coming to light.

The ecclesiastical hierarchy almost certainly felt the need of some sort of 'chain of command', or, at least, 'chain of accountability', whereby some measure of control could be exercised over Qumran scholarship. In any case, it is significant, if not particularly surprising, that from 1956 on, every director of the Ecole Biblique has also been a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission.

When de Vaux died in 1971, the Commission's list of 'consultants' was updated to include the name of his successor at the Ecole, Father Pierre Benoit.5 When Benoit died in 1987, the new director, Jean-Luc Vesco, became a 'consultant' to the Commission in turn.6

Even today, the Pontifical Biblical Commission continues to supervise and monitor all biblical studies conducted under the auspices of the Catholic Church. It also publishes official decrees on 'the right way to teach... scripture'.7 In 1907, adherence to these decrees was made obligatory by Pope Pius X. Thus, for example, the Commission 'established', by decree, that Moses was the literal author of the Pentateuch.

In 1909, a similar decree affirmed the literal and historical accuracy of the first three chapters of Genesis. More recently, on 21 April 1964, the Commission issued a decree governing biblical scholarship in general and, more specifically, the 'historical truth of the Gospels'. The decree was quite unequivocal, stating that 'at all times the interpreter must cherish a spirit of ready obedience to the Church's teaching authority'.8

It further declared that those in charge of any 'biblical associations' are obliged to 'observe inviolably the laws already laid down by the Pontifical Biblical Commission'.9 Any scholar working under the Commission's aegis - and this, of course, includes those at the Ecole Biblique - is thus in effect constrained by the Commission's decrees. Whatever conclusions he might reach, whatever the revelations to which his research might lead him, he must not, in his writing or his teaching, contradict the Commission's doctrinal authority.

The head of the Pontifical Biblical Commission today is Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Cardinal Ratzinger is also head of another Catholic institution, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This designation is fairly new, dating from 1965, and probably unfamiliar to most laymen; but the institution itself is one of long-established pedigree. It has, in fact, a unique and resonant history behind it, extending back to the 13th century. In 1542, it had become known officially as the Holy Office.

Prior to that, it was called the Holy Inquisition. Cardinal Ratzinger is, in effect, the Church's modern-day Grand Inquisitor.

The official head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is always the reigning Pope, and the executive head of the Congregation is today called its secretary, although in earlier times he was known as the Grand Inquisitor. Of all the departments of the Curia, that of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is the most powerful.

Ratzinger is perhaps the closest to the Pope of all the Curia cardinals. Certainly they have many attitudes in common. Both wish to restore many pre-Vatican II values. Both dislike theologians. Ratzinger sees theologians as having opened the Church up to corrosive secular influences. A deeply pessimistic man, he feels that the Church is 'collapsing', and only the suppression of all dissent can assure its survival as a unified faith. He regards those who do not share his pessimism as 'blind or deluded'.10

Like the Inquisition of the past, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is in large part a tribunal. It has its own judges, the chief of whom is called the 'Assessor'. The 'Assessor' is aided by a 'Commissar' and two Dominican monks. These individuals have the specific task of preparing whatever 'investigations' the Congregation chooses to undertake. Such investigations generally pertain to breaches of doctrine on the part of clerics, or anything else that might threaten Church unity.

As in the Middle Ages, all investigations are conducted and pursued under conditions of total secrecy.

Until 1971, the Pontifical Biblical Commission and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith were supposed to be separate organizations. In reality, however, the separation between them was little more than nominal. The two organizations overlapped one another in a multitude of respects, ranging from their functions to the membership of their governing bodies.

In 1969, for example, eight of the twelve cardinals presiding over the Congregation also presided over the Commission.11 A number of individuals acted as 'consultants' for both. At last, on 27 June 1971, Pope Paul VI, in an attempt to streamline bureaucracy, amalgamated the Commission and the Congregation in virtually everything but name. Both were housed in the same offices, at the same address - the Palace of the Congregation at Holy Office Square in Rome. Both were placed under the directorship of the same cardinal.

On 29 November 1981, that cardinal became Joseph Ratzinger.

Numerous contemporary priests, preachers, teachers and writers have been muzzled, expelled or deprived of their posts by the body over which Ratzinger now presides. The victims have included certain of the most distinguished and intelligent theologians in the Church today. One such was Father Edward Schillebeeckx, of the University of Nigmegen in Holland.

In 1974, Schillebeeckx had published a book, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology. In this work, he appeared, in the eyes of his adversaries, to be questioning the literal truth of certain dogma, such as the Resurrection and the Virgin Birth. In December 1979, Schillebeeckx was hauled before a tribunal of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where one of his judges publicly accused him of heresy. He survived his investigation by the tribunal, but in 1983 he was again summoned to a tribunal of the Congregation, this time for his latest book, Ministry: A Case for Change.

What were Schillebeeckx's transgressions?

If only tentatively, he had questioned the Church's position on celibacy. He had sympathized with arguments for the ordination of women. Most seriously of all, he had suggested the Church should 'change with the times' rather than remaining fettered to immutably fixed doctrines.12

The Church, he contended, should respond to, and evolve with, the needs of its faithful, instead of imposing draconian codes upon them. He had argued, in short, for a dynamic pastoral approach, as opposed to the static one favored by Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger. Once again, Schillebeeckx survived the Congregation's investigation and interrogation.

To this day, however, he remains under close scrutiny, and his every word, written or spoken, is carefully monitored. It goes without saying that such assiduously vigilant surveillance will exert a profoundly inhibiting influence.

A more telling case is that of the eminent Swiss theologian Dr Hans Küng, formerly head of the Department of Theology at the University of Tübingen. Küng was generally acknowledged to be among the most brilliant, most influential, most topically relevant Catholic writers of our age - a man who, following in the footsteps of Pope John XXIII, seemed to offer a new direction for the Church, a new humanity, a new flexibility and adaptability.

But Küng was also controversial. In his book Infallible?, first published in German in 1970 and in English the following year, he challenged the doctrine of papal infallibility - which, one must remember, had never existed in the Church until 1870 and had only then been established by a vote. 'No one is infallible', Küng wrote, 'but God himself.'13 Further, 'the traditional doctrine of infallibility in the Church... rests on foundations that cannot be regarded as secure'.14

Küng also recognized the distinction between theology and history, and the former's propensity to parade itself as the latter. He attacked the sophistry of such Church 'scholars' as Cardinal Jean Danielou, who, in 1957, had published The Dead Sea Scrolls and Primitive Christianity, a work primarily of theological propaganda:

'Theologians such as Danielou... now bring an aura of pseudo-learning to the role of Grand Inquisitor, are appointed Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church and fulfil its expectations.'15

After the election of John Paul II, Küng was critical of the new pontiff's rigidity in morals and dogma.

'Is the Catholic theologian', he asked, 'going to be allowed... to ask critical questions... ?'16

Was John Paul II really free, Küng wondered, of the personality cult which had bedeviled earlier popes; and was he not perhaps excessively preoccupied with doctrine, at the expense of 'the liberating message ofChrist'?

Can the Pope and the Church credibly speak to the conscience of today's people if a self-critical 
examination of conscience on the part of the Church and its leadership does not also 
simultaneously occur... 17

Küng's outspokenness made him, of course, an irresistible target for the inquisitional tribunals of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Having evaluated his statements, the tribunal accordingly passed judgment. On 18 December 1979, the Pope, acting on the formal recommendation of the Congregation, stripped Küng of his post and pronounced him no longer qualified to teach Roman Catholic doctrine. He was informed that he was no longer a Catholic theologian, and was forbidden to write or publish further. Küng himself effectively summarized what had befallen him: 'I have been condemned by a pontiff who has rejected my theology without ever having read one of my books and who always has refused to see me. The truth is that Rome is not waiting for dialogue but for submission.'18

Under the directorship of Cardinal Ratzinger, the Congregation, during the last decade, has become increasingly entrenched, intransigent and reactionary. Ratzinger is vehemently critical of all changes in the Church since the Second Vatican Council of 1962-5.

The Church's teachings, he maintains, are being 'tarnished' by doubt and questioning. According to one commentator, Ratzinger seeks 'a return to Catholic fundamentalism... and reasserting the literal truth of papally-defined dogma'.19 Through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger's attitudes determine the attitudes of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, of which he is also head, and filter down from there into theEcole Biblique.

During the course of 1990, these attitudes served to place the Congregation prominently in the news. In May, the Congregation issued a preliminary draft of the new, revised and updated 'Universal Catechism of the Catholic Church' - the official formulation of tenets in which all Catholics are obliged formally to believe.

Allowing no flexibility whatever, the new 'Catechism' definitively condemns, along with a catalogue of other things, divorce, homosexuality, masturbation and sexual relations before or outside marriage. It lays down, as basic tenets of the Catholic faith, papal infallibility, the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, as well as the 'Universal Authority of the Catholic Church'.

In one particularly dogmatic passage, the new,

'Catechism' declares that 'the task of giving an authentic interpretation of the Word of God... has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church alone'.20

In June, there appeared a second document, published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and written by Cardinal Ratzinger himself. This document addresses itself specifically to the functions and obligations of the theologian, a term intended to encompass the biblical historian and archaeologist as well. According to this document, approved and endorsed by the Pope, Catholic theologians have no right to dissent from the established teachings of the Church.

Indeed, dissent is itself promoted (or demoted) to the status of an actual 'sin':

'To succumb to the temptation of dissent... [allows] infidelity to the Holy Spirit...'21

If a theologian begins to question Church doctrine, he is thus, by skilful psychological manipulation, made to feel morally tainted for doing so. Any propensity to question is effectively turned back on the questioner and transformed into guilt - something in which the Church has always trafficked most profitably.

In the same document, Cardinal Ratzinger states:

The freedom of the act of faith cannot justify a right to dissent. This freedom does not indicate 
freedom with regard to the truth, but signifies the free determination of the person in conformity 
with his moral obligations to accept the truth.22

In other words, one is perfectly free to accept the teachings of the Church, but not to question or reject them. Freedom cannot be manifested or expressed except through submission. It is a curious definition of freedom.

Such restrictions are monstrous enough when imposed on Catholics alone - monstrous in the psychological and emotional damage they will cause, the guilt, intolerance and bigotry they will foster, the horizons of knowledge and understanding they will curtail. When confined to a creed, however, they apply only to those who voluntarily submit to them, and the non-Catholic population of the world is free to ignore them.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, however, are not articles of faith, but documents of historical and archaeological importance which belong properly not to the Catholic Church, but to humanity as a whole. It is a sobering and profoundly disturbing thought that, if Cardinal Ratzinger has his way, everything we ever learn about the Qumran texts will be subject to the censorship machinery of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - will be, in effect, filtered and edited for us by the Inquisition.

Given its obligatory allegiance to the Congregation, one is justified in wondering whether, quite simply, the Ecole Biblique can be trusted. Even if the Israeli government clamped down and ordered the immediate release of all Qumran material, how could we be sure that items potentially compromising to the Church would ever see the light of day?

We personally, in this book, should like to pose publicly certain basic questions to Father Jean-Luc Vesco, the Ecole Biblique's current director.

• If the Ecole Biblique is accountable to the Pontifical Biblical Commission and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, what are its responsibilities to scholarship?

• How can any reputable academic institution function under the strain of such potentially divided, even mutually hostile, loyalties?

• And what exactly would the Ecole Biblique do if, among the unpublished or perhaps as yet undiscovered Qumran material, something inimical to Church doctrine turned up?

9 - The Scrolls

It is not feasible or relevant in this book to list all the texts known to have been found at Qumran, or even to have been translated and published. Many of them are of interest solely to specialists. Many of them consist of nothing more than small fragments, whose context and significance cannot now be reconstructed.

A substantial number of them are commentaries on various books of the Old Testament, as well as on other Judaic works known as apocrypha and pseudepigrapha.

But it is worth at this point noting a few of the Qumran documents which contain material of special relevance - and two in particular which will prove not only most illuminating, but most controversial indeed.

The 'Copper Scroll'
 

Found in the Qumran cave designated number 3, the 'Copper Scroll' simply lists, in the dry fashion of an inventory, sixty-four sites where a treasure of gold, silver and precious religious vessels is alleged to have been hidden. Many of the sites are in Jerusalem proper, some of them under or adjacent to the Temple. Others are in the surrounding countryside, perhaps as far afield as Qumran itself.

If the figures in the scroll are accurate, the total weight of the various scattered caches amounts to sixty-five tons of silver and twenty-six tons of gold, which would be worth some £30 million at today's prices. It is not a particularly staggering sum as such things go - a sunken Spanish treasure galleon, for example, would fetch far more – but not many people would turn their noses up at it; and the religious and symbolic import of such a treasure would place it, of course, beyond all monetary value.

Although this was not publicized when the contents of the scroll were originally revealed, the text clearly establishes that the treasure derived from the Temple - whence it was removed and secreted, presumably to protect it from the invading Romans. One can therefore conclude that the 'Copper Scroll' dates from the time of the Roman invasion in AD 68. As we have noted, certain members of the international team, such as Professor Cross and the former Father Milik, deemed the treasure to be wholly fictitious.

Most independent scholars now concur, however, that it did exist. Nevertheless, the depositories have proved impossible to find. The directions, sites and landmarks involved are indicated by local names long since lost; and the general configuration and layout of the area has, in the course of two thousand years and endless wars, changed beyond all recognition.

In 1988, however, a discovery was made just to the north of the cave in which the 'Copper Scroll' was found. Here, in another cave, three feet or so below the present surface, a small jug was exhumed, dating from the time of Herod and his immediate successors. The jug had clearly been regarded as very valuable, and had been concealed with extreme care, wrapped in a protective cover of palm fibers. It proved to contain a thick red oil which, according to chemical analysis, is unlike any oil known today.

This oil is generally believed to be balsam oil - a precious commodity reported to have been produced nearby, at Jericho, and traditionally used to anoint Israel's rightful kings.1 The matter cannot be definitively established, however, because the balsam tree has been extinct for some fifteen hundred years.

If the oil is indeed balsam oil, it may well be part of the treasure stipulated in the 'Copper Scroll'. In any case, it is an incongruously costly commodity to have been used by a community of supposedly isolated ascetics in the desert. As we have noted, however, one of the most important features of the 'Copper Scroll' is that it shows Qumran not to have been so isolated after all.

On the contrary, it would seem to establish links between the Qumran community and factions associated with the Temple in Jerusalem.



The 'Community Rule'

Found in Cave 1 at Qumran, the 'Community Rule', as we have seen, adumbrates the rituals and regulations governing life in the desert community. It establishes a hierarchy of authority for the community. It lays down instructions for the 'Master' of the community and for the various officers subordinate to him. It also specifies the principles of behavior and the punishment for violation of these principles.

Thus, for instance,

'Whoever has deliberately lied shall do penance for six months.'2

The text opens by enunciating the basis on which the community define and distinguish themselves. All members must enter into a 'Covenant before God to obey all His commandments';3 and he who practices such obedience will be 'cleansed from all his sins'.4 Adherence to the Law is accorded a paramount position. Among the various terms by which the community's members are designated, one finds 'Keepers of the Covenant'5 and those who have 'zeal for the Law'.6

Among the rituals stipulated, there is cleansing and purification by baptism - not just once, but, apparently, every day. Daily prayers are also specified, at dawn and at sunset, involving recitations of the Law. And there is a ritually purified 'Meal of the Congregation'7 -a meal very similar, as other scrolls attest, to the 'Last Supper' of the so-called 'early Church'.

The 'Community Rule' speaks, too, of the 'Council' of the Community, made up of twelve men and, possibly, a further three priests. We have already discussed the interesting echoes of the 'cornerstone' or 'keystone' image in relation to the Council of the Community. But the scroll also states that the Council 'shall preserve the faith in the Land with steadfastness and meekness and shall atone for sin by the practice of justice and by suffering the sorrows of affliction'.8

In their eagerness to distance the Qumran community from Jesus and his entourage, scholars promoting the consensus of the international team stress that the concept of atonement does not figure in Qumran teachings - that Jesus is to be distinguished from Qumran's 'Teacher of Righteousness' in large part by virtue of his doctrine of atonement. The 'Community Rule', however, demonstrates that atonement figured as prominently in Qumran as it did with Jesus and his followers in the so-called 'early Church'.

Finally, the 'Community Rule' introduces the Messiah - or perhaps Messiahs, in the plural. Members of the Community, 'walking in the way of perfection', are obliged to adhere zealously to the Law 'until there shall come the prophet and the Messiahs of Aaron and Israel'.9 This reference is usually interpreted as meaning two distinct Messiahs, two equally regal figures, one descended from the line of Aaron, one from the established line of Israel -i.e. the line of David and Solomon.

But the reference may also be to a dynasty of single Messiahs descended from, and uniting, both lines. In the context of the time, of course, 'Messiah' does not signify what it later comes to signify in Christian tradition.

It simply means 'the Anointed One', which denotes consecration by oil. In Israelite tradition, it would seem, both kings and priests - in fact, any claimant to high office - were anointed, and hence Messiahs.

 

The 'War Scroll'

Copies of the 'War Scroll' were found in Caves 1 and 4 at Qumran. On one level, the 'War Scroll' is a very specific manual of strategy and tactics, obviously intended for specific circumstances, at a specific place and time.

Thus, for example:

'Seven troops of horsemen shall also station themselves to right and to left of the formation; their troops shall stand on this side...'10

On another level, however, the text constitutes exhortation and prophetic propaganda, intended to galvanize morale against the invading foe, the 'Kittim', or Romans. The supreme leader of Israel against the 'Kittim' is called, quite unequivocally, the 'Messiah' - though certain commentators have sought to disguise or dissemble this nomenclature by referring to him as 'Thine anointed'.11

The advent of the 'Messiah' is stated as having been prophesied in Numbers 24:17, where it is said that 'a star from Jacob takes the leadership, a scepter arises from Israel'. The 'Star' thus becomes a sobriquet for the 'Messiah', the regal warrior priest-king who will lead the forces of Israel to triumph. As Robert Eisenman has stressed, this prophecy linking the Messiah figure with the image of the star occurs elsewhere in the Qumran literature, and is of crucial importance. It is also significant that the same prophecy is cited by sources quite independent of both Qumran and the New Testament - by historians and chroniclers of 1st-century Rome, for example, such as Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius.

And Simeon bar Kochba, instigator of the second revolt against the Romans between AD 132 and 135, called himself the 'Son of the Star'.

The 'War Scroll' imparts a metaphysical and theological dimension to the struggle against the 'Kittim' by depicting it as a clash between the 'Sons of Light' and the 'Sons of Darkness'. More importantly still, however, the scroll contains a vital clue to its own dating and chronology. When speaking of the 'Kittim', the text refers quite explicitly to their 'king'.

The 'Kittim' concerned cannot, therefore, be the soldiers of republican Rome, who invaded Palestine in 63 BC and who had no monarch. On the contrary, they would have to be the soldiers of imperial Rome, who invaded in the wake of the revolt of AD 66 — although, of course, occupying troops had been present in Palestine since the imposition of imperial Roman prefects or procurators in AD 6. It is thus clear that the 'War Scroll' must be seen in the context not of pre-Christian times, but of the 1st century.

As we shall see, this internal evidence of chronology -which advocates of the 'consensus' contrive to ignore - will be even more persuasively developed in one of the other, and most crucial, of the Qumran texts, the 'Commentary on Habakkuk'.



The 'Temple Scroll'

The 'Temple Scroll' is believed to have been found in Cave 11 at Qumran, though this has never been definitively established. As its name suggests, the scroll deals, at least in part, with the Temple of Jerusalem, with the design, furnishings, fixtures and fittings of the structure. It also outlines specific details of rituals practiced in the Temple. At the same time, however, the name conferred on the scroll, by Yigael Yadin, is somewhat misleading.

In effect, the 'Temple Scroll' is a species of Torah, or Book of the Law - a kind of alternative Torah used by the Qumran community and other factions elsewhere in Palestine. The 'official' Torah of Judaism comprises the first five books of the Old Testament - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. These are deemed to be the books of laws which Moses received on Mount Sinai, and their authorship is traditionally ascribed to Moses himself. The 'Temple Scroll' constitutes, in a sense, a sixth Book of the Law.

The laws it contains are not confined to rites of worship and observance in the Temple. There are also laws pertaining to more general matters, such as ritual purification, marriage and sexual practices.

Most important and interesting of all, there are laws governing the institution of kingship in Israel - the character, comportment, behavior and obligations of the king. The king, for example, is strictly forbidden to be a foreigner. He is forbidden to have more than one wife. And like all other Jews, he is forbidden to marry his sister, his aunt, his brother's wife or his niece.12

There is nothing new or startling about most of these taboos. They can be found in Leviticus 18-20 in the Old Testament. But one of them - that forbidding the king's marriage to his niece -is new. It is found elsewhere in only one other place, another of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the 'Damascus Document'. As Eisenman has pointed out, this stricture provides an important clue to the dating of both the 'Temple Scroll' and the 'Damascus Document' - and, by extension, of course, to the other Dead Sea Scrolls as well.

As we have noted, the consensus of the international team regards the Dead Sea Scrolls as pre-Christian, dating from the era of Israel's Maccabean kings. But there is no evidence that the Maccabean kings — or any Israelite kings before them - ever married their nieces or ever incurred criticism for doing so.13 The issue seems to have been utterly irrelevant.

Either marriage to one's niece was accepted, or it was never practiced at all. In either case, it was not forbidden.

The situation changed dramatically, however, with the accession of Herod and his descendants. In the first place, Herod was, by Judaic standards at the time, a foreigner, of Arabian stock from Idumaea - the region to the south of Judaea. In the second place, the Herodian kings made a regular practice of marrying their nieces. And Herodian princesses regularly married their uncles.

Bernice, sister of King Agrippa II (ad 48—53), married her uncle, for example. Herodias, sister of Agrippa I (ad 37-44), went even further, marrying two uncles in succession. The strictures in the 'Temple Scroll' are thus of particular relevance to a very specific period, and constitute a direct criticism of the Herodian dynasty -a dynasty of foreign puppet kings, imposed on Israel forcibly and sustained in power by imperial Rome.

Taken in sum, the evidence of the 'Temple Scroll' runs counter to the consensus of the international team in three salient respects:

1. According to the consensus, the Qumran community had no connection with, or interest in, either the Temple or the 'official' Judaism of the time. Like the 'Copper Scroll', however, the 'Temple Scroll' establishes that the Qumran community were indeed preoccupied with Temple affairs and with the governing theocracy.
    

2. According to the consensus, the supposed 'Essenes' of Qumran were on cordial terms with Herod. The 'Temple Scroll', however, goes out of its way to include certain specific strictures — strictures intended to damn Herod and his dynasty.14 These strictures would be meaningless in any other context. 3. According to the consensus, the 'Temple Scroll' itself, like all the other Qumran texts, dates from pre-Christian times. Yet the internal evidence of the scroll points to issues that would have become relevant only during the Herodian period - that is, during the 1st century of the Christian era.

The 'Damascus Document'

The 'Damascus Document' was known to the world long before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran. In the absence of a context, however, scholars were not sure what to make of it. Towards the end of the last century, the loft of an ancient synagogue in Cairo was found to contain a 'geniza' — a depository for the disposal of worn-out or redundant religious texts' - dating from the 9th century ad.

In 1896, a few fragments from this 'geniza' were confided to one Solomon Schechter, a lecturer at Cambridge University who happened to be in Cairo at the time. One fragment proved to contain the original Hebrew version of a text which, for a thousand years, had been known only in secondary translations. This prompted Schechter to investigate further. In December 1896, he collected the entire contents of the 'geniza' - 164 boxes of manuscripts housing some 100,000 pieces - and brought them back to Cambridge.

From this welter of material, two Hebrew versions emerged of what came to be known as the 'Damascus Document'. The versions from the Cairo 'geniza' were obviously later copies of a much earlier work. The texts were incomplete, lacking endings and probably large sections in the middle; the order of the texts was scrambled and the logical development of their themes confused.

Even in this muddled form, however, the 'Damascus Document' was provocative, potentially explosive. Schechter published it for the first time in 1910. In 1913, R.H. Charles reprinted it in his compilation The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament.

When Eisenman was given, and passed on to Biblical Archaeology Review, the computer print-out which inventoried all the Qumran material in the hands of the international team, there were listed, among the items, additional versions and/or fragments of the 'Damascus Document'. Having been found at Qumran, they were obviously much earlier than those of the Cairo 'geniza', and probably more complete.

It was the Qumran parallels and the fragments of the 'Damascus Document' that Eisenman and Philip Davies of Sheffield requested to see in their formal letter to John Strugnell, thereby precipitating the bitter and vindictive controversy of 1989. Why should this document be such a bone of contention?

The 'Damascus Document' speaks firstly of a remnant of Jews who, unlike their co-religionists, remained true to the Law. A 'Teacher of Righteousness' appeared among them. Like Moses, he took them into the wilderness, to a place called 'Damascus', where they entered into a renewed 'Covenant' with God. Numerous textual references make it clear that this Covenant is the same as the one cited by the 'Community Rule' for Qumran. And it is obvious enough - no scholar disputes it - that the 'Damascus Document' is speaking of the same community as the other Qumran scrolls. Yet the location of the community is said to be 'Damascus'.

It is clear from the document's context that the place in the desert called 'Damascus' cannot possibly be the Romanized city in Syria. Could the site for 'Damascus' have been in fact Qumran? Why the name of the location should have been thus masked remains uncertain - though simple self-preservation, dictated by the turmoil following the revolt of AD 66, would seem to be explanation enough, and Qumran had no name of its own at the time.

In any case, it can hardly be coincidental that, according to the international team's computer print-out, no fewer than ten copies or fragments of the 'Damascus Document' were found in Qumran's caves.15

Like the 'Community Rule', the 'Damascus Document' includes a list of regulations. Some of these are identical to those in the 'Community Rule'. But there are some additional regulations as well, two of which are worth noting. One pertains to marriage and children - which establishes that the Qumran community were not, as Father de Vaux maintained, celibate 'Essenes'. A second refers - quite in passing, as if it were common knowledge - to affiliated communities scattered throughout Palestine. In other words, Qumran was not as isolated from the world of its time as de Vaux contended.

The 'Damascus Document' fulminates against three crimes in particular, crimes alleged to be rampant among the enemies of the 'Righteous', those who have embraced the 'New Covenant'.

These crimes are specified as wealth, profanation of the Temple (a charge leveled by the 'Temple Scroll' as well) and a fairly limited definition of fornication - taking more than one wife, or marrying one's niece. As Eisenman has shown, the 'Damascus Document' thus echoes the 'Temple Scroll' in referring to issues of unique relevance to the period of the Herodian dynasty.16 And it echoes, as we shall see, a dispute in the community which figures more prominently in another of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the 'Habakkuk Commentary'.

This dispute involves an individual designated as 'the Liar', who defects from the community and becomes its enemy. The 'Damascus Document' condemns those 'who enter the New Covenant in the land of Damascus, and who again betray it and depart'.17 Shortly thereafter, the document speaks of those 'who deserted to the Liar'.18

The 'Damascus Document' also echoes the 'Community Rule' and the 'War Scroll' by speaking of a Messianic figure (or perhaps two such figures) who will come to 'Damascus' - a prophet or 'Interpreter of the Law' called 'the Star' and a prince of the line of David called 'the Scepter'.19 On five subsequent occasions in the text, there is a focus on a single figure, 'the Messiah of Aaron and Israel'.20

The significance of this Messiah figure will be explored later. For the moment, it is worth considering the implications of 'Damascus' as a designation for Qumran. To most Christians, of course, 'Damascus' is familiar from Chapter 9 of the Acts of the Apostles, where it is taken to denote the Romanized city in Syria, that country's modern-day capital. It is on the road to Damascus that Saul of Tarsus, in one of the best-known and most crucial passages of the entire New Testament, undergoes his conversion into Paul.21

According to Acts 9, Saul is a kind of inquisitor-cum-'enforcer', dispatched by the high priest in the Temple of Jerusalem to suppress the community of heretical Jews - i.e. 'early Christians' - residing in Damascus. The priesthood are collaborators with the occupying Romans, and Saul is one of their instruments. In Jerusalem, he is already said to have participated actively in attacks on the 'early Church'. Indeed, if Acts is to be believed, he is personally involved in the events surrounding the stoning to death of the individual identified as Stephen, acclaimed by later tradition as the first Christian martyr. He himself freely admits that he has persecuted his victims 'to death'.

Prompted by his fanatical fervor, Saul then embarks for Damascus, to ferret out fugitive members of the 'early Church' established there. He is accompanied by a band of men, presumably armed; and he carries with him arrest warrants from the high priest in Jerusalem.

Syria, at the time, was not a part of Israel, but a separate Roman province, governed by a Roman legate, with neither an administrative nor a political connection with Palestine. How, then, could the high priest's writ conceivably run there? The Roman Empire would hardly have sanctioned self-appointed 'hit-squads' moving from one territory to another within its domains, serving arrests, perpetrating assassinations and threatening the precarious stability of civic order. According to official policy, every religion was to be tolerated, provided it posed no challenge to secular authority or the social structure.

A Jerusalem-based 'hit-squad' operating in Syria would have elicited some swift and fairly gruesome reprisals from the Roman administration - reprisals such as no high priest, whose position depended on Roman favor, would dare to incur. Given these circumstances, how could Saul of Tarsus, armed with warrants from the high priest, possibly have undertaken his punitive expedition to Damascus - if, that is, 'Damascus' is indeed taken to be the city in Syria?

If 'Damascus' is understood to be Qumran, however, Saul's expedition suddenly makes perfect historical sense. Unlike Syria, Qumran did lie in territory where the high priest's writ legitimately ran. It would have been entirely feasible for the high priest in Jerusalem to dispatch his 'enforcers' to extirpate heretical Jews at Qumran, a mere twenty miles away, near Jericho.

Such action would have thoroughly conformed to Roman policy, which made a point of not meddling in purely internal affairs. Jews, in other words, were quite free to hurry and persecute other Jews within their own domains, so long as such activities did not encroach on the Roman administration. And since the high priest was a Roman puppet, his efforts to extirpate rebellious co-religionists would have been all the more welcome.

This explanation, however, despite its historical plausibility, raises some extremely awkward questions. According to the consensus of the international team, the community at Qumran consisted of Judaic sectarians - the so-called 'Essenes', a pacifist ascetic sect having no connection either with early Christianity or with the 'mainstream' of Judaism at the time.

Yet Saul, according to Acts, embarks for Damascus to persecute members of the 'early Church'. Here, then, is a provocative challenge both to Christian tradition and to adherents of the consensus, who have studiously avoided looking at the matter altogether. Either members of the 'early Church' were sheltering with the Qumran community – or the 'early Church' and the Qumran community were one and the same.

In either case, the 'Damascus Document' indicates that the Dead Sea Scrolls cannot be distanced from the origins of Christianity.



The 'Habakkuk Commentary'

Found in Cave 1 at Qumran, the 'Habakkuk Pesher', or 'Habakkuk Commentary', represents perhaps the closest approximation, in the entire corpus of known Dead Sea Scrolls, to a chronicle of the community - or, at any rate, of certain major developments in its history. It focuses in particular on the same dispute cited by the 'Damascus Document'.

This dispute, verging on incipient schism, seems to have been a traumatic event in the life of the Qumran community. It figures not just in the 'Damascus Document' and the 'Habakkuk Commentary', but in four other Qumran texts as well; and there seem to be references to it in four further texts.22

Like the 'Damascus Document', the 'Habakkuk Commentary' recounts how certain members of the community, under the iniquitous instigation of a figure identified as 'the Liar', secede, break the New Covenant and cease to adhere to the Law.

This precipitates a conflict between them and the community's leader, 'the Teacher of Righteousness'. There is mention, too, of a villainous adversary known as 'the Wicked Priest'. Adherents of the consensus have generally tended to regard 'the Liar' and 'the Wicked Priest' as two different sobriquets for the same individual. More recently, however, Eisenman has effectively demonstrated that 'the Liar' and 'the Wicked Priest' are two quite separate and distinct personages.23

He has made it clear that 'the Liar', unlike 'the Wicked Priest', emerges from within the Qumran community. Having been taken in by the community and accepted as a member in more or less good standing, he then defects. He is not just an adversary, therefore, but a traitor as well. In contrast, 'the Wicked Priest' is an outsider, a representative of the priestly establishment of the Temple.

Although an adversary, he is not therefore a traitor. What makes him important for our purposes is the clue he provides to the dating of the events recounted in the 'Habakkuk Commentary'. If 'the Wicked Priest' is a member of the Temple establishment, it means the Temple is still standing and the establishment intact. In other words, the activities of 'the Wicked Priest' pre-date the destruction of the Temple by Roman troops.

As in the 'War Scroll', but even more explicitly, there are references that can only be to imperial, not republican, Rome - to Rome, that is, in the 1st century AD. The 'Habakkuk Commentary', for example, alludes to a specific practice - victorious Roman troops making sacrificial offerings to their standards. Josephus provides written evidence for this practice at the time of the fall of the Temple in AD 70.24

And it is, in fact, a practice that would make no sense under the republic, when victorious troops would have offered sacrifices to their gods. Only with the creation of the empire, when the emperor himself was accorded the status of divinity, becoming the supreme god for his subjects, would his image, or token, or monogram, be emblazoned on the standards of his soldiers.

The 'Habakkuk Commentary', therefore, like the 'War Scroll', the Temple Scroll' and the 'Damascus Document', points specifically to the Herodian epoch.

11 - The Essenes

The reader by now will be familiar with the conclusions of the consensus view of the international team and, as expressed through its journals, the Ecole Biblique, as well as with the processes by which those conclusions were reached. It is now time to return to the evidence and see whether any alternative conclusions are possible. In order to do so, certain basic questions must again be posed.

Who, precisely, were the elusive and mysterious denizens of Qumran, who established their community, transcribed and deposited their sacred texts, then apparently vanished from the stage of history? Were they indeed Essenes? And if so, what exactly does that term mean?

The traditional images of the Essenes come down to us from Pliny, Philo and Josephus, who described them as a sect or sub-sect of lst-century Judaism.1 Pliny, as we have seen, depicted the Essenes as celibate hermits, residing, with 'only palm-trees for company', in an area that might be construed as Qumran. Josephus, who is echoed by Philo, elaborates on this portrait.

According to Josephus, the Essenes are celibate - although, he adds, almost as an afterthought, 'there is a second order of Essenes' who do marry.2 The Essenes despise pleasure and wealth. They hold all possessions in common, and those who join their ranks must renounce private property. They elect their own leaders from amongst themselves. They are settled in every city of Palestine, as well as in isolated communities, but, even in urban surroundings, keep themselves apart.

Josephus portrays the Essenes as something akin to a monastic order or an ancient mystery school. Postulants to their ranks are subjected to a three-year period of probation, the equivalent of a novitiate. Not until he has successfully undergone this apprenticeship is the candidate officially accepted. Full-fledged Essenes pray before dawn, then work for five hours, after which they don a clean loincloth and bathe - a ritual of purification performed daily.

Thus purified, they assemble in a special 'common' room and partake of a simple communal meal. Contrary to later popular misconceptions, Josephus does not describe the Essenes as vegetarian. They are said to eat meat.

The Essenes, Josephus says, are well versed in the books of the Old Testament and the teachings of the prophets. They are themselves trained in the arts of divination, and can foretell the future by studying sacred texts in conjunction with certain rites of purification. In their doctrine, according to Josephus, the soul is immortal but trapped in the prison of the mortal and corruptible body. At death, the soul is set free and soars upwards, rejoicing. Josephus compares Essene teaching to that of 'the Greeks'. Elsewhere, he is more specific, likening it to the principles of the Pythagorean schools.3

Josephus mentions Essene adherence to the Law of Moses:

'What they reverence most after God is the Lawgiver, and blasphemy against him is a capital offence.'4

On the whole, however, the Essenes are portrayed as pacifist, and on good terms with established authority. Indeed, they are said to enjoy the special favor of Herod, who 'continued to honor all the Essenes';5

'Herod had these Essenes in such honor and thought higher of them than their mortal nature required... '6

But at one point, Josephus contradicts himself - or perhaps slips his guard.

The Essenes, he says:

despise danger and conquer pain by sheer will-power: death, if it comes with honor, they value 
more than life without end. Their spirit was tested to the utmost by the war with the Romans, who 
racked and twisted, burnt and broke them, subjecting them to every torture yet invented in order to 
make them blaspheme the Lawgiver or eat some forbidden food.7

In this one reference, at variance with everything else Josephus says, his Essenes begin to sound suspiciously like the militant defenders of Masada, the Zealots or Sicarii.

With the exception of this one reference, Josephus' account was to shape popular images of the Essenes for most of the ensuing two thousand years. And when the Aufklärung, the so-called 'Enlightenment', began to encourage 'free-thinking' examination of Christian tradition, commentators began to make connections between that tradition and Josephus' Essenes.

Thus, in 1770, no less a personage than Frederick the Great wrote definitively that 'Jesus was really an Essene; he was imbued with Essene ethics'.8 Such apparently scandalous assertions proceeded to gain increasing currency during the latter half of the next century, and in 1863 Renan published his famous Vie de Jesus, in which he suggested that Christianity was 'an Essenism which has largely succeeded'.9

Towards the end of the 19th century, the revival of interest in esoteric thought consolidated the association of Christianity with the Essenes. Theosophy, through the teachings of H.P. Blavatsky, postulated Jesus as a magus or adept who embodied elements of both Essene and Gnostic tradition. One of Blavatsky's disciples, Anna Kingsford, developed a concept of 'esoteric Christianity'.

This roped in alchemy as well and portrayed Jesus as a Gnostic thaumaturge who, prior to his public mission, had lived and studied with the Essenes. In 1889, such ideas were transplanted to the Continent through a book called The Great Initiate, by the French theosophist Edouard Schure. The mystique surrounding the Essenes had by now begun to associate them with healing, to credit them with special medical training and to represent them as a Judaic equivalent of the Greek Therapeutae.

Another influential work, The Crucifixion by an Eye-Witness, which appeared in German towards the end of the 19th century and in English around 1907, purported to be a genuine ancient text composed by an Essene scribe. Jesus was depicted as the son of Mary and an unnamed Essene teacher, whose fund of secret Essene medical knowledge enabled him not just to survive the Crucifixion, but also to appear to his disciples afterwards as if 'risen from the dead'.

George Moore undoubtedly drew on this work when, in 1916, he published The Brook Kerith and scandalized Christian readers across the English-speaking world. Moore, too, portrayed Jesus as a protégé of Essene thought, who survives the Crucifixion and retires to an Essene community in the general vicinity of Qumran. Here, years later, he is visited by a fanatic named Paul, who, quite unknowingly, has come to promulgate a bizarre mythologized account of his career and, in the process, promote him to godhood.

The Essenes depicted in The Brook Kerith derive ultimately from the 'stereotyped' Essenes of Pliny, Josephus and Philo, imbued now with a mystical character which endeared them to esoteric-oriented writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To the extent that educated readers knew anything of the Essenes at all, this was the prevailing image of them. And something of this image was retained even by more critical commentators, such as Robert Graves, who in other respects sought to demystify Christian origins.

When the Dead Sea Scrolls came to light, they seemed, on the surface at least, not to contain anything that conflicted with the prevailing image of the Essenes. It was only natural, therefore, that they should be associated with the established conceptions.

As early as 1947, when he first saw the Qumran texts, Professor Sukenik had suggested an Essene character for their authorship. Father de Vaux and his team also invoked the traditional image of the Essenes. As we have noted, de Vaux was quick to identify Qumran with the Essene settlement mentioned by Pliny. 'The community at Qumran', Professor Cross concurred, 'was an Essene settlement.'10 It soon became regarded as an established and accepted fact that the Dead Sea Scrolls were essentially Essene in their authorship, and that the Essenes were of the familiar kind - pacifist, ascetic, celibate, divorced from public and particularly political issues.

The community at Qumran, the consensus view contends, built upon the much earlier remains of an abandoned Israelite fortress dating from the 6th century BC. The authors of the scrolls arrived at the site some time around 134 BC, and the major buildings were erected around 100 BC and thereafter - a chronology safely and uncontroversially pre-Christian.

The community was said to have thrived until it was decimated by an earthquake, followed by a fire, in 31 BC. During the reign of Herod the Great (37-4 BC), Qumran was abandoned and deserted, and then, in the reign of Herod's successor, the ruins were reoccupied and rebuilding undertaken. According to the consensus, Qumran then flourished as a quietist, politically neutral and disengaged enclave until it was destroyed by the Romans in AD 68, during the war that also involved the sack of Jerusalem.

After this the site was occupied by a Roman military garrison until the end of the 1st century. When Palestine rose in revolt again between AD 132 and 135, Qumran was inhabited by rebel 'squatters'.11 It was a neat, conveniently formulated scenario which effectively defused the Dead Sea Scrolls of whatever explosive potential they might have. But the evidence seems to have been ignored when expediency and the stability of Christian theology so dictated.

There is a contradiction, quite apart from the geographical question, in de Vaux's assertion that the passage from Pliny, quoted here on page 20, refers to Qumran - a contradiction which pertains to the dating of the scrolls. Pliny is referring, in this passage, to the situation after the destruction of Jerusalem. The passage itself indicates that Engedi has likewise been destroyed - which it was.

The Essene community, however, is described as still intact, and even taking in a 'throng of refugees'. Yet even de Vaux acknowledged that Qumran, like Jerusalem and Engedi, was destroyed during the revolt of AD 66-73. It would thus seem even more unlikely that Pliny's Essene community is in fact Qumran. What is more, Pliny's community, as he describes it, contains no women, yet there are women's graves among those at Qumran. It is still, of course, possible that the occupants of Qumran were Essenes, if not of Pliny's community, then of some other.

If so, however, the Dead Sea Scrolls will themselves reveal how ill informed about the Essenes Pliny was.

The term 'Essene' is Greek. It occurs only in classical writers - Josephus, Philo and Pliny - and is written in Greek as 'Essenoi' or 'Essaioi'. Thus, if the inhabitants of Qumran were indeed Essenes, one would expect 'Essene' to be a Greek translation or transliteration of some original Hebrew or Aramaic word, by which the Qumran community referred to themselves.

Accounts of the Essenes by classical writers are not consistent with the life or thought of the community as revealed by either the external evidence of archaeology or the internal evidence of the texts themselves. Josephus, Philo and Pliny offer portraits of the Essenes which are often utterly irreconcilable with the testimony of Qumran's ruins and of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The evidence at Qumran, both internal and external, repeatedly contradicts their accounts.

Some of these contradictions have been cited before, but it is worth reviewing the most important of them.

1. Josephus acknowledges that there is 'another order' of Essenes who do marry, but this, he indicates, is atypical.12 In general, Josephus says, echoing Philo and Pliny, the Essenes are celibate. Yet the graves of women and children have been found among those excavated at Qumran. And the 'Community Rule' contains regulations governing marriage and the raising of children.
    

2. None of the classical writers ever mentions anything to suggest that the Essenes used a special form of calendar. The Qumran community, however, did - a unique, solar-based calendar, rather than the conventional Judaic calendar, which is lunar-based. If the Qumran community were indeed Essenes, surely so strikingly noticeable a characteristic would have been accorded some reference.
    

3. According to Philo, the Essenes differed from other forms of ancient Judaism in having no cult of animal sacrifices.13 Yet the 'Temple Scroll' issues precise instructions for such sacrifices. And the ruins of Qumran revealed animal bones carefully placed in pots, or covered by pots, and buried in the ground under a thin covering of earth.14 De Vaux speculated that these bones might be the remains of ritual meals. They might indeed. But they might equally be the remains of animal sacrifices, as stipulated by the 'Temple Scroll'.
    

4. The classical writers use the term 'Essene' to denote what they describe as a major sub-division of Judaism, along with the Pharisees and Sadducees. Nowhere in the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, is the term 'Essene' found.
    

5. Josephus declares the Essenes to have been on congenial terms with Herod the Great, who, he says, 'had these Essenes in such honour and thought higher of them than their mortal nature required'.15 Yet the Qumran literature indicates a militant hostility towards non-Judaic authorities in general, and towards Herod and his dynasty in particular. What is more, Qumran appears to have been abandoned and uninhabited for some years precisely because of persecution by Herod.
    

6. According to classical writers, the Essenes were pacifist. Philo specifically states that their numbers included no makers of weapons or armour.16 Josephus emphatically distinguishes between the non-violent Essenes and the militantly messianic and nationalistic Zealots. Yet the ruins of Qumran include a defensive tower of a manifestly military nature, and what 'can only be described as a forge'.17

    

   As for the Qumran literature, it is often martial in the extreme, as exemplified by such texts as the 'War Scroll'. Indeed, the bellicose character of such texts would seem to have less in common with what Josephus says of the Essenes than with what he and others say of the so-called Zealots - which is precisely what Roth and Driver claimed the Qumran community to be, thereby incurring the fury of de Vaux and the international team.

The Qumran community wrote mostly not in Greek, but in Aramaic and Hebrew. So far as Aramaic and Hebrew are concerned, no accepted etymology for the origins of the term 'Essene' has hitherto been found.

Even the classical writers were mystified by its derivation. Philo, for example, suggested that, in his opinion, the name stemmed from the Greek word for 'holy', 'oseeos', and that the Essenes were therefore the 'Oseeotes', or 'Holy Ones'.18

One theory has enjoyed a certain qualified currency among certain modern scholars, notably Geza Vermes of Oxford University. According to Vermes, the term 'Essene' derives from the Aramaic word 'assayya', which means 'healers'.19 This has fostered an image in some quarters of the Essenes as medical practitioners, a Judaic equivalent of the Alexandrian ascetics known as the 'Therapeutae'.

But the word 'assayya' does not occur anywhere in the corpus of Qumran literature; nor is there any reference to healing, to medical activities or to therapeutic work. To derive 'Essene' from 'assayya'', therefore, remains purely speculative; and there would be no reason to credit it at all unless there were no other options.

In fact, there is another option - not just a possibility, but a probability. If the Qumran community never refer to themselves as 'Essenes' or 'assayya', they do employ a number of other Hebrew and Aramaic terms. From these terms, it is clear that the community did not have a single definitive name for themselves.

They did, however, have a highly distinctive and unique concept of themselves, and this concept is reflected by a variety of appellations and designations.20 The concept rests ultimately on the all-important 'Covenant', which entailed a formal oath of obedience, totally and eternally, to the Law of Moses. The authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls would thus refer to themselves as, for example, 'the Keepers of the Covenant'.

As synonyms for 'Covenant' and 'Law', they would often use the same words that figure so prominently in Taoism - 'way', 'work' or 'works' ('ma'asim' in Hebrew). They would speak, for instance, of 'the Perfect of the Way', or 'the Way of Perfect Righteousness'21 - 'way' meaning 'the work of the Law', or 'the way in which the Law functions', 'the way in which the Law works'. Variations of these themes run all through the Dead Sea Scrolls to denote the Qumran community and its members.

In the 'Habakkuk Commentary', Eisenman, continuing this line of thought, found one particularly important such variation - the 'Osei ha-Torah', which translates as the 'Doers of the Law'.22 This term would appear to be the source of the word 'Essene', for the collective form of 'Osei ha-Torah' is 'Osim', pronounced 'Oseem'.

The Qumran community would thus have constituted, collectively, 'the Osim'. They seem, in fact, to have been known as such. An early Christian writer, Epiphanius, speaks of an allegedly 'heretical' Judaic sect which once occupied an area around the Dead Sea. This sect, he says, were called the 'Ossenes'.23

It is fairly safe to conclude that the 'Essenes', the 'Ossenes' of Epiphanius and the 'Osim' of the Qumran community were one and the same.

28 Qumran, showing the marl terraces. The photograph was taken from the ruins looking west 
towards the Judaean hills, with Cave 5 on the extreme left and the two openings of Cave 4 just to the right. 
The original entrance to Cave 4 can be seen above the right-hand opening.


29 The ruins of Qumran. Caves 4 and 5 can be seen at the end of the nearer eroded cliff-face.


30 The interior of Cave 4, Qumran, where the largest number of fragments
were discovered in 1952. Fragments of up to 800 different scrolls were retrieved.


31 The Qumran ruins from the fortified tower. In the foreground are the remains 
of the circular weapons forge, to the left of which part of the water conduit has been exposed.


32 Remains of the main waterway into the Qumran community.
The site had a complex water system fed from
seasonal water flowing in the Wadi behind the ruins.


33 A cistern cut into the desert floor on the rocky terraces near to the Qumran ruins.
Water control and storage were vital to the survival of such a community.


34 The water supply to Qumran depended upon this water tunnel carved through solid rock
in the cliff-face. The water was dammed in the Wadi and directed through this tunnel.


35 The exit of the water tunnel.
From here the water flowed down the Waterway to the settlement itself.


36 Several of the 1,200 or so rock-covered graves slightly to the east of tb ruins.
Aligned north-south, contrary to normal Jewish practice, the graves appear to be unique to the Qumran-type of community.

A small number of graves has been opened, and the remains of men, women and children found


37 A dozen or so Qumran-type graves - aligned north—south - have been discovered 
some nine miles south of Qumran, at En el-Ghuweir. Clearly there was a settlement also on this site.
The caves in the Wadi and cliffs behind may well have served as repositories 
for the same type of scrolls as were found near Qumran.


38 Ruins of a settlement at En el-Ghuweir near to the graves.
The ruins have been dated to the Herodian period.


39 The pyramidal hill at Gamla in the Golan where the final citadel stood.
Here, on 10 November 67 AD, 4,000 zealots died fighting the Romans 
and another 5,000 killed themselves by jumping over the cliff.
The Dead Sea Scrolls provide an insight into the rationale which lay behind the mass suicides.


40 The ruins of Masada where, on 15 April 74 ad,
960 Zealots - men, women and children - killed themselves rather than surrender to the Romans.
 

Thus the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls may be thought of as 'Essenes', but not in the sense as defined and described by Josephus, Philo and Pliny. The accounts of the classical chroniclers prove to be altogethertoo circumscribed.

They have also prevented many modern scholars from making the necessary connections - perhaps, in some cases, because it was not deemed desirable to do so. If the connections are made, a different and broader picture emerges - a picture in which such terms as 'Essene' and 'the Qumran community' will prove to be interchangeable with others.

Eisenman effectively summarizes the situation:

Unfortunately for the premises of modern scholarship, terms like: Ebionim, Nozrim, Hassidim, 
Zaddikim... turn out to be variations on the same theme. The inability to relate to changeable 
metaphor... has been a distinct failure in criticism.24

This, precisely, is what we are dealing with - changeable metaphors, a variety of different designations used to denote the same people or factions. Recognition of that point was urged as early as 1969 by an acknowledged expert in the field, Professor Matthew Black of St Andrews University, Scotland.

The term 'Essene' was acceptable, Professor Black wrote:

provided we do not define Essenism too narrowly, for instance, by equating it exclusively with the 
Dead Sea group, but are prepared to understand the term as a general description of this 
widespread movement of anti-Jerusalem, anti-Pharisaic non-conformity of the period. It is from 
such an 'Essene-type' of Judaism that Christianity is descended.25

There is support for Professor Black's contention in the work of Epiphanius, the early Christian writer who spoke of the 'Ossenes'. Epiphanius states that the original 'Christians' in Judaea, generally called 'Nazoreans' (as in the Acts of the Apostles), were known as 'Jessaeans'.

These 'Christians', or 'Jessaeans', would have conformed precisely to Professor Black's phraseology - a 'widespread movement of anti-Jerusalem, anti-Pharisaic non-conformity'. But there is an even more crucial connection.

Among the terms by which the Qumran community referred to themselves was 'Keepers of the Covenant', which appears in the original Hebrew as 'Nozrei ha-Brit’. From this term derives the word 'Nozrim’ one of the earliest Hebrew designations for the sect subsequently known as 'Christians'.26 The modern Arabic word for Christians, 'Nasrani', derives from the same source.

So, too, does the word 'Nazorean' or 'Nazarene', which, of course, was the name by which the 'early Christians' referred to themselves in both the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. Contrary to the assumptions of later tradition, it has nothing whatever to do with Jesus' alleged upbringing in Nazareth, which, the evidence (or lack of it) suggests, did not even exist at the time.

Indeed, it seems to have been the very perplexity of early commentators encountering the unfamiliar term 'Nazorean' that led them to conclude Jesus' family came from Nazareth, which by then had appeared on the map.

To sum up, then, the 'Essenes' who figure in classical texts, the 'Ossenes' mentioned by Epiphanius, and the 'Osi'm', the Qumran community, are one and the same. So, too, are the 'Jessaeans', as Epiphanius calls the 'early Christians'.

So, too, are the 'Nozrei ha-Brit', the 'Nozrim', the 'Nasrani' and the 'Nazoreans'.

On the basis of this etymology, it becomes clear that we are indeed dealing with Professor Black's 'widespread movement', characterized, as Eisenman says, by shifting metaphor, a variety of slightly different designations used for the same people, shifting with time, translation and transliteration, just as 'Caesar' evolves into 'Kaiser' and 'Tsar'.

It would thus seem that the Qumran community was equivalent to the 'early Church' based in Jerusalem - the 'Nazoreans' who followed James, 'the Lord's brother'.27 Indeed, the 'Habakkuk Commentary' states explicitly that Qumran's ruling body, the 'Council of the Community', was actually located at the time in Jerusalem.28

And in Acts 9:2, the members of the 'early Church' are specifically referred to as 'followers of the Way' - a phrase identical with Qumran usage.

13 - James 'The Righteous'

If James played so important a role in the events of the time, why do we know so little about him? Why has he been relegated to the status of a shadowy figure in the background? Those questions can be answered simply enough.

Eisenman stresses that James, whether he was literally Jesus' brother or not, had known Jesus personally in a way that Paul never did. In his teachings, he was certainly closer to 'the source' than Paul ever was. And his objectives and preoccupations were often at variance with Paul's - were sometimes, indeed, diametrically opposed. For Paul, then, James would have been a constant irritant. With the triumph of Pauline Christianity, therefore, James's significance, if it couldn't be obliterated completely, had, at the very least, to be diminished.

Unlike a number of personalities in the New Testament, James does seem to have been an historical personage, and, moreover, one who played a more prominent role in the affairs of his time than is generally recognized. There is, in fact, a reasonably copious body of literature pertaining to James, even though most of it lies outside the canonical compilation of the New Testament.

In the New Testament itself, James is mentioned in the Gospels as one of Jesus' brothers, though the context is generally vague or confusing and has obviously been tampered with. In Acts, as we have discussed, he assumes rather more prominence, though it is not until the second part of Acts that he emerges in any kind of perspective. Then, with Paul's letter to the Galatians, he is clearly identified as the leader of the 'early Church', who resides in Jerusalem and is attended by a council of elders.1

Apart from those that impinge on Paul, however, one learns little of his activities, and even less about his personality and biography. Neither is the Letter of James in the New Testament of much value in this respect. The letter may indeed derive from a text by James, and Eisenman has drawn attention to its Qumranic style, language and imagery.2

It contains (James 5:6) an accusation whose significance will become apparent shortly - an accusation to the effect that 'you murdered the righteous [or just] man'.3

Again, however, no personal information is vouchsafed.

Such is James's role in scripture proper. But if one looks further afield, a portrait of James does begin to emerge. This is the research which Eisenman has been pursuing over the last few years. One source of information he has emphasized is an anonymous text of the 'early Church', the so-called 'Recognitions of Clement', which surfaced very early in the 3rd century. According to this document, James is preaching in the Temple when an unnamed 'enemy', accompanied by an entourage of followers, bursts in.

The 'enemy' taunts James's listeners and drowns out his words with noise, then proceeds to inflame the crowd,

'with revilings and abuse, and, like a madman, to excite everyone to murder, saying, "What do ye? Why do ye hesitate? Oh, sluggish and inert, why do we not lay hands upon them, and pull all these fellows to pieces?" '4

The 'enemy' does not confine himself to a verbal assault. Seizing a brand of wood, he begins to flail about with it at the assembled worshippers, and his entourage follow suit.

A full-scale riot ensues:

Much blood is shed; there is a confused flight, in the midst of which that enemy attacked James, 
and threw him headlong from the top of the steps; and supposing him to be dead, he cared not to 
inflict further violence upon him.5

James, however, is not dead. According to the 'Recognitions', his supporters carry him back to his house in Jerusalem. The next morning, before dawn, the injured man and his supporters flee the city, making their way to Jericho, where they remain for some time - presumably while James convalesces.6

For Eisenman, this attack on James is pivotal. He notes the parallels between it and the attack on Stephen as recounted in Acts. He suggests that Stephen may be an invented figure, to disguise the fact that the attack - as Acts could not possibly have admitted - was really directed at James. And he points out that Jericho, where James flees for refuge, is only a few miles from Qumran.

What is more, he argues, the flight to Jericho has a ring of historical truth to it. It is the kind of incidental detail that is unlikely to have been fabricated and interpolated, because it serves no particular purpose. As for the 'enemy', there would seem to be little doubt about his identity.

The 'Recognitions of Clement' concludes:

Then after three days one of the brethren came to us from Gamaliel... bringing us secret tidings 
that the enemy had received a commission from Caiaphas, the chief priest, that he should arrest all 
who believed in Jesus, and should go to Damascus with his letters...7

The surviving editions of Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews contain only one reference to James, which may or may not be later interpolation. The chronicle reports that the Sanhedrin, the religious high court, call before them James, 'the brother of Jesus who was called Christ'.8

Accused (most improbably) of breaking the Law, James and certain of his companions are found guilty and accordingly stoned to death. Whether this account is accurate, doctored or wholly invented, the most important aspect of it is the date to which it refers. Josephus indicates that the events he has described occurred during an interval between Roman procurators in Judaea.

The incumbent procurator had just died. His successor, Lucceius Albinus, was still en route to Palestine from Rome. During the interregnum, effective power in Jerusalem was wielded by the high priest, an unpopular man named Ananas. This allows the account of James's death to be dated at around AD 62 - only four years before the outbreak of the revolt in AD 66.

Here, then, is at least some chronological evidence that James's death may have had something to do with the war that ravaged the Holy Land between AD 66 and 73. For further information, however, one must turn to later Church historians.

Perhaps the major source is Eusebius, 4th-century Bishop of Caesarea (the Roman capital of Judaea) and author of one of the most important early Church histories. In accordance with the conventions of the time, Eusebius quotes at length from earlier writers, many of whose works have not survived. In speaking of James, he cites Clement, Bishop of Alexandria (c. AD 150-215).

Clement refers to James, we are told, as 'the Righteous', or, as it is often translated, 'the Just' - 'Zaddik' in Hebrew.9 This, of course, is the by now familiar Qumranic usage, whence derives the 'Teacher of Righteousness', the leader of the Qumran community. According to Clement, Eusebius reports, James was thrown from a parapet of the Temple, then beaten to death with a club.10

Later in his chronicle, Eusebius quotes extensively from a 2nd-century Church historian, Hegesippus. All of Hegesippus' works were reputedly extant as late as the 16th or 17th century. Everything has since disappeared, though copies may well exist in the Vatican, as well as in the library of one or another monastery -in Spain, for example.11 At present, however, almost everything we have by Hegesippus is contained in the excerpts from his work cited by Eusebius.

Quoting Hegesippus, Eusebius states that James 'the Righteous' 'was holy from his birth':

he drank no wine ... ate no animal food; no razor came near his head; he did not smear himself 
with oil, and took no baths. He alone was permitted to enter the Holy Place [the Holy of Holies in 
the Temple], for his garments were not of wool but of linen [i.e. priestly robes]. He used to enter 
the Sanctuary alone, and was often found on his knees beseeching forgiveness for the people, so 
that his knees grew hard like a camel's... Because of his unsurpassable righteousness, he was 
called the Righteous and... 'Bulwark of the people'...12

At this point, it is worth interrupting the text to note certain intriguing details. James is said to wear linen, or priestly robes. This was the prerogative of those who served in the Temple and belonged to one of the priestly families, traditionally the Sadducean 'aristocracy' who, during the 1st century, came to an accommodation with Rome and the Herodian dynasty of Roman puppets. Again, Eisenman points out, Epiphanius, another Church historian, speaks of James wearing the mitre of the high priest.13

Then, too, only the high priest was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctum and most sacred spot in the Temple.

• What, then, can James be doing there -and without eliciting any explanation or expression of surprise from Church historians, who seem to find nothing untoward or irregular in his activities?

• Did he, perhaps, by virtue of his birth, have some legitimate right to wear priestly apparel and enter the Holy of Holies?

• Or might he have been acting, as Eisenman suggests, in the capacity of a kind of 'opposition high priest' - a rebel who, defying the established priesthood's accommodation with Rome, had taken upon himself the role they had betrayed?14

Certainly the established priesthood had no affection for James. According to Hegesippus, the 'Scribes and Pharisees' decide to do away with him, so that the people 'will be frightened and not believe him'.

They proclaim that 'even the Righteous one has gone astray',15 and invoke a quote from the Old Testament - in this case from the prophet Isaiah (Isa. 3:10) - to justify their actions. They note that Isaiah had prophesied the death of the 'Righteous One'. In murdering James, therefore, they will simply be bringing Isaiah's prophecy to fulfillment. But also, in using this quote from Isaiah, they are following a technique employed in both the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament.

Eisenman points out that, just as this quote is used in order to describe the death of James, so the Qumran community employs similar 'Righteousness' passages from the New Testament in order to describe the death of the 'Teacher of Righteousness'.16

Eusebius goes on to describe the death of James in the following manner:

So they went up and threw down the Righteous one. They said to each other 'let us stone James 
the Righteous', and began to stone him, as in spite of his fall he was still alive... While they 
pelted him with stones... [a member of a particular priestly family] called out: 'Stop! What are 
you doing...' Then one of them, a fuller, took the club which he used to beat clothes, and brought 
it down on the head of the Righteous one. Such was his martyrdom... Immediately after this 
Vespasian began to besiege them.17

Vespasian, who became emperor in AD 69, commanded the Roman army that invaded Judaea to put down the revolt of AD 66. Here again, then, is a chronological connection between James's death and the revolt. But Eusebius goes further. The connection for him is more than just chronological.

The entire 'siege of Jerusalem', he says, meaning presumably the whole of the revolt in Judaea, was a direct consequence of James's death - 'for no other reason than the wicked crime of which he had been the victim'.18

To support this startling contention, Eusebius invokes Josephus. The passage of Josephus he quotes, although no longer to be found in any extant version of Josephus, was unquestionably what Josephus wrote, because Origen, one of the earliest and most prolific of the Church Fathers, quotes precisely the same passage.

Referring to the revolt of AD 66 and the Roman invasion that followed, Josephus states that,

'these things happened to the Jews in requital for James the Righteous, who was a brother of Jesus known as Christ, for though he was the most righteous of men, the Jews put him to death'. 19

From these fragments pertaining to James, a scenario begins to take form. James, the acknowledged leader of the 'early Church' in Jerusalem, represents a faction of Jews who, like the Qumran community, are 'zealous for the Law'. This faction is understandably hostile towards the Sadducee priesthood and the high priest Ananas (appointed by Herod20), who have betrayed their nation and their religion by concluding an accord with the Roman administration and its Herodian puppet-kings.

So intense is this hostility that James arrogates to himself the priestly functions which Ananas has compromised.21 Ananas' supporters respond by contriving James's death. Almost immediately thereafter, the whole of Judaea rises in revolt, and Ananas is himself one of the first casualties, assassinated as a pro-Roman collaborator. As the rebellion gains momentum, Rome is forced to react, and does so by dispatching an expeditionary force under Vespasian.

The result is the war which witnesses the sack of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in AD 68, and which does not end until the fall of Masada in AD 74.

The only uncertain element in this scenario is the nature and magnitude of the part played by James's death. Did it merely coincide chronologically? Or was it, as Josephus and Eusebius assert, the primary causal factor? The truth, almost certainly, lies somewhere in between: the revolt stemmed from enough contributing factors for the historian not to have had to fall back on James's de2th as a sole explanation. On the other hand, the evidence unquestionably indicates that James's death was not just a marginal incident. It would seem to have had at least something to do with the course of public events.

In any case James, as a result of Eisenman's analysis, indubitably emerges as a more important personage in 1st-century history than Christian tradition has hitherto acknowledged. And the 'early Church' emerges in a very different light. It is no longer a congregation of devotees eschewing politics and public affairs, pursuing a course of personal salvation and aspiring to no kingdom other than that of heaven.

On the contrary, it becomes one of the manifestations of Judaic nationalism at the time - a body of militant individuals intent on upholding the Law, deposing the corrupt Sadducee priesthood of the Temple, toppling the dynasty of illegitimate puppet-kings and driving the occupying Romans from the Holy Land. In all these respects, it conforms to conventional images of the Zealots.

But what has all this to do with Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls?

From the Acts of the Apostles, from Josephus and from early Christian historians, there emerges a coherent, if still incomplete, portrait of James, 'the Lord's brother'. He appears as an exemplar of 'righteousness' - so much so that 'the Just', or 'the Righteous', is appended as a sobriquet to his name.

He is the acknowledged leader of a 'sectarian' religious community whose members are 'zealous for the Law'. He must contend with two quite separate and distinct adversaries. One of these is Paul, an outsider who, having first persecuted the community, then converts and is admitted into it, only to turn renegade, prevaricate and quarrel with his superiors, hijack the image of Jesus and begin preaching his own doctrine -a doctrine which draws on that of the community, but distorts it.

James's second adversary is from outside the community - the high priest Ananas, head of the Sadducee priesthood. Ananas is a notoriously corrupt and widely hated man. He has also betrayed both the God and the people of Israel by collaborating with the Roman administration and their Herodian puppet-kings. James publicly challenges Ananas and eventually meets his death at the hands of Ananas' minions; but Ananas will shortly be assassinated in turn.

All of this takes place against a backdrop of increasing social and political unrest and the impending invasion of a foreign army.

With this scenario in mind, Eisenman turned to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and particularly the 'Habakkuk Commentary'. When the fragmentary details of the Qumran texts had been assembled into a coherent sequence, what emerged was something extraordinarily similar to the chronicle of Acts, Josephus and early Christian historians.

The scrolls told their own story, at the centre of which was a single protagonist, the 'Teacher of Righteousness' - an exemplar of the same virtues associated with James. Like James, the 'Teacher' was the acknowledged leader of a 'sectarian' religious community whose members were 'zealous for the Law'. And like James, the 'Teacher' had to contend with two quite separate and distinct adversaries.

One of these was dubbed the 'Liar', an outsider who was admitted to the community, then turned renegade, quarreled with the 'Teacher' and hijacked part of the community's doctrine and membership. According to the 'Habakkuk Commentary',

the 'Liar' 'did not listen to the word received by the Teacher of Righteousness from the mouth of God'.22

 

Instead, he appealed to 'the unfaithful of the New Covenant in that they have not believed in the Covenant of God and have profaned His holy name'.23

The text states explicitly that,

'the Liar... flouted the Law in the midst of their whole congregation'.24

He 'led many astray' and raised 'a congregation on deceit'.25 He himself is said to be 'pregnant with [works] of deceit'.26 These, of course, are precisely the transgressions of which Paul is accused in Acts - transgressions which lead, at the end of Acts, to the attempt on his life. And Eisenman stresses Paul's striking hypersensitivity to charges of prevarication and perjury.27

In 1 Timothy 2:7, for example, he asserts indignantly, as if defending himself, that 'I am telling the truth and no lie'.

In II Corinthians 11:31, he swears that:

'The God and Father of the Lord Jesus... knows that I am not lying.'

These are but two instances; Paul's letters reveal an almost obsessive desire to exculpate himself from implied accusations of falsity.

According to the Dead Sea Scrolls, the 'Liar' was the adversary of the 'Teacher of Righteousness' from within the community. The 'Teacher's' second adversary was from outside. This was the 'Wicked Priest', a corrupt representative of the establishment who had betrayed his function and his faith.28 He conspired to exterminate the 'Poor' - those 'zealous for the Law' - said to be scattered about Jerusalem and other places.

He harried the 'Teacher of Righteousness' wherever the 'Teacher' sought refuge. At the hands of the 'Wicked Priest's' minions, the 'Teacher' suffered some serious injury and possibly - the text is vague on the matter - death. Subsequently, the 'Wicked Priest' was himself assassinated by followers of the 'Teacher', who, after killing him, 'took vengeance upon his body of flesh' - that is, defiled his corpse.29

The parallels between the 'Wicked Priest' of the scrolls and the historical figure of the high priest Ananas are unmistakable.

In his book on James, Eisenman explores these parallels - James, Paul and Ananas on the one hand, the 'Teacher of Righteousness', the 'Liar' and the 'Wicked Priest' on the other - in exhaustive detail. He goes through the 'Habakkuk Commentary' and other texts line by line, comparing them with information vouchsafed by Acts, by Josephus and by early Christian historians.

In our own pages, it would be impossible to do adequate justice to the weight of evidence he amasses. But the conclusions of this evidence are inescapable. The 'Habakkuk Commentary' and certain other of the Dead Sea Scrolls are referring to the same events as those recounted in Acts, in Josephus and in the works of early Christian historians.

This conclusion is reinforced by the striking and pervasive recurrence of Qumranic philosophy and imagery in Acts, in the Letter of James and in Paul's copious epistles. It is also reinforced by the revelation that the place for which Paul embarks and in which he spends three years as a postulant is in fact Qumran, not the city in Syria. Even the one fragment that would not, at first, appear to fit -the fact that the persecution and death of James occurs quite specifically in Jerusalem, while the Dead Sea Scrolls have been assumed to chronicle events in Qumran - is explained within the texts themselves.

The 'Habakkuk Commentary' states explicitly that the leadership of the community were in Jerusalem at the relevant time.30

There is another point which Eisenman stresses as being particularly important. In the Letter to the Romans (1:17), Paul states that,

'this is what reveals the justice of God to us: it shows how faith leads to faith, or as scripture says: the upright man finds life through faith'.

The same theme appears in the Letter to the Galatians (3:11):

'the Law will not justify anyone in the sight of God, because we are told: the righteous man finds life through faith'.

These two statements constitute, in effect, 'the starting-point of the theological concept of faith'. They are ultimately, as Eisenman says, 'the foundation piece of Pauline theology'.31 They provide the basis on which Paul is able to make his stand against James - is able to extol the supremacy of faith, while James extols the supremacy of the Law.

From where does Paul derive this principle of the supremacy of faith? It was certainly not an accepted part of Judaic teaching at the time. In fact, it derives from the original Book of Habakkuk, a text of Old Testament apocrypha believed to date from the mid-7th century BC. According to Chapter 2, Verse 4 of the Book of Habakkuk, 'the upright man will live by his faithfulness'. Paul's words in his letters are clearly an echo of this statement; and the Book of Habakkuk is clearly the 'scripture' to which Paul refers.

More important still, however, is the 'Habakkuk Commentary' - the gloss and exegesis on part of the Book of Habakkuk found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The 'Habakkuk Commentary' cites the same statement and then proceeds to elaborate upon it:

But the righteous shall live by his faith. Interpreted, this concerns all those who observe the 
Law in the House of Judah, whom God will deliver from the House of Judgment because of their 
suffering and because of their faith in the Teacher of Righteousness.32

This extraordinary passage is tantamount, in effect, to a formulation of early 'Christian' doctrine. It states explicitly that suffering, and faith in the 'Teacher of Righteousness', constitute the path to deliverance and salvation. From this passage in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Paul must have derived the foundation for the whole of his own theology.

But the passage in question declares unequivocally that suffering and faith in the 'Teacher of Righteousness' will lead to deliverance only among 'those who observe the Law in the House of Judah'.33

It is just such emphasis on adherence to the Law that Paul contrives to ignore, thereby precipitating his doctrinal dispute with James and the other members of the 'early Church'.

15 - Zealot Suicide

Once the broad messianic movement of 1st-century Palestine is seen in perspective, and once the apparently diverse sects are seen as integral parts of it, a number of hitherto inexplicable elements and anomalies slip into place. Thus, for example, the apocalyptic and eschatological ferocity of John the Baptist begins to make sense, as does his role in the events recounted by the Gospels.

Thus, too, can one account for a number of theologically awkward passages and incidents pertaining to Jesus' own career. There is, as we have noted, at least one 'Zealot' in his following, and possibly more. There is the violence of his action in overturning the tables of the money-changers at the Temple. There is his execution not by Judaic but by Roman authorities, in a fashion specifically reserved for political offenders. There are numerous other instances, which the authors of this book have examined at length elsewhere.

Finally, there are Jesus' own words:

Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth; it is not peace I have come to bring, 
but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother... 
(Matt. 10:34-5)

And, more tellingly still, in unmistakably Qumranic phraseology:

Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have come not to abolish 
but to complete [or fulfill] them... not one dot, not one little stroke shall disappear from the Law 
until its purpose is achieved. Therefore the man who infringes even one of the least of these 
commandments and teaches others to do the same will be considered the least in the Kingdom of 
Heaven. (Matt. 5:17-19)!

In this passage, it is almost as if Jesus had anticipated Paul's advent. Certainly he could not have warned against it any more specifically. By the standards he lays down, Paul's status in the Kingdom of Heaven cannot be much higher than that of official pariah-in-residence.

Another anomaly that emerges in a fresh light is the fortress of Masada, and the character and mentality of its tenacious defenders. When the Holy Land rose in revolt in AD 66, Masada was one of the first strongholds to be seized - by Menahem, the son or grandson of Judas of Galilee, founder of the 'Zealots'.

Perched high on a sheer-sided mountain overlooking the south-western shore of the Dead Sea, some thirty-three miles below Qumran, the place became the rebels' most important bastion, the supreme symbol and embodiment of resistance. Long after that resistance had collapsed elsewhere, Masada continued to hold out. Jerusalem, for example, was occupied and razed within two years of the insurrection's outbreak - in AD 68. Masada remained impregnable, however, until AD 74.

From within its walls, some 960 defenders withstood repeated assaults and a full-scale siege by a Roman army estimated to have numbered fifteen thousand.

Despite the tenacity of this resistance, Masada's position, by the middle of April AD 74, had become hopeless. Cut off from reinforcement, entirely encircled by Roman troops, the garrison no longer had any prospect of withstanding a general assault. The besieging Romans, after bombarding the fortress with heavy siege machinery, had constructed an immense ramp running up the mountainside and, on the night of 15 April, prepared for their final onslaught.

The garrison, under the command of Eleazar ben Jair, came to their own decision. The men killed their wives and children. Ten men were then chosen to kill their comrades. Having done so, they proceeded to draw lots, choosing one to dispatch the remaining nine. After he had performed this task, he set fire to what remained of the buildings in the fortress and killed himself.

Altogether, 960 men, women and children perished. When the Romans burst through the gate the following morning, they found only corpses amid the ruins. 

Two women and five children escaped the carnage, supposedly having hidden in the water conduits under the fortress while the rest of the garrison killed themselves. Josephus recounts the testimony of one of the women - drawing, he says, on her interrogation by Roman officers.2 According to Josephus, she furnished a detailed account of what transpired on the last night of the siege.

If this account is to be believed (and there is no reason why it shouldn't), Eleazar, the commander of the fortress, exhorted his followers to their mass suicide by his charismatic and persuasive eloquence:

Ever since primitive man began to think, the words of our ancestors and of the gods, supported by 
the actions and spirits of our forefathers, have constantly impressed on us that life is the calamity 
for man, not death. Death gives freedom to our souls and lets them depart to their own pure home 
where they will know nothing of any calamity; but while they are confined within a mortal body 
and share its miseries, in strict truth they are dead.

For association of the divine with the mortal is most improper. Certainly the soul can do a 
great deal when imprisoned in the body; it makes the body its own organ of sense, moving it 
invisibly and impelling it in its actions further than mortal nature can reach. But when, freed from 
the weight that drags it down to earth and is hung about it, the soul returns to its own place, then in 
truth it partakes of a blessed power and an utterly unfettered strength, remaining as invisible to 
human eyes as God himself. Not even while it is in the body can it be viewed; it enters 
undetected and departs unseen, having itself one imperishable nature, but causing a change in the 
body; for whatever the soul touches lives and blossoms, whatever it deserts withers and dies: such 
is the superabundance it has of immortality.3

According to Josephus, Eleazar concludes:

'Let us die unenslaved by our enemies, and leave this world as free men in company with our wives and children. That is what the Law ordains.'4

On occasion, Josephus is unreliable. When he is so, however, it shows. In this instance, there is certainly no reason to doubt his word; and the excavations of Masada conducted in the 1960s tend to support his version of events. It is, of course, probable that he embellished Eleazar's speeches somewhat, making them perhaps more eloquent (and long-winded) than they might actually have been, availing himself of some poetic license.

But the general tenor of the narrative rings true, and has always been accepted by historians. What is more, Josephus had a unique and first-hand understanding of the mentality that dictated the mass suicide at Masada. At the beginning of the revolt, he himself had been a rebel commander in Galilee. In AD 67, his forces were besieged by the Romans under Vespasian at Jotapata - now Yodefat, near Sepphoris.

When the town fell, many of its defenders committed suicide rather than submit to capture. Many others, including Josephus himself, fled and hid in caves. According to his own account, he found himself in one cave with forty other fugitives. Here, as at Masada, lots were drawn as to who would kill his comrades. Whether 'by chance', as Josephus suggests, or by 'the providence of God', or perhaps by a fiddle which aided and abetted one or the other, he and another man ended up as the sole survivors.

Persuading his companion to surrender, he then himself defected to the victorious Romans.5 He does not emerge from the adventure in any very creditable light, of course. But even if he himself could not live up to them, he was no stranger to 'Zealot' attitudes, including their preparedness for self-immolation in the name of the Law.

In reality, there was a fairly sophisticated logic governing such self-immolation, which would not have been readily apparent to Josephus' readers, either at the time or subsequently. The mass suicides at Masada, at Gamala and at other sites are explained by Eisenman as resting ultimately on the uniquely 'Zealot' concept of resurrection. This concept derived primarily from two Old Testament prophets, Daniel and Ezekiel, both of whose texts were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran.

Daniel (Daniel 12:2) was the first to give expression to the concept in any developed form:

'Of those who lie sleeping in the dust of the earth many will awake, some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting disgrace.'

He speaks, too, of an imminent 'Kingdom of Heaven', and of 'End Times', of the 'coming of an anointed Prince', of a 'Son of Man' on whom 'was conferred sovereignty' (Daniel 7:13-14).

In Ezekiel, the relevant passage is the famous vision of a valley filled with dry bones, all of which, God announces, will live again:

I mean to raise you from your graves... and lead you back to the soil of Israel. And you will 
know that I am Yahweh, when I open your graves and raise you from your graves... And I shall 
put my spirit in you, and you will live...' (Ezekiel 37:12-14)

So important was this passage deemed to be that a copy of it was found buried under the floor of the synagogue at Masada.6

The concept of resurrection derived from Daniel and Ezekiel was picked up and adopted by the original 'zealots for the Law', the Maccabees. Thus, in the second book of Maccabees, it is used to encourage martyrdom for the sake of the Law. In 2 Maccabees 14:42, an Elder of Jerusalem kills himself rather than be captured and suffer outrages.

In 2 Maccabees 6:18ff., a priest and teacher of the Law kills himself as an 'example of how to make a good death... for the venerable and holy laws'. This incident, according to Eisenman, is the prototype for the establishment of later Zealot mentality.

The principle finds its fullest expression in 2 Maccabees 7, where seven brothers submit to death by torture rather than transgress the Law:

Said one brother, '... you may discharge us from this present life, but the king of the world will 
raise us up, since it is for his laws that we die, to live again for ever.'

Another said, 'It was heaven that gave me these limbs; for the sake of his laws I disdain them; 
from him I hope to receive them again.'

The next said to his tormentors, 'Ours is the better choice, to meet death at men's hands, yet 
relying on God's promise that we shall be raised up by him; whereas for you... there can be no 
resurrection, no new life.'

Here then, in the pre-Christian book of Maccabees, is the principle of bodily resurrection that will figure so prominently in later Christian theology. It is available, however, as the third of the above speeches makes clear, only to the righteous, to those 'zealous for the Law'.

But there is another point of relevance in the passage devoted to the death of the seven brothers. Just before the last of them is to be executed, his mother is brought in to see him. She has been urged to plead with him to submit and thereby save himself. Instead, she says to him that 'in the day of mercy I may receive you back in your brothers' company' (2 Mace. 7:29).

At the end of time, those who die together will be resurrected together. Thus Eleazar, in his exhortation to the garrison of Masada, urges them to die 'in company with our wives and children. That is what the Law ordains.' Not the Law of the 'Sadducee' establishment or of later Judaism - only the Law of the so-called 'Zealots'. Had the women and children in the fortress been left alive, they would not have been exterminated by the victorious Romans. But they would have been separated from their menfolk and from each other.

And many of them would have been enslaved, raped, consigned to Roman army brothels and thereby defiled, bereft of their ritual purity according to the Law. At Masada, separation and defilement were feared more than death, since death, for the 'Righteous', would have been only temporary. Here then, among the ferocious defenders of Masada, is a principle of bodily resurrection virtually identical to that of later Christianity.

The garrison who defended Masada can hardly be reconciled with traditional images of placid, peace-loving Essenes - who, according to adherents of the consensus, made up the community at Qumran.

And indeed, as we have noted, adherents of the consensus continue to insist that no connection can possibly have existed between the Qumran community and the garrison at Masada, despite the discovery at Masada of texts identical to some of those found at Qumran - found at Qumran and, in at least two instances, found nowhere else - and despite the use by the defenders of Masada of precisely the same calendar as that used by the Qumran material: a unique solar calendar, in contrast to the lunar calendar of the official 'Sadducee' establishment and of later rabbinical Judaism.

Once again, there can be discerned the configuration of what Eisenman has described: a broad messianic nationalistic movement in which a number of supposed factions, if there was ever any distinction between them, effectively merged. Eisenman's explanation accommodates and accounts for what has previously seemed a welter of contradictions and anomalies. It makes sense, too, of the mission on which Paul is dispatched by James and the hierarchy of the so-called 'early Church' - the 'Nazorean' enclave - in Jerusalem. In biblical times, it must be remembered, 'Israel' was not just a territory, not just a particular tract of land.

Even more important, 'Israel' denoted a people, a tribe, a 'host'.

When Paul and other 'evangelists' are sent forth by the hierarchy in Jerusalem, their purpose is to make converts to the Law - that is, to 'Israel'. What would this have meant in practical terms, if not the recruitment of an army? Since Old Testament times, and especially since the 'Babylonian Captivity', the 'tribe of Israel' had been scattered across the Mediterranean world and beyond, on into Persia - where, at the time of Simeon bar Kochba's rising in AD 132, there was still enough sympathy to elicit at least a promise of support.

Were not the emissaries of the Jerusalem hierarchy sent to tap this potentially immense source of manpower - to 'call to the colors' the dispersed people of 'Israel' to drive the Roman invaders from their native soil and liberate their homeland? And Paul, in preaching a wholly new religion rather than mustering recruits, was, in effect, depoliticizing, demilitarizing and emasculating the movement.7

This would, of course, have been a far more serious matter than merely lapsing from dogma or certain ritual observances. It would have been, in fact, a form of treason. For the Law, as it figures in the Dead Sea Scrolls, is not wholly confined to dogma and ritual observances. Running throughout the Qumran texts, as a sacred duty, there is clearly a thrust to build a legitimate messianic persona, whether royal, or priestly, or both. By implication, this would involve the re-establishment of the ancient monarchy and priesthood, to drive out the invader, to reclaim and purify the Holy Land for the people chosen by God to inhabit it.

In the words of the 'War Scroll':

'The dominion of the [invaders] shall come to an end... the sons of righteousness shall shine over all the ends of the earth. '8

Postscript

The story of the scrolls is, needless to say, unfinished.

The plot continues to unfold, taking new twists and turns. Much has happened since this book appeared in Great Britain in May 1991. By the autumn, things had built to a climax, and the scrolls were the subject of front page coverage, as well as editorials, in such newspapers as The New York Times. Even as the American edition of our book is being prepared for publication, other books and articles are appearing in print, conferences are being convened, media attention is intensifying, various protagonists are issuing new statements.

In May, the Israeli 'Oversight Committee' granted to Oxford University a complete set of photographs of all scroll material, and a centre for scroll research was established under the auspices of Gaza Vermes. Access, however, was still rigorously restricted, still denied to independent scholars. Interviewed on British television, Professor Norman Golb of the University of Chicago queried the purpose of such a centre. Was it, he asked, simply to be a centre of frustration?

On 5 September, the American press reported that two scholars at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Professor Ben-Zion Wacholder and one of his doctoral students, Martin G. Abegg, had 'broken the monopoly' of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Using the concordance prepared by the international team in the 1950s, they had then employed a computer to reconstruct the texts themselves.

The results, said to be 80 percent accurate, were published by the Biblical Archaeology Society under Hershel Shanks. The surviving members of the international team were predictably furious. Professor Cross inveighed against 'piracy'.

'What else would you call it,' the deposed John Strugnall fulminated, 'but stealing?'

On 7 September, however, an editorial in The New York Times endorsed Wacholder's and Abegg's action:

Some on the committee might be tempted to charge the Cincinnati scholars with piracy. On the 
contrary, Mr. Wacholder and Mr. Abegg are to be applauded for their work - and for sifting 
through layer upon layer of obfuscation. The committee, with its obsessive secrecy and cloak-and-
dagger scholarship, long ago exhausted its credibility with scholars and laymen alike. The two 
Cincinnatians seem to know what the scroll committee forgot: that the scrolls and what they say 
about the common roots of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism belong to civilization, not to a few 
sequestered professors.

A more electrifying revelation was soon to follow. On 22 September, the Huntingdon Library in California disclosed that it possessed a complete set of photographs of all unpublished scroll material.

These had been entrusted to the library by Betty Bechtel of the Bechtel Corporation, who had commissioned them around 1961. Having learned of the photographs' existence, members of the international team had demanded them back. The Huntingdon had responded with defiance. Not only did the library make its possession of the photographs public but it also announced its intention of making them accessible to any scholar who wished to see them.

Microfilm copies were to be offered for as little as ten dollars.

'When you free the scrolls,' said William A. Moffett, the library's director, 'you free the scholars.'

Again, of course, members of the international team kicked up a rumpus, this time more petulant than before. Again, there were charges of 'theft of scholarly work'.

One independent professor replied, however, that most people,

'... will regard [the Huntington] as Robin Hoods, stealing from the academically privileged to give to those hungry for... knowledge.'

Amir Drori, head of the Israeli Antiquities Authority, accused the Huntington of sundry legal transgressions - even though the photographs had been taken long before the scrolls passed into Israeli hands as spoils of war. Magen Broshi, director of the Shrine of the Book, spoke darkly of legal action. The Huntington stood its ground.

'There's either freedom of access or not. Our position is that there should be unfettered access.'

By that time, release of the photographs was already a fait accompli, and any attempt to reverse the process would have been futile. 'It's too late,' the Huntington declared.

'It's done.'

On 25 September, the Israeli government gave way, carefully distancing itself from Drori's and Broshi's pronouncements. Drori and Broshi were said to have been 'speaking as individuals, not as representatives of the Israeli government.' Yuvel Ne'eman, Israel's Minister of Science, issued a press statement asserting that... every scholar should be granted free access to examine the scrolls and publish his findings. It is fortunate that this opportunity has now become feasible through public exposure of the scrolls' photographic collection by the Huntington Library.

In the meantime, at 11:05 that morning, Robert Eisenman's name had gone down on record as that of the first scholar formally to request and obtain access to the Huntingdon's photographs of scroll material.

The battle for access had been won.

There still remains, however, the process of dismantling the 'orthodoxy of interpretation' promulgated for the last forty years by the international team.

By the time the events chronicled above had hit the headlines, Eisenman had begun to pursue his research on other fronts as well. In 1988, he had pointed out that the excavations at Qumran were far from complete, far from exhaustive. The surrounding terrain is, in fact, ideal for the preservation of manuscripts, and virtually all experts in the field agree that there are more discoveries to be made.

It is not just possible, but probable, that additional scroll material still exists, buried under landslides and rock-falls. Many caves have yet to be excavated properly - that is, through the rubble of fallen roofs and down to bed-rock. Other caves, previously explored only by the Bedouin, have to be explored anew, since the Bedouin tended to overlook some concealed documents and to leave behind many fragments; and, in any case, officially sanctioned Bedouin excavations effectively ceased with the 1967 war.

There are other sites in the general vicinity of Qumran that have yet to be thoroughly explored. Nine miles to the south, for example, on the shores of the Dead Sea, at a place called En el-Ghuweir, an Israeli archaeologist found Qumran-style graves and the ruins of a Qumran-style (albeit smaller) residence.1 It is certainly reasonable to suppose that the caves in the nearby wadis, hitherto unexcavated, may also be repositories for scrolls.

With these facts in mind, Eisenman determined to embark on his own archaeological explorations. His primary objective was, of course, to look for additional scroll material. Such material might - as proved to be the case with the 'Temple Scroll' - be entirely new. But even if it duplicated material already in the hands of the international team, it would render pointless any continued suppression.

Quite apart from the prospect of additional scroll material, however, Eisenman wanted to build up as complete a picture as possible of the population in the entire region, from Qumran on south towards Masada. There might have been, he concluded, other Qumran-style communities. In consequence, he undertook to look for evidence of any other kind - evidence of water control, for example, such as terraces, aqueducts and cisterns, which might have been constructed to sustain livestock and support agriculture.

To date, Michael Baigent has accompanied Robert Eisenman and his team of archaeologists and volunteers on two exploratory expeditions, in January 1989 and in January 1990. In the first of them, they concentrated on the excavation of a cave roughly a mile south of Qumran, some 500 feet up the cliff. The cave opened into a series of chambers extending at least eighty feet back into the rock.

Part of the interior had a smooth floor made of palm fronds and packed mud. No scrolls came to light, but a number of Iron Age remains were found - a juglet, an oil lamp, and, uniquely, an arrow shaft and arrowhead in perfect preservation after 3,000 years. The expedition proved, for the first time, that some at least of the caves around Qumran had been inhabited -not just used as temporary refuges during brief periods of danger, but occupied on a more permanent basis.

The second expedition endeavored to explore as much as possible of the Dead Sea coast south of Qumran and the adjacent cliff-face. The purpose of this undertaking was to compile an inventory of all hitherto unexplored caves that might warrant subsequent exhaustive excavation. Dividing itself into small teams, the expedition searched some thirteen miles of cliff, rising precipitously as high as 1,200 feet.

Apart from caves, there were found the remains of artificial terraces and walls, of constructions for water control and irrigation - all attesting to human inhabitation and cultivation. Altogether, 137 habitable caves were located and subjected to preliminary examination without excavation. Of these, 83 were deemed worthy of systematic excavation: they will become the focus of future archaeological activity.

Of particular and revolutionary importance to any such activity will be a new system of 'high-tech' ground radar known as 'Subsurface Interface Radar' (SIR). We had been discussing with Eisenman the likelihood of there being other caves in the vicinity of Qumran and along the shore of the Dead Sea, as well as of caves, rooms, cellars, passages and/or other subterranean structures under the ruins of Qumran itself.

De Vaux, the only person to attempt any excavation of the actual site, never looked for anything of the sort, never really probed beneath the surface. Yet it is virtually unknown for a construction of the kind attested to by the Qumran ruins not to have underground chambers, passages, dungeons or escape tunnels. It is generally acknowledged that something of the sort must indeed exist. But some fairly major excavations would be necessary, involving much trial and error and probably damage to the site.

The prospect, therefore, of finding anything under Qumran seemed, a priori, doomed in advance by the magnitude of what would have been entailed. But in the autumn of 1988 we chanced on a newspaper article about a 'secret burial vault' of possible relevance to Shakespearean scholars, found under a church near Stratford-on-Avon.

What interested us about this article was the fact that the vault had apparently been located by a species of underground radar scanning system, operated by a firm based in the south of England.

The possibilities offered by SIR proved exciting indeed. It was a terrestrial equivalent of a ship-based sonar recording system. The apparatus was portable. When moved at a constant speed over the ground, it produced a computer-generated image of subterranean features. The image in turn was produced through the building up of a profile of 'interfaces' - that is, points at which earth or rock or any other substance of density and solidity gave way to air. The entire system was thus ideal for locating underground caves and cavities. At the very least, it would register interfaces 30 feet below the surface. Under good conditions, it could penetrate as deep as 120 feet.

The manager of the company that operated the radar proved keen to help. He had, it transpired, read and enjoyed the books we had previously published. The prospect of his equipment being employed at Qumran intrigued him. He even offered to come along on an expedition and operate the apparatus himself. As a result of this offer, Eisenman's 1990 expedition made a special point of noting sites warranting investigation by radar.

We are now waiting for permission from the Israeli government to bring the equipment into the country and employ it at Qumran.

The Dead Sea Scrolls found in 1947 were not the first such ancient texts to come to light in the Judaean desert. Indeed, there are reports of such texts being found as early as the 3rd century AD. The theologianOrigen, one of the early Church Fathers, is alleged to have made one such discovery. According to the Church historian Eusebius, Origen found several different versions of Old Testament texts, some of which had been lost for many years.

He is said to have 'hunted them out of their hiding places and brought them to light'.2 One version of the psalms, we are told, 'was found at Jericho in a jar during the reign of Antoninus, Son of Severus'.3 This reference allows us to date the discovery to somewhere between AD 211 and 217.

More intriguing still is a letter dating from some time shortly before AD 805, written by Timotheus, Patriarch of Seleucia, to another ecclesiastic:

We learned from trustworthy Jews who were being instructed... in the Christian faith that ten 
years ago, near Jericho, some books were found in a cave... the dog of an Arab hunter followed 
an animal into a cave and didn't return. The Arab went in after it and found a small cave in which 
there were many books. The Arab went to Jerusalem and told the Jews there who then came out 
in large numbers and found books of the Old Testament and other books in Hebrew characters. 

As the person who told this story to me was a learned man... I asked him about the many 
references in the New Testament which are referred to as originating in the Old Testament but 
which cannot be found there... He said: they exist and can be found in the books from the cave...4

Similar discoveries have continued to occur through the centuries, up until modern times. One of the most famous is that of Moses William Shapira, an antique dealer with a shop in Jerusalem in the late 19th century.5

In 1878, Shapira was told of some Arabs who, on the run from the authorities, had sought refuge in what is now Jordanian territory, on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. Here, in a cave at Wadi Mujib, directly across the Dead Sea from En Gedi, they were reported to have found a number of old bundles of rags which they tore open, hoping to find valuables of some kind. They found only a number of dark leather scrolls. One of the Arabs took these away with him and later claimed that possession of them had brought him luck.

This was said to be his reason for not wanting to sell them — or for raising the price.

Shapira, who sold antiquities to European collectors and museums, was intrigued. Through a sheik with whom he was friendly, he managed to purchase what purported to be the entire corpus of material. This comprised fifteen strips of parchment, each about three-and-a-half by seven inches in size. After studying his acquisition for some weeks, Shapira realized that what he had was an ancient version of the Book of Deuteronomy, one which differed markedly from the established biblical text.

In 1883, after a number of vicissitudes and consultations with experts, Shapira brought his scroll fragments to London. He was preceded by great excitement and extensive coverage in the press. British experts pronounced the fragments genuine, and translations of them were published in The Times. The Prime Minister, William Gladstone, came to see them and discussed their possible purchase with Shapira. A sum of £1 million was apparently mentioned - a staggering figure for the time.

The French government sent a prominent scholar, one of Shapira's old enemies, across the Channel to examine the fragments and compile a report. Shapira refused to let the Frenchman inspect the fragments closely or to handle them. The Frenchman was allowed only a cursory look at two or three fragments. He was then reduced, by Shapira's intransigence, to spending two days looking at two additional fragments on display in a glass case, jostled by other visitors to the museum.

Out of spite, and a probably justified exasperation, the Frenchman at last pronounced the fragments to be forgeries. Other scholars, without even bothering to look at the fragments, echoed this conclusion, and the affair quickly degenerated into farce. Shapira had effectively ruined himself. Repudiated and discredited, he shot himself in a Rotterdam hotel room on 9 March 1884.

His scroll fragments were purchased by a London antiquarian book-dealer for £10 5s.

Since then, they have disappeared - though they might conceivably still turn up in someone's attic or among the belongings of some private collector. According to the last attempt to trace them, they may have been taken to Australia with the effects of a dealer in antiquities.

A number of modern authorities - including Allegro, who made a special study of Shapira — have become convinced that Shapira's fragments were probably genuine. Had they been discovered this century rather than last, Allegro maintained, they would in all likelihood have proved to be as valid as the material found at Qum-ran.6 But in the late 19th century, egos, scholarly reputations and vested interests were as much 'on the line' as they are today. As a result, something of potentially priceless value has, almost certainly, been irretrievably lost.

At the same time, discoveries such as Shapira's continue to be made. Thus, for example, in the late 1970s, when we ourselves had little more than a cursory knowledge of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other such documents, we were telephoned by a friend from Paris, a collector of antiques. He asked if, on virtually no notice, we could meet him at a restaurant in London, not far from Charing Cross. Michael Baigent, who'd done much professional photography, was particularly requested. He was asked to bring a camera along - and keep it hidden.

Baigent found our associate in the company of three other men - an American collector, a Palestinian dealer and a Jordanian engineer. He accompanied them to a nearby bank, where they were ushered into a small private room and two wooden chests were produced, each locked with three padlocks. 'We don't know what's in these chests,' one of the bank's officials said pointedly.

'We don't want to know what's in them.'

The officials then left, locking Baigent and his four companions in the room.

A telephone call was made to Jerusalem and some sort of permission was obtained. The Jordanian engineer then produced a bunch of keys and proceeded to open the two chests. Inside, there were literally hundreds of thin cardboard sheets, each holding (attached by adhesive tape!) a dozen or so fragments of ancient parchment and/or papyrus.

The fragments obviously spanned a considerable period of time, derived from a number of diverse sources and had been inscribed in several different languages -Aramaic, for example, Hebrew, Greek and Arabic. As might be expected of so eclectic and haphazard an assemblage, not everything was of value. Many of the fragments proved subsequently to be worthless - receipts and documents pertaining to ancient commercial transactions that might have been ferreted out of some archaic rubbish tip.

But there were others as well.

The collection had come to London through the clandestine scroll market active in Jerusalem and Bethlehem during the 1950s and 1960s, and had been brought out of Israel during, or shortly after, the 1967 war. It was now supposedly being offered for sale to a certain unnamed European government, for an alleged price of £3 million.

Baigent was asked to make a selection of photographs, to be displayed as samples of what was available. He took approximately a hundred photographs. But there were hundreds of sheets and, altogether, upwards of two thousand fragments, most of them relatively large.

In the dozen or so years since this incident, we have heard nothing further about the collection. If a sale was indeed negotiated, it was done so quietly, with no public announcement of any kind. Alternatively, the entire collection may still be sequestered in its London bank, or in some other similar depository elsewhere, or amongst the treasures of some private dealer.

Transactions such as the one to which we'd been peripherally privy were not, we subsequently learned, at all uncommon. During the course of the next decade, our research was to bring us into contact with an intricate network of antique dealers and collectors engaged in subterranean scroll traffic. This network is international and deals on a scale comparable to that of networks trafficking in paintings or gems.

Hundreds of thousands of pounds can be produced on virtually immediate notice and be transferred on the basis of a handshake.

Two factors have conducted to the dissemination of the underground scroll market. One was the action of Yadin and the Israeli military in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war, when the dealer known as Kando was held for interrogation and forced to divulge the existence of the 'Temple Scroll'. Not surprisingly, this action upset the existing 'truce' and fostered a profound mistrust between Israeli and Arab dealers.

As a result, much material found by the Bedouin, which would ordinarily have passed into Israeli hands, now finds its way illegally to Amman or Damascus or even further afield. From there, it passes to the West via such routes as Turkey or the Lebanon.

A second spur to the subterranean scroll market was a law instituted under the auspices of UNESCO, according to which any antiquities smuggled out of a country must be returned to their point of origin. This law was made retroactive. In consequence, individuals who had invested large sums in scroll material, or hoped to obtain large sums for scroll material, could not afford to make their holdings public. In effect, the law drove the clandestine traffic in scrolls even further underground — and, of course, caused a dramatic increase in prices.

How does the underground scroll trade operate?

Much of it is controlled by certain families well known in the antique trade, who supply many of the legal antiquities on sale in Israel and abroad. During the course of the last half-century, these families have established their own intelligence networks, which maintain close contacts with the Bedouin and keep abreast of all rumors, whispers, legends and reported discoveries of antiquarian interest.

When a potentially fruitful site is located, the land will be rented for a year and a large black Bedouin tent - ostensibly a domicile -will be erected. At night, excavations will be conducted under the tent. When all antiquities of value have been removed, the tent will be dismantled and its occupants will move on. A similar process occurs in towns, and particularly in Jerusalem, which has proved especially fertile territory. Sites will be rented for short periods or, if necessary, purchased. If a house does not already exist, one will be constructed.

The occupants will then excavate downwards from the cellar to bedrock.

Through such procedures as these, much scroll material has found its way into the hands of private collectors and investors. This material entirely circumvents the world of 'official' archaeology and biblical scholarship. Indeed, the world of 'official' archaeology and biblical scholarship often does not even realise it exists. Unknown to the academics, there is at present a substantial quantity of Qumran and related material in the hands of collectors or for sale. We ourselves know of numerous fragments.

We know of a well-preserved copy of one Qumran text, called the 'Book of Jubilees'. We know of a handful of letters by Simeon bar Kochba. And there are substantial grounds for believing that other documents - documents of a much more explosive nature, utterly unique and undreamed of by the world of scholarship — also exist.

In the course of the next few years, major developments can be expected from any or all of three distinct quarters. The most obvious of these, needless to say, is the Qumran material itself. Now that the entire corpus of this material is readily accessible, independent scholars, without preconceptions, without axes to grind and vested interests to protect, can get to work.

The international team's 'orthodoxy of interpretation' has already begun to come under attack; and as this book has demonstrated, the supposed archaeological and paleographical evidence with which they support their position will not withstand close scrutiny. In consequence, we can expect a radical revision of the process whereby dates have been assigned to a number of particularly important texts. As a result, new contexts and interpretations will emerge for already familiar material.

And new material will emerge in perspectives that would have been cursorily and high-handedly dismissed a few years ago.

At the same time, there is also the possibility, enhanced by each new archaeological expedition Eisenman and his colleagues undertake to Qumran and the shores of the Dead Sea, that wholly new material may come to light. This possibility will be further enhanced - now that the Israeli government has granted permission for its use - by deployment of the 'Subsurface Interface Radar' system.

Finally, there is the clandestine scroll market, which may at any moment cough up something of unprecedented consequence -something hitherto kept secret, at last released into public domain. As we have said, such material exists. The question is simply if and when those who hold it decide it can be divulged.

Whatever the quarter or quarters from which new material might issue, fresh and, in some cases, very major revelations are bound to be forthcoming. As this occurs, we can expect ever more light to be shed on biblical history, on the character of ancient Judaism, on the origins of both Christianity and Islam. One should not, of course, expect a disclosure of such magnitude as to 'topple the Church', or anything as apocalyptic as that.

The Church today, after all, is less a religious than a social, cultural, political and economic institution. Its stability and security rest on factors quite remote from the creed, the doctrine and the dogma it promulgates. But some people, at any rate, may be prompted to wonder whether the Church - an institution so demonstrably lax, biased and unreliable in its own scholarship, its own version of its history and origins — should necessarily be deemed reliable and authoritative in its approach to such urgent contemporary matters as overpopulation, birth control, the status of women and the celibacy of the clergy.

Ultimately, however, the import of the Qumran texts resides in something more than their potential to embarrass the Church. The real import of the Qumran texts resides in what they have to reveal of the Holy Land, that soil which, for so many centuries, has voraciously soaked up so much human blood — blood shed in the name of conflicting gods or, to be more accurate, not very dissimilar versions of the same God.

Perhaps the documents yet to be divulged may confront us a little more inescapably with the scale and pointlessness of our own madness - and shame us, thereby, at least by a degree or so, in the general direction of sanity. The Dead Sea Scrolls offer a new perspective on the three great religions born in the Middle East.

The more one examines those religions, the more one will discern not how much they differ, but how much they overlap and have in common - how much they derive from essentially the same source - and the extent to which most of the quarrels between them, when not precipitated by simple misunderstanding, have stemmed less from spiritual values than from politics, from greed, from selfishness and the presumptuous arrogance of interpretation. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all, at present, beset by a resurgent fundamentalism.

One would like to believe — though this may be too much to hope for — that greater understanding of their common roots might help curb the prejudice, the bigotry, the intolerance and fanaticism to which fundamentalism is chronically prone.

17 January 1991 - 13 October 1991

Back to Contents




Notes and References


Note

The full bibliographical details, when not cited here, are to be found in the Bibliography.

Preface

1 Eisenman, Maccabees, Zadokites, Christians and Qumran, p.xvi.

1 The Discovery of the Scrolls

1 The true story of the discovery will probably never be known. All the various accounts differ in certain details. Arguments over the correct sequence of events continued into the 1960s. For the different accounts, see: Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls, pp.l7ff; Brownlee, 'Muhammad Ed-Deeb's own Story of his Scroll Discovery', pp. 236ff; 'Edh-Dheeb's Story of his Scroll Discovery', pp.483ff; 'Some New Facts Concerning the Discovery of the Scrolls of 1Q', pp.417ff; Harding, The Times, 9 August 1949, p. 5; Samuel, 'The Purchase of the Jerusalem Scrolls', pp.26ff; Treasure of Qumran, pp.l42ff; Trever, 'When was Qumran Cave 1 Discovered?', pp.l35ff; The Untold Story of Qumran, pp.25ff; Wilson, The Dead Sea Scrolls 1947-1969, pp.3ff. 

2 See, for example, Brownlee, op. cit., p.486, and n.6; Allegro, op. cit., p.20. 

3 Wilson, op. cit,, p.4.

4 Van der Ploeg, The Excavations at Qumran, pp. 9-13. 

5 Interviews, Miles Copeland, 10 April and 1 May 1990. A search of CIA archives requested under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act has failed to locate the photographs.

6 Interview, 21 May 1990.

7 Yadin, The Message of the Scrolls, pp. 15-24, quoting Sukenik's private journal.

8 Ibid., p. 14.

9 Trever, The Untold Story ofQumran, p.85.

10 Time Magazine, 15 April 1957, p.39.

11 Allegro, op. cit., pp.38-9.

12 Ibid., p.41.

13 Pliny, Natural History, V, xv.

14 De Vaux, Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls, pp. 134-5.

15 Reports of this survey can be found in the following: de Vaux, 'Exploration de la region de Qumran', pp.540ff.; Reed, 'The Qumran Caves Expedition of March 1952', pp.8ff.

16 Ibid.

17 Allegro, The Treasure of the Copper Scroll, p.35.

18 Time Magazine, op. cit., p.38.

19 Yadin, op. cit., p.40.

20 Ibid., pp.41-52.

21 Sharon to Eisenman, 16 January 1990.

2 The International Team

1 Pryce-Jones, 'A New Chapter in the History of Christ?', p,12ff.

2 Ibid., p. 14.

3 Ibid.

4 Pryce-Jones to authors, 11 January 1990.

5 Interview, Magen Broshi, 12 November 1989.

6 Interview, Frank Cross, 18 May 1990.

7 Private communication.

8 Interview, Abraham Biran, 4 December 1989.

9 Interview, James Robinson, 3 November 1989.

10 North, 'Qumran and its Archaeology', p.429.

11 Interview, Norman Golb, 1 November 1989.

12 Interview, Shemaryahu Talmon, 8 November 1989.

13 Time Magazine, 14 August 1989, p.44.

14 BAR, May/June 1989, p.57; September/October 1989, p.20.

15 Interview, James Robinson, 3 November 1989.

16 See Robinson, 'The Jung Codex: the Rise and Fall of a Monopoly'; see also Robinson, 'Getting the Nag Hammadi Library into English'.

17 A total of three volumes of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert dealing with the Cave 4 fragments have been published to date. There remain, so far as the projected publication schedule is concerned, fifteen further volumes dealing with Cave 4 texts and one more of Cave 11.

18 New York Times, 26 June 1989, p.B4.

19 BAR, September/October 1985, p.6.

20 Ibid., p.66. The magazine adds: 'Obviously, the existence of this factor is controversial and disputed.'

21 Ibid., p.66.

22 New York Times, op. cit., pp.Bl, B4.

23 The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 July 1989, p.A7.

24 Cross, The Ancient Library of Qumran, p.30.

25 Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls, p.50.

26 This letter and many following are to be found in the private correspondence file of John Allegro's papers.

3 The Scandal of the Scrolls

1 Wilson, The Dead Sea Scrolls 1947-1969, p. 77.

2 Ibid., pp.97-8.

3 Ibid., p.97.

4 Interview, Philip Davies, 10 October 1989.

5 There was, however, one 'rash' statement made by Wilson which, for the record, should be dismissed. De Vaux told Wilson a story of events during the Six Day War, when, according to Wilson's report, the Israeli troops, upon entering the grounds of the Ecole Biblique on 6 June 1967, sat priests, two at a time, as hostages in the open courtyard. The threat was that they should be shot if any sniper fire should come from the buildings of the Ecole or the associated Monastery of St Stephen. See Wilson, op. cit., p.259. Interviews in Israel have indicated that this event did not take place but was a tale foisted upon Wilson by de Vaux. Wilson did not apparently check this statement with any Israeli sources.

6 Interview, Shemaryahu Talmon, 8 November 1989.

7 Given to the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres on 26 May 1950. Reported in Le Monde, 28-9 May 1950, p.4.

8 Brownlee, 'The Servant of the Lord in the Qumran Scrolls I', p.9.

9 Allegro to Strugnell, in a letter undated but written between 14 and 31 December 1955.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 New York Times, 5 February 1956, p.2.

13 Ibid.

14 The Times, 8 February 1956, p.8.

15 Allegro to de Vaux, 9 February 1956.

16 Allegro to de Vaux, 20 February 1956.

17 Ibid.

18 Allegro to de Vaux, 7 March 1956.

19 Ibid.

20 Allegro to Cross, 6 March 1956.

21 The Times, 16 March 1956, p. 11.

22 The Times, 20 March 1956, p. 13.

23 Ibid.

24 Allegro to Strugnell, 8 March 1957.

25 Smyth, 'The Truth about the Dead Sea Scrolls', p.33.

26 Ibid., p.34.

27 Allegro to Claus-Hunno Hunzinger, 23 April 1956.

28 Harding to Allegro, 28 May 1956.

29 The Times, 1 June 1956, p. 12.

30 Allegro to Harding, 5 June 1956.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Allegro to Cross, 5 August 1956.

34 Allegro to de Vaux, 16 September 1956.

35 Allegro to team member (name withheld), 14 September 1959.

36 Team member (name withheld) to Allegro, 21 October 1959.

37 Allegro to de Vaux, 16 September 1956.

38 Ibid.

39 Allegro to Cross, 31 October 1957.

40 Ibid.

41 Allegro to James Muilenburg, 31 October 1957.

42 Allegro to Muilenburg, 24 December 1957.

43 Ibid.

44 Allegro to Dajani, 10 January 1959.

45 Ibid.

46 The Times, 23 May 1970, p.22.

47 The Times, 19 May 1970, p.2.

48 The Times, 26 May 1970, p.9.

49 The Daily Telegraph, 18 May 1987, p.ll.

50 The Times, 5 October 1970, p.4.

51 Wilson, op. cit., p. 125.

52 Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Qumran in Perspective, pp. 23-4.

53 Times Literary Supplement, 3 May 1985, p.502.

54 Ibid.

55 Eisenman has pointed to mention of 'the Poor' in the War Scroll; see Eisenman, op. cit., p.43, n.23; p.62, n.105. This text states that the Messiah will lead 'the Poor' to victory against the armies of Belial (The War Scroll, XI,14 (Vermes, p.116 - Vermes for his own reasons translates 'Belial' as 'Satan') ). For a more detailed discussion, see Eisenman, 'Eschatological "Rain" Imagery in the War Scroll from Qumran and in the Letter ofjames', p. 182.

56 Interview, Emile Puech, 7 November 1989.

57 BAR, March/April 1990, p. 24. This fragment is coded 4Q246 and was first found and privately translated by the scholars in 1958.

58 Ibid.