The Dead Sea Scrolls 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 cockpits. 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 defence 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 coloured 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, scrutinising 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 sceptical 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 organisation 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:

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.

Endeavouring 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 authorise 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:

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’:

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. Fourteen German SS officers who’d commanded extermination squads on the Eastern Front were sentenced to hang. According to the chief prosecutor, the judgment ‘was a landmark in the campaign against racial intolerance and violence’. There were also reports of a massacre in the Holy Land the previous Friday. Two Jewish terrorist organisations — the Irgun and the Stern Gang — had wiped out the Arab village of Deir Yasin, raping girls, exterminating men, women and children. The Jewish Agency itself expressed ‘horror and disgust’ at what had happened. In the meantime, according to other reports on the page, there was fighting in Jerusalem. Arab artillery had bombarded the western quarter of the city at dusk. Quantities of new field-guns had arrived from Syria and were aimed at Jewish sectors. The city’s water supply had again been cut off. Rail supplies had been disrupted. Renewed fighting for the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road was expected to be imminent. Elsewhere in the Holy Land, Arab terrorists had murdered two British soldiers, and Jewish terrorists one. (Forty-two years later, while this was being checked and copied from microfilm in a local library, there was a bomb alert and the premises had to be evacuated. Plus ca change…)

Hostilities in the Middle East were to continue for another year. On 14 May 1948 — the day before the British mandate was scheduled to expire — the Jewish People’s Council met in the Tel Aviv Museum and declared their own independent state of Israel. The response from adjacent Arab countries was immediate. That very night, Egyptian aircraft bombed Tel Aviv. During the six and a half months of fighting that followed, Israel was to be invaded by troops from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, while the King of Transjordan proclaimed himself monarch of all Palestine.

The final ceasefire took effect on 7 January 1949. According to its terms, the large central section of what had formerly been Palestine was to remain Arab. This territory was occupied and then annexed by Transjordan, which on 2 June 1949 began to call itself simply Jordan. Thus Qumran passed into Jordanian hands, along with the Arab east side of Jerusalem. The border between Israel and Jordan — the Nablus road — cut through the centre of the city.

Amidst these dramatic historical events, the scrolls attracted little public attention or interest. Behind the scenes, however, political, religious and academic forces were already beginning to mobilise. By January 1949, the Department of Antiquities for Transjordan and Arab Palestine had become involved, under the auspices of its director, Gerald Lankester Harding. So had Father Roland de Vaux, director, since 1945, of another institution — the Dominican-sponsored Ecole Biblique, situated in the Jordanian-controlled eastern sector of Jerusalem, and for the last sixty years a centre of French-Catholic biblical scholarship in the city.

A year and a half had now elapsed since the scrolls were first found. To date, however, no trained archaeologist had visited the site of the discovery. The Albright Institute had tried, but the war, they decided, rendered any such endeavours too dangerous. It was at this point that a Belgian air-force officer, Captain Philippe Lippens, appeared on the scene. Lippens had arrived in Jerusalem as a member of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation. But he was also Jesuit-trained, and a graduate of the Oriental Institute at the University of Louvain. He had read of the scrolls, and now approached de Vaux, who until then appears to have been sceptical about their significance. If he managed to locate the cave of the original discovery, Lippens asked, would de Vaux confer legitimacy on the undertaking by acting as technical director for subsequent excavations? De Vaux assented.

On 24 January, Lippens established the support of a British officer commanding a brigade of the Jordanian Arab Legion, and, through this officer, the support of Lankester Harding in Amman. With Harding’s blessing, the British Army’s archaeological officer was despatched to Qumran, to search for the cave in which the original discovery had been made. He was accompanied by two Bedouin from the Arab Legion, who located the cave on 28 January. Inside, they found remains of the linen in which the scrolls had been wrapped and numerous pieces of pottery. A fortnight or so later, early in February, Harding and de Vaux visited the cave together. They found enough shards for more than forty jars and the remains of thirty identifiable texts, as well as many more unidentifiable fragments. Within another fortnight, the first official archaeological expedition had been mounted.

In the years that followed, scrolls became big business indeed, and traffic in them came to constitute an extremely lucrative cottage industry. Fragments were being smuggled to and fro in dirty wallets, in cigarette boxes, in assorted other makeshift containers. Forgeries began to appear, and wily local merchants had no shortage of gullible purchasers. The popular press portrayed anything resembling ancient parchment as immensely valuable. In consequence, Arab dealers were loath to settle for anything less than hundreds of pounds, and on at least one occasion a thousand — and this, it must be remembered, was in the days when a house could be mortgaged for £1500.

When Metropolitan Samuel took his scrolls to the United States, Jordanian radio reports claimed he was asking a million dollars for them. Fears arose that scrolls would be bought not only for private collections and as souvenirs, but also as investments. At the same time, of course, the scrolls themselves were dangerously fragile, requiring special conditions of light and temperature to preserve them from further deterioration. In many of them, indeed, the process of deterioration was already irreversible. As the black market burgeoned, so did the prospect of ever more valuable material being lost irretrievably to scholarship.

Responsibility to do something about the matter devolved upon Gerald Lankester Harding of the Department of Antiquities. Harding concluded it was less important to insist on the letter of the law than to rescue as many scrolls and fragments as he could. In consequence, he adopted a policy of purchasing scroll material from whomever happened to have it. This affected the legal status of such material by tacitly acknowledging that anyone who possessed it had a legitimate claim to it. In their negotiations and transactions, Harding’s agents were authorised to ignore all questions of legality and (up to a point) price. He himself, being fluent in Arabic, befriended not just dealers, but the Bedouin as well, and let it be known he would pay handsomely for anything they might obtain. Nevertheless, Metropolitan Samuel was accused of having ‘smuggled’ his scrolls out of the country, and the Jordanian government demanded their return. By that time, of course, it was too late. Eventually, the Bedouin of the Ta’amireh tribe were given what amounted to a ‘cave-hunting monopoly’. The Qumran area became, in effect, a military zone, and the Ta’amireh were charged with policing it, ‘to keep other tribes from muscling in on the scroll rush’.¹⁰ Whatever the Ta’amireh found, they would take to Kando, who would remunerate them. Kando would take the material to Harding and be remunerated in turn.

In October 1951, members of the Ta’amireh tribe arrived in Jerusalem with scroll fragments from a new site. Both Father de Vaux of the Ecole Biblique and Harding were away, so the Bedouin approached Joseph Saad, director of the Rockefeller Museum. Saad demanded to be taken to the site in question. The Bedouin went off to consult, and failed to return.

Saad obtained a jeep, a letter of authority from the archaeological officer of the Arab Legion and some armed men and drove to the first Ta’amireh camp he could find, outside Bethlehem. The next morning, as he was driving into Bethlehem, he saw one of the men who had approached him the day before. Dispensing with all niceties, Saad proceeded to kidnap the Bedouin:

Subjected to this sort of persuasion, the Bedouin agreed to cooperate. Saad obtained reinforcements from a nearby military post, and the contingent headed off down the Wadi Ta’amireh towards the Dead Sea. When the terrain became impassable, they abandoned the jeep and began to walk. They walked for seven hours, until they came to a wadi with walls hundreds of feet high. Far up in the cliff-face, two large caves could be seen, with clouds of dust issuing from them — the Bedouin were already inside, collecting what they could. At Saad’s arrival, a number of them emerged. The soldiers accompanying Saad fired into the air and the Bedouin dispersed. Of the two caves, one, when the soldiers reached it, proved to be huge — twenty feet wide, twelve to fifteen feet high and extending some 150 feet back into the cliff. It was the next morning before Saad got back to Jerusalem. Exhausted after his expedition (which had included fourteen hours of walking), he went to sleep. He woke later in the day to find Jerusalem in a state of upheaval. Friends of the Bedouin had spread the news of his ‘kidnapping’ and incarceration. One commentator observed afterwards that it was ‘perhaps’ a mistake to have used force: this served to drive documents underground and made the Bedouin more reluctant to relinquish what they found.¹²

Saad’s expedition led to the discovery of four caves at Wadi Murabba’at, just over eleven miles south of Qumran and some two miles inland from the Dead Sea. The material found here was less difficult to date and identify than that from Qumran, but of nearly comparable import. It derived from the early 2nd century ad — more specifically, from the revolt in Judaea orchestrated by Simeon bar Kochba between ad 132 and 135. It included two letters signed by Simeon himself and furnished new data on the logistics, economics and civil administration of the rebellion, which had come within a hair’s-breadth of success — Simeon actually captured Jerusalem from the Romans and held the city for some two years. According to Robert Eisenman, this insurrection was a direct continuation of events dating from the previous century — events which involved certain of the same families, many of the same underlying principles, and perhaps also Jesus himself.

Shortly after the discovery of the caves at Murabba’at, activity around Qumran began to gather momentum. Having returned from Europe, Father de Vaux began to excavate the site, together with Harding and fifteen workers. These excavations were to continue for the next five years, until 1956. Among other things, they exhumed a complex of buildings, which were identified as the ‘Essene community’ spoken of by Pliny.

Pliny himself perished in ad 79, in the eruption of Vesuvius which buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. Of his works, only the Natural History survives — which, however, deals with both the topography and certain events in Judaea. Pliny’s sources are unknown, but his text refers to the sack of Jerusalem in AD 68, and must therefore have been composed some time after that. There was even for a time a legend, now discredited, that, like Josephus, he accompanied the Roman army on its invasion of Palestine. In any case, Pliny is one of the few ancient writers not just to mention the Essenes by name, but to locate them geographically. He locates them, quite specifically, on the shores of the Dead Sea:

De Vaux took this passage as referring to Qumran, assuming that ‘below the Essenes’ means ‘down’, or to the south. The Jordan, he argued, flows ‘down’, or south, to the Dead Sea; and if one continues further south, one does indeed come to the site of Engedi.¹⁴ Other scholars dispute de Vaux’s contention, maintaining that ‘lying below’ is to be understood literally — that the Essene community was situated in the hills above Engedi.

Whether Qumran was indeed Pliny’s community or not, de Vaux was spurred on to further efforts. In the spring of 1952, he endeavoured to wrest the initiative from the Bedouin and make a systematic survey of all caves in the vicinity. The survey was conducted between 10 and 22 March 1952 by de Vaux, three other members of the Ecole Biblique and William Reed, the new director of the Albright Institute. They were accompanied by a team of twenty-four Bedouin under the authority of three Jordanian and Palestinian archaeologists.¹⁵ Not surprisingly, perhaps, it was the Bedouin who did all the work, clambering up the steep, often precipitous cliff-faces and exploring caves. The archaeologists preferred to remain below, compiling inventories, drawing up maps and charts. As a result, the survey was not very comprehensive. The Bedouin, for example, chose not to divulge the existence of certain caves they had found. Several scrolls did not come to light until much later. And one is known never to have been recovered from the Bedouin.

Altogether, the survey encompassed some five miles of cliff-face. It examined 267 sites according to de Vaux, 273 sites according to William Reed. According to de Vaux, it yielded thirty-seven caves containing pottery. According to Reed, it yielded thirty-nine. The official map produced at the conclusion of the expedition shows forty.¹⁶ Shards were found for more than a hundred jars, a highly speculative figure. Such imprecision is typical of Qumran research.

But if the 1952 survey was amateurish, it also produced one genuinely important discovery. On 20 March, two days before the end of the survey, in the site designated Cave 3, a research team found two scrolls — or, rather, two fragments of the same scroll — of rolled copper. The writing on it had been punched into the metal. Oxidisation had rendered the metal too brittle to be unrolled. Before it could be read, the scroll would have to be sliced open in a laboratory. Three and a half years were to pass before the Jordanian authorities allowed this to be done. When they at last consented, the cutting was performed in Manchester under the auspices of John Allegro, a member of de Vaux’s team. The first segment of the scroll was finished in summer 1955, the second in January 1956.

The scroll proved to be an inventory of treasure — a compilation or listing of gold, silver, ritual vessels and other scrolls. Apparently, at the commencement of the Roman invasion, this treasure had been divided into a number of secret caches; and the ‘Copper Scroll’, as it came to be known, detailed the contents and whereabouts of each such cache. Thus, for example:

According to researchers, the total hoard would have amounted to some sixty-five tons of silver and perhaps twenty-six of gold. To this day, there is some argument as to whether the treasure ever in fact existed. Most scholars, however, are prepared to accept that it did and that the scroll comprises an accurate inventory of the Temple of Jerusalem. Unfortunately, the locations indicated by the scroll have been rendered meaningless by time, change and the course of two millennia, and nothing of the treasure has ever been found. A number of people, certainly, have searched for it.

In September 1952, six months after the official survey, there surfaced a new source of scrolls. It proved to be a cave within some fifty feet of the actual ruins of Qumran, which de Vaux and Harding had excavated in 1951. Here, at the site demarcated Cave 4, the largest discovery of all was made — again, predictably, by the Bedouin. Some years would be required to piece this material together. By 1959, however, most of the fragments had been organised. The work was conducted in a large room, which came to be known as the ‘Scrollery’, in the Rockefeller Museum.

The Rockefeller Museum — or, to give it its official name, the Palestine Archaeological Museum — had first opened in 1938, during the British mandate, and was built from funds donated by John D. Rockefeller. It contained not only exhibition space, but also laboratories, photographic dark-rooms and the offices of the Department of Antiquities. Shortly before the mandate ended in 1948, the museum had been turned over to an international board of trustees. This board was made up of representatives of the various foreign archaeological schools in Jerusalem — the French Ecole Biblique, for example, the American Albright Institute, the British Palestine Exploration Society. For eighteen years, the Rockefeller was to exist as an independently endowed institution. It managed to retain this status even through the Suez Crisis of 1956, when many of its staff were recalled to their home countries. The only casualties of the crisis were Gerald Lankester Harding, dismissed from his post as director of the Department of Antiquities, and the scrolls themselves. During hostilities, they were removed from the museum, placed into thirty-six cases and locked up in a bank in Amman. They were not returned to Jerusalem until March 1957, ‘some of them slightly moldy [sic] and spotted from the damp vault’.¹⁸

In 1966, however, the Rockefeller, with the scrolls it contained, was officially nationalised by the Jordanian government. This move was to have important repercussions. It was also of questionable legality. The museum’s board of trustees did not object, however. On the contrary, the president of the board transferred the museum’s endowment fund from London, where it had been invested, to Amman. Thus the scrolls and the museum housing them became, in effect, Jordanian property.

A year later, the Middle East erupted in the Six Day War, and Jordanian East Jerusalem fell to Israeli troops. At five o’clock on the morning of 6 June 1967, Yigael Yadin was informed that the museum had been occupied by an Israeli paratroop unit.

After becoming, in 1949, chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, Yadin had resigned in 1952 and studied archaeology at Hebrew University, earning his PhD in 1955 with a thesis on one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. That year he began teaching at Hebrew University. In 1954 he had travelled to the USA on a lecture tour. There, after speaking at Johns Hopkins University, he met Professor William F. Albright and asked why the American had published only three of Metropolitan Samuel’s four scrolls. Albright replied that Samuel was anxious to sell the scrolls and would not allow the fourth to be published until a purchaser had been found for all of them. Could a purchaser not be found in the States, Yadin asked: ‘Surely a few million dollars for such a purpose is not too difficult to raise.’ Albright’s reply was astonishing. The scrolls, he said, would probably sell for as little as half a million. Even so, however, no American institution or individual appeared to be interested.¹⁹

There were, in fact, two reasons for this apparent apathy. In the first place, facsimile editions of the first three scrolls had already been produced; and this, for most American researchers, obviated the need for the originals. More significant, however, was the legal status of the scrolls’ ownership. The Jordanian government had branded Metropolitan Samuel ‘a smuggler and a traitor’, claiming he had had no right to take the scrolls out of Jordan; and the Americans, by virtue of publishing the contraband texts, were accused of collusion in the ‘crime’. This, needless to say, deterred prospective purchasers, who had no desire to lay out a substantial sum of money, only to find themselves embroiled in complex international litigation and, quite possibly, end up with nothing. Yadin, on the other hand, had no need to fear the Jordanians. Relations between his country and theirs couldn’t possibly sink any lower.

On 1 June, Yadin was telephoned by an Israeli journalist stationed in the States, who called the advertisement in the Wall Street Journal to his attention. Yadin resolved immediately to obtain the scrolls, but recognised that a direct approach might jeopardise everything.

In consequence, he worked almost entirely through intermediaries, and it was a New York banker who replied to the advertisement. A meeting was arranged for 11 June 1954, a price of $250,000 for the four scrolls was agreed on and a wealthy benefactor found to provide the requisite money. After a number of frustrating delays, the transaction was completed at the Waldorf Astoria on 1 July. Among those present was a distinguished scholar, Professor Harry Orlinsky, whose role was to ensure the scrolls were indeed genuine. In order to conceal any Israeli or Jewish interest in the deal, Orlinsky introduced himself as ‘Mr Green’.

The next day, 2 July, the scrolls were removed from the vault of the Waldorf Astoria and taken to the Israeli Consulate in New York. Each scroll was then sent back to Israel separately. Yadin returned home by ship, and a code was arranged to keep him informed of each scroll’s safe arrival. Details of the transaction were kept secret for another seven months. Not until 13 February 1955 did a press release reveal that Israel had acquired the four scrolls of Metropolitan Samuel.²⁰ Along with the three scrolls previously purchased by Sukenik, they are now in the Shrine of the Book, which was established specifically to house them.

By the end of 1954, then, there were two entirely separate bodies of scroll material and two entirely separate cadres of experts working with them. In West Jerusalem, there were the Israelis, addressing themselves to the scrolls acquired by Sukenik and Yadin. In East Jerusalem, at the Rockefeller, there was a team of international scholars operating under the direction of de Vaux. Neither group communicated with the other. Neither had any contact with the other. Neither knew what the other possessed or what the other was doing, except for what leaked out in scholarly journals. In several instances, specific texts were fragmented, some pieces being in Israeli hands, some at the Rockefeller — which made it, of course, that much more difficult to obtain any sense of the whole. So ridiculous was the situation that certain individuals were tempted to do something about it. Former Major-General Ariel Sharon reported that, in the late 1950s, he and Moshe Dayan devised a plan for an underground raid on the Rockefeller, to be conducted through Jerusalem’s sewer system.²¹ The plan, needless to say, was never implemented.

Now, however, in 1967, hearing of the capture of the Rockefeller, Yadin immediately dispatched three colleagues from Hebrew University to ensure that the scrolls were safe. He recognised the implications of what had happened. Because the Rockefeller Museum was no longer an international institution, but a Jordanian one, it would pass into Israeli hands as a spoil of war.

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 vigour 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 practising 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 programme 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’:

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.[1] They would also, of course, help one another on problems requiring one or another individual’s special expertise. 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 authorising 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 favourable 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 monopolisation 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 monopolising 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:

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 summarised 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 behaviour 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 programme 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 behaviour, 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 tantalising 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. Professors John 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.²⁶Complete 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 sceptical 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 labelled ‘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 emphasise, the sophistry involved in this. For the ‘biblical material’ is perfectly innocuous and uncon-troversial, 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 skilfully 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.

3. The Scandal of the Scrolls

Ironically enough, it was not a biblical scholar, not an expert in the field, but an outsider who first detected something suspect in the international team’s position. The outsider was the distinguished American literary and cultural critic, Edmund Wilson, whom most university students in Britain and the States will have encountered through his work in fields far removed from Qumran and 1st-century Palestine. He is known for his own fiction — for I Thought of Daisy and, particularly, Memoirs of Hecate County. He is known as the author of Axel’s Castle, an original and pioneering study of the influence of French symbolism on 20th-century literature. He is known for To the Finland Station, an account of Lenin’s machinations and the Bolshevik hijacking of the Russian Revolution. And he is known for the grotesque, highly publicised literary feud he precipitated with his former friend, Vladimir Nabokov, by presuming to challenge Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin.

As his controversy with Nabokov demonstrated, Wilson had no compunction about venturing into waters beyond his officially acknowledged expertise. But perhaps it was just such recklessness that Qumran research required — the perspective of an outsider, a man capable of establishing some kind of overview. In any case, Wilson, in 1955, wrote a lengthy article for the New Yorker on the Dead Sea Scrolls — an article which, for the first time, made the scrolls a ‘household phrase’ and generated interest in them from the general public. In the same year, Wilson expanded his article and published it as a book, The Scrolls from the Dead Sea. Fourteen years later, in 1969, this text was expanded again, to encompass new material, and was reissued at virtually twice its former length. To this day, it remains one of the basic and most popular investigative works on the Qumran scrolls by an outsider. But even if Wilson was an outsider in the realm of biblical scholarship, he was certainly no mere amateur or dabbler; not even de Vaux’s international team could impugn his integrity or ‘high seriousness’. Wilson was thus able, on behalf of the literate public, to call them in some sense to account.

As early as 1955, Wilson detected a desire on the part of the ‘experts’ to distance the Qumran scrolls from both Judaism and Christianity. The ‘experts’, it seemed to him, were protesting rather too vehemently, and this aroused his suspicions:

Wilson stressed how much the scrolls had in common with both rabbinical Judaism, as it was emerging during the 1st century ad, and with the earliest forms of Christianity; and he noted a marked ‘inhibition’, on the part of both Judaic and Christian-oriented scholars, to make the often obvious connections:

In accordance with scholarly decorum, Wilson is, of course, being tactful, couching a fairly serious charge in the most diplomatic of language. He himself had no compunction about taking hold of the subject and placing it in historical perspective:

It is, alas, characteristic and typical of biblical scholarship, and particularly of scholarship associated with the scrolls, that such a connection should be made not by the ‘experts’ in the field, but by an astute and informed observer. For it was Wilson who gave precise and succinct expression to the very issues the international team endeavoured so diligently to avoid.

These imputations about the bias of most biblical scholars were echoed to us personally by Philip Davies, Professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield and author of two books on the Qumran material. As Professor Davies pointed out, most scholars working with the scrolls were — and, for that matter, still are — Christian-oriented, with a background primarily in the New Testament. He knew a number, he said, whose research sometimes conflicted painfully with their most passionately held personal beliefs, and questioned whether objectivity, in such cases, was really possible. Professor Davies stressed the perennial confusion of theology with history. All too often, he said, the New Testament is taught not just as the former, but also as the latter — as a literal and accurate account of 1st-century events. And if one takes the New Testament — the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles — as incontrovertible historical fact, it is impossible to do scholarly justice to the scrolls. Christian doctrine, in effect, ‘dictates the agenda’.⁴

Because Edmund Wilson was an outsider, the international team could get away with adopting towards him an attitude of patroning condescension. He was too distinguished to be insulted or abused; but he could be ignored, or dismissed superciliously as an intelligent and well-intentioned amateur who simply did not understand the complexities and subtleties of the issues involved, and who, in his alleged naiveté, might make ‘rash statements’.⁵ It was thus that many scholars were intimidated against saying what they actually believed. Academic reputations are fragile things, and only the most audacious or secure individuals could afford to incur the risk involved — the risk of being discredited, of being isolated by a concerted critical barrage from adherents of the consensus. ‘The scrolls are a fief, Shemaryahu Talmon, himself a prominent Israeli professor in the field, observed; and the scholars who monopolized them were, in effect, ‘a cabal’.⁶

Not even such cabals, however, can be omnipotent in suppressing dissent. Edmund Wilson may have been an outsider, but deviation from the international team’s consensus was beginning to surface within the cocooned sphere of biblical scholarship itself. As early as 1950, five years before Wilson’s book, Andre Dupont-Sommer, Professor of Semitic Language and Civilisation at the Sorbonne, had

presented a public paper which caused a sensation.⁷ He addressed himself to one of the Qumran texts recently translated. It described, he explained to his audience, a self-styled ‘Sect of the New Covenant’, whose leader, known as the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’, was held to be a Messiah, was persecuted, tortured and martyred. The ‘Teacher’s’ followers believed the end of the world to be imminent, and only those with faith in him would be saved. And albeit cautiously, Dupont-Sommer did not shrink from drawing the obvious conclusion — that the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ was in many ways ‘the exact prototype of Jesus’.⁸

These assertions provoked a squall of controversy and protest, Jesus’ uniqueness and originality were held to be under attack, and the Catholic establishment, especially in France and the States, began to unleash its critical artillery. Dupont-Sommer himself was somewhat shaken by the reaction and, in subsequent statements, sought shelter behind more circumspect phraseology. Anyone who might have been inclined to support him was also, for a time, obliged to duck for cover. Yet the seed of doubt had been planted, and was eventually to bear fruit. From the standpoint of Christian theological tradition, that fruit was to be particularly poisonous when it burgeoned amidst the international team themselves, in the very precincts of the Rockefeller Museum’s ‘Scrollery’.

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 honours 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 honours, 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 programme 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 fragl ments 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 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 of Jesus’.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 realised 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’:

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:

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’:

To publish this sort of accusation — especially in a letter to The Times — is remarkable behaviour. 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:

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:

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 jeopardise 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:

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. In any case, he pointed out that as soon as the press release pertaining to the ‘Copper Scroll’ was issued, reporters would descend en masse. To deal with this contingency, he suggested that Harding, the international team and everyone else involved close ranks and adopt a ‘party line’ towards the media. On 28 May, Harding, who had been warned and briefed by de Vaux, wrote back. The treasure listed in the ‘Copper Scroll’, he said, didn’t appear to be connected with the Qumran community at all. Nor could it possibly be a real cache — the value of the items cited was too great. The ‘Copper Scroll’ was merely a collation of ‘buried treasure’ legends.²⁸ Four days later, on 1 June, the official press release pertaining to the ‘Copper Scroll’ was issued. It echoed Harding’s assertions. The scroll was said to contain ‘a collection of traditions about buried treasure’.²⁹

Allegro appears to have been stunned by this duplicity. On 5 June, he wrote to Harding, ‘I don’t quite follow whether this incredible “traditions” gag you and your chums are putting out is for newspaper, government, Bedu or my consumption. Or you may even believe it, bless you.’³⁰ At the same time, however, he was still appealing to Harding as a possible ally against the phalanx of Catholic interests. Did not Harding think, he asked, that ‘a bit more ready information on these scroll matters might not be a good idea? It’s well known now that the copper scroll was completely open in January, and despite your attempts to squash it, it is also known that my translation went to you immediately… A little general information… saves a good deal of rumour-mongering, which has now taken on a somewhat sinister note.’³¹ He adds that ‘the feeling would get around that the Roman Catholic brethren of the team, by far in the majority, were trying to hide things’.³² The same point is stressed in a letter to Frank Cross in August: ‘In lay quarters it is firmly believed that the Roman Church in de Vaux and Co. are intent on suppressing this material.’³³ To de Vaux personally, he observed drily, ‘I notice that you have been careful to keep it dark that the treasure is Temple possessions.’³⁴

Allegro had originally believed a full translation of the text of the ‘Copper Scroll’ would be released fairly promptly. It must now have been clear to him that this wasn’t going to occur. In fact, four years were to pass before a translation of the text appeared, and then it was published by Allegro himself, who by that time had lost all patience with the international team. He still would have preferred to publish his popular book after the ‘official’ translation, scheduled to be done by Father Milik, and was led to believe this would be possible. Milik’s translation, however, was suddenly and unexpectedly subject to further delays, which may well have been deliberate. Allegro was asked to postpone his own publication accordingly. At one point, indeed, this request, transmitted through an intermediary, appears to have been attended by threats — from a member of the team whose name cannot be divulged for legal reasons. Allegro replied that, ‘As conveyed to me, the request was accompanied by the expression of some rather strange sentiments originating, it was said, from yourself and those for whom you were acting. There appeared even to be some forecast of consequences were I not to accede to this request.’³⁵ The recipient of this letter wrote back sweetly that Allegro must not imagine himself the victim of persecution.³⁶ Thus, when Allegro went ahead with his own publication, he found himself in the embarrassing position of seeming to have pre-empted the work of a colleague. In effect, he had been manoeuvred into providing the international team with further ammunition to use against him — and, of course, to alienate him further from them. Milik’s translation, in fact, did not appear until 1962 — two years after Allegro’s, six years after the ‘Copper Scroll’ had been sliced open in Manchester and ten years after it had been discovered.

In the meantime, The Dead Sea Scrolls — Allegro’s popular book on the Qumran material, from which all mention of the ‘Copper Scroll’ had been withheld — had appeared in the late summer of 1956, some five months after the controversy surrounding his radio broadcasts. The controversy, and especially the letter to The Times, had, as Allegro predicted, ensured the book’s success. The first edition of forty thousand copies sold out in seventeen days, and Edmund Wilson reviewed it enthusiastically on the BBC. The Dead Sea Scrolls, now in its second edition and nineteenth printing, continues to be one of the best introductions to the Qumran material. De Vaux did not see it that way, and sent Allegro a lengthy critique. In his reply, dated 16 September 1956, Allegro stated that ‘you are unable to treat Christianity any more in an objective light; a pity, but understandable in the circumstances’.³⁷ In the same letter, he draws attention to a text among the scrolls which refers to the ‘son of God’:

After everything that had passed, Allegro would have been extremely naive to assume that he could still be accepted by his erstwhile colleagues as a member of their team. Nevertheless, that was precisely what he seems to have done. In the summer of 1957, he returned to Jerusalem and spent July, August and September working on his material in the ‘Scrollery’. From his letters of the time, it is clear that he did indeed feel himself part of the team again and had no doubt that all was well. In the autumn, he travelled back to London and arranged with the BBC to make a television programme on the scrolls. In October, he returned to Jerusalem with producer and film crew. They immediately went to see Awni Dajani, Jordanian curator of the Rockefeller Museum and one of Allegro’s closest friends. The next morning, Dajani took them round ‘to get things moving with de Vaux’. In a letter of 31 October to Frank Cross, whom he still assumed to be his ally, Allegro described the ensuing events:

Allegro described himself as still flummoxed. Awni Dajani, however, was beginning to get annoyed. He apparently saw the programme as ‘a very definite boost for Jordan — antiquities and tourism’, and declared a preparedness to assert his authority. He was, after all, an official representative of the Jordanian government, whom not even de Vaux could afford to defy:

In the same letter, Allegro tried to persuade Cross to appear in the programme. After consulting with de Vaux, Cross refused. By now, the penny had pretty much dropped for Allegro and he knew precisely where he stood in relation to his former colleagues. On the same day that he wrote to Cross, he had also written to another scholar, a man who was not officially a member of the international team but had been allowed to work with the scrolls. Allegro repeated the account of his contretemps and then added that he was ‘starting a campaign, very quietly for the moment, to get the scrollery clique broken up and new blood injected, with the idea of getting some of the stuff Milik, Strugnell and Starcky are sitting on, published quickly in provisional form’.⁴¹ Two months later, on 24 December 1957, he wrote to the same scholar saying that he was worried:

This report is extremely disquieting. Scholars outside the international team have suspected that some form of monitoring and selection was taking place. Here, Allegro confirms these suspicions. One can only wonder what might have happened to any fragment that held doctrines opposed to that of the Church.

Allegro then outlined his own plan, part of which involved ‘inviting scholars who can spare six months or a year at least to come to Jerusalem and take their place in the team’:

One may not immediately sympathise with Allegro as his personality manifests itself through his letters — cavalier, impudent, cheerfully iconoclastic. But it is impossible not to sympathise with the academic integrity of his position. He may indeed have been egocentric in his conviction that his particular interpretation of the Qumran material was valid and important. But the statements quoted above constitute an appeal on behalf of scholarship itself — an appeal for openness, honesty, accessibility, impartiality. Unlike de Vaux and the international team, Allegro displays no propensity for either secrecy or self-aggrandisement. If he is conspiring, he is conspiring only to make the Dead Sea Scrolls available to the world at large, and quickly enough not to betray the trust reposed in academic research. Such an aspiration can only be regarded as honourable and generous.

Allegro’s honour and generosity, however, were not to be rewarded, or even recognized. The film, completed by the end of 1957, was not transmitted by the BBC until the summer of 1959, and then only in a late-night slot which attracted a minimal audience. By that time, understandably enough, Allegro was beginning to grow uneasy. On 10 January 1959, after the latest in a long series of postponements, he wrote to Awni Dajani:

After repeating what he’d come increasingly to see as a viable short-term solution — nationalisation of the Rockefeller Museum, the ‘Scrollery’ and the scrolls by the Jordanian government — he reveals the sense of punctilio to which he’d previously felt subject: ‘I might even let out an instance or two when information has been suppressed — but I’ll only do that if De Vaux looks like winning.’⁴⁵

In 1961, King Hussein appointed Allegro honorary adviser on the scrolls to the government of Jordan. The post, however, though prestigious enough, entailed no real authority. It was not until November 1966, five years later, that the Jordanian government finally acted on Allegro’s suggestion and nationalised the Rockefeller Museum. By then, as we have seen, it was too late. Within the year, the Six Day War was to erupt, and the museum, the ‘Scrollery’ and its contents all passed into Israeli hands; and Israel, as we have noted, was too much in need of international support to risk a head-on confrontation with the Vatican and the Catholic hierarchy. Only four years before, Pope John XXIII had officially and doctrinally exculpated the Jews of any responsibility for Jesus’ death, and excised all vestiges of anti-Semitism from Roman Catholic Canon Law. No one wished to see this sort of conciliatory work undone.

By that time, too, Allegro was understandably weary and disillusioned with the world of professional scholarship. For some time, he had been anxious to leave academia and sustain himself solely as a writer. He was also eager to return to his original chosen field, philology, and had spent some five years working on a book which derived from what he regarded as a major philological breakthrough. The result of his efforts appeared in 1970 as The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross — the work for which Allegro today is most famous, and for which he is almost universally dismissed.

The argument in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross rests on complicated philological premises which we, like many other commentators, find difficult to accept. That, however, is incidental. Scholars tend all the time to expound their theories based on premises of varying validity, and they are usually, at worst, ignored, not publicly disgraced. What turned The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross into a scandal were Allegro’s conclusions about Jesus. In attempting to establish the source of all religious belief and practice, Allegro asserted that Jesus had never existed in historical reality, was merely an image evoked in the psyche under the influence of an hallucinatory drug, psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms. In effect, he argued, Christianity, like all other religions, stemmed from a species of psychedelic experience, a ritualistic rite de passage promulgated by an orgiastic magic mushroom cult.

Taken separately, and placed in a different context, Allegro’s conclusions would probably not have provoked the storm they did. Certainly reputable scholars before Allegro had questioned, and doubted, the existence of an historical Jesus. Some of them, for that matter, still do, though they are in a minority. And there is little dispute today that drugs — psychedelic and of other kinds — were used to at least some extent among the religions, cults, sects and mystery schools of the ancient Middle East — as indeed they were, and continue to be, across the world. It is certainly not inconceivable that such substances were known to, and perhaps employed by, 1st-century Judaism and early Christianity. One must also remember the climate and atmosphere of the late 1960s. Today, in retrospect, one tends to think in terms of the so-called ‘drug culture’ — in terms of a facile ersatz mysticism, of Ken Kesey and his ‘Merry Pranksters’, of Tom Wolfe and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, of hippies thronging the streets of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, staging ‘love-ins’ and ‘be-ins’ in Golden Gate Park. That, however, is only one side of the picture, and tends to eclipse the very real excitement and expectation that psychedelia generated even in more sophisticated and disciplined minds — the conviction, shared by many scientists, neurologists, biochemists, academicians, psychologists, medical practitioners, philosophers and artists, that humanity was indeed on the verge of some genuine epistemological ‘breakthrough’.

Books such as Huxley’s The Doors of Perception enjoyed enormous currency, and not just among the rebellious young. At Harvard, Timothy Leary, with his proclamations of a ‘new religion’, still possessed in those days a considerable measure of credibility. In The Teachings of Don Juan, Castaneda had produced not just a best-selling book, but also an acclaimed academic dissertation for the University of California. Psychedelic substances were routinely used in both medicine and psychotherapy. Divinity students in Boston conducted a service under the influence of LSD, and most of them said afterwards they had indeed experienced an intensified sense of the sacred, a greater rapprochement to the divine. Even the MP Christopher Mayhew, later Minister of Defence, voluntarily appeared stoned on the nation’s television screens, beaming beatifically at his interviewer, wearing the seraphically celestial smirk of a man newly promoted to sagehood. One can see why the academic and critical establishment recoiled in alarm from Allegro’s book, even though Allegro himself repudiated the mentality of Haight-Asbury and never himself smoked or drank.

All the same, and even if not for the reasons usually cited, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross was a distinctly unorthodox book, and effectively compromised Allegro’s credibility as a scholar. Its reviewer in The Times, for example, became personal, embarking on an amateur psychoanalysis of Allegro in order to debunk him.⁴⁶ Allegro’s own publishers publicly apologised for issuing the book, cravenly admitting it to be ‘unnecessarily offensive’.⁴⁷ In a letter to The Times on 26 May 1970, fourteen prominent British scholars repudiated Allegro’s conclusions.⁴⁸ The signatories included Geza Vermes of Oxford, who’d concurred with much of Allegro’s previous work on the Qumran material, and who was soon to echo his complaints about the international team’s delays. The signatories also included Professor Godfrey Driver, Allegro’s former mentor, who had formulated a more radical interpretation of the Qumran texts than Allegro himself had ever attempted.

Allegro continued to bring the attention of the public to the delays in the publication of the scrolls. In 1987, a year before his death, he declared the international team’s delays to be ‘pathetic and inexcusable’, and added that his former colleagues, for years, ‘have been sitting on the material which is not only of outstanding importance, but also quite the most religiously sensitive’:

By this time, the initiative had passed into the hands of the next generation of scholars and Allegro had left the world of scroll scholarship to pursue his research on the origins of myth and religion. His works subsequent to The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross were moderate enough, but for most readers, as well as for the academic establishment, he was to remain an ‘exile’, the man who, in the sneering words of The Times, had ‘traced the source of Christianity to an edible fungus’.⁵⁰ He died suddenly in 1988, no longer accepted by his colleagues, but still energetic, enthusiastic about his own philological work in progress, and optimistic. It must have been some consolation for him to see, before his death, that his defiance of the international team, and his concern about their delays in releasing material, were already being echoed by others.

In 1956, Edmund Wilson had favourably reviewed Allegro’s ‘popular’ book on the Dead Sea Scrolls. In 1969, when he brought out the new edition of his own book, it had swollen to twice its former length. The situation regarding the scrolls was no longer, for Wilson, merely a question of ‘tension’ and ‘inhibition’; it had now begun to assume the proportions of a cover-up and a scandal: ‘I have been told by a Catholic scholar that at first, in regard to the scrolls, a kind of official policy tended to bias scholarship in the direction of minimizing their importance.’⁵¹ By the mid-1970s, biblical scholars were beginning to speak openly of a scandal. Even the most docile began to have their worries, and the international team were alienating men who had no desire to engage in academic controversy. Among the most prominent names in contemporary Semitic scholarship, for example, is that of Dr Geza Vermes, who has, since 1951, been publishing books and articles on the scrolls. Initially, he had no quarrel with the international team and their work. Like many others, however, he gradually began to lose patience with the delays in publication. In 1977, he published a book, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Qumran in Perspective, in the first chapter of which he publicly flung down the gauntlet:

True to form, the international team did not deign to take any notice. Nearly a decade later, in 1985, Dr. Vermes again called them to account, this time in the Times Literary Supplement:

In the same statement, Dr Vermes praised Yigael Yadin, who had just died, for the promptitude with which he’d ushered into print the Qumran material in his possession: ‘But it is also a reminder to us all, especially to those who have been tardy in responding to the challenge of their privileged task, that time is running out.’⁵⁴

In his desire to avoid undignified controversy, Dr. Vermes neglected to pursue the matter further. As before, the international team took no notice whatever of his comments. For Dr. Vermes, the situation must be particularly galling. He is a recognized expert in the field. He has published translations of such scrolls as have found their way into the public domain — through Israeli auspices, for example. He is certainly as competent to work on unpublished Qumran material as any member of the international team, and is probably better qualified than most. Yet for the whole of his distinguished academic career, access to that material has been denied him. He has not even been allowed to see it.

In the meantime, valuable evidence continues to remain under wraps. We ourselves can personally testify to vital material which, if it has not exactly been suppressed, has not been made public either. In November 1989, for example, Michael Baigent visited Jerusalem and met with members of the current international team. One of them was Father Emile Puech, the young ‘crown prince’ of the Ecole Biblique, who ‘inherited’ the scroll fragments previously assigned to Father Jean Starcky. These included material labelled ‘of unknown provenance’. In personal conversation, Father Puech divulged three important discoveries:

1. He had apparently found new overlaps between the scrolls and the Sermon on the Mount, including fresh and significant references to ‘the poor in spirit’.⁵⁵

2. In the Epistle of Barnabas, an apocryphal Christian text mentioned as early as the 2nd century ad, Puech had found a quotation hitherto untraced, attributed to an ‘unknown prophet’. The quotation, in fact, proved to have come directly from one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, thus establishing that the author of the Epistle of Barnabas was a member of, or had access to, the Qumran community and its teachings. Here was an incontrovertible link between Qumran and Christian tradition.

3. In the work of the 2nd-century Christian writer Justin Martyr, Puech found yet another quotation deriving directly from the Qumran scrolls.

‘We are not hiding anything,’ Puech insisted adamantly. ‘We will publish everything.’⁵⁶ To our knowledge, however, none of the revelations confided by Puech in conversation has yet appeared in print, and there seems no immediate likelihood of their doing so. On the other hand, there has been a recent ‘leak’ which offers some indication of the kind of material still being suppressed. This ‘leak’ surfaced in 1990, in the pages of BAR, and was confided, apparently, by an unnamed scholar whose conscience was troubling him. It consists of a Qumran fragment very similar to a passage in Luke’s Gospel. Referring to Jesus’ imminent birth, Luke (1:32-5) speaks of a child who will be called ‘Son of the Most High’ and ‘Son of God’. The Qumran fragment from Cave 4 also speaks of the coming of someone who ‘by his name shall… be hailed [as] the Son of God, and they shall call him ‘Son of the Most High’.⁵⁷ This, as BAR points out, is an extraordinary discovery, ‘the first time that the term “Son of God” has been found in a Palestinian text outside the Bible’.⁵⁸ Whatever the circumstances pertaining to the release of this fragment, it derives from the corpus of material hitherto controlled, and rigorously withheld, by the ‘elusive’ Father Milik.

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 the Dead 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 by Pliny, 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 the Encyclopaedia judaica. He commanded enormous respect in the academic world, and was recognised 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 palaeography. 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 palaeography. 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 fervour 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 endeavoured 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 defence 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, palaeographical, ‘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 patronising 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 palaeography.

Archaeology and palaeography 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 palaeography, 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 scepticism with regard to the methodology of archaeologists, numismatists, and palaeographers. 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 outmanoeuvred 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 disorganised. 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:

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 realise, 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 palaeography. 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 palaeography. 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 realised, 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.[2] 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.

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 analysing handwriting, did he know anything about history? Ostensibly, it was all a half-joking, more or less ‘civilised’ 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:

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 demeanour 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 recognised 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 endeavours’. The letter continued:

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:

The second point would appear, at least with hindsight, to be self-evident. The international team insisted on the importance of archaeology and palaeography. It was on the basis of their supposedly accurate archaeological and palaeographical 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 monopolised 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 sensationalise 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:

5. Academic Politics and Bureaucratic Inertia

Early in 1989, Eisenman had been invited to present a paper at a conference on the scrolls to be held at the University of Groningen that summer. The organiser and chairman of the conference was the secretary of the journal Revue de Qumran, the official organ of the Ecole Biblique, the French-Dominican archaeological school in Jerusalem of which most of the international team were members or associates. According to the arrangement, all papers presented at the conference would subsequently be published in the journal. By the time of the conference, however, Eisenman’s conflict with the international team, and the ensuing controversy, had become public. It was not, of course, feasible to retract Eisenman’s invitation. He was therefore allowed to present his paper, but its publication in Revue de Qumran was blocked.[3]

The chairman of the conference was deeply embarrassed, apologising to Eisenman and explaining there was nothing he could do — his superiors, the editors of the journal, had insisted on excluding Eisenman’s paper.¹ Revue de Qumran had thus effectively revealed itself, not as a non-partisan forum for the spectrum of scholarly opinion, but as a species of mouthpiece for the international team.

The balance was, however, slowly beginning to tilt in Eisenman’s favour. The New York Times, for example, had monitored the dispute throughout, and had assessed the arguments of the opposing factions. On 9 July 1989, it pronounced its judgment in an editorial entitled ‘The Vanity of Scholars’:

Despite the unseemly squabbling, the clack and crack of ruptured amour propre, the fustian and umbrage and general high dudgeon, Eisenman’s arguments were now beginning to carry weight, to convince people. And there was also another development, of comparable importance. The ‘outsiders’ — the adversaries of the international team — were beginning to organise, to consolidate their efforts and conduct conferences of their own. In the months following the editorial in the New York Times, there were to be two such conferences.

The first of these was arranged by Professor Kapera of Krakow, with the aid of Philip Davies, and took place at Mogilany, Poland. It produced what became known as the ‘Mogilany Resolution’, with two main demands: that ‘the relevant authorities’ in Israel should obtain photographic plates of all unpublished scrolls, and that these should be supplied to Oxford University Press for immediate publication; and that the data obtained from de Vaux’s excavations at Qumran between 1951 and 1956, much of which had not yet appeared, should now be issued in definitive published form.

Seven and a half months later, a second conference was convened, on Eisenman’s home territory, California State University at Long Beach. Papers were presented by a number of academics, including Eisenman himself, Professor Ludwig Koenen and Professor David Noel Freedman from the University of Michigan, Professor Norman Golb from the University of Chicago and Professor James M. Robinson from Claremont University, who had headed the team responsible for publishing the Nag Hammadi Scrolls. Two resolutions were produced: first, that a facsimile edition of all hitherto unpublished Qumran fragments should be issued immediately — a necessary ‘first step in throwing the field open to scholars irrespective of point of view or approach’; and second, that a data bank of AMS Carbon-14 results on known manuscripts should be established, to facilitate the future dating of all previously undated texts and manuscripts, whether on papyrus, parchment, codex or any other material.

None of these resolutions, of course, either from Mogilany or from Long Beach, was in any sense legally binding. In the academic community, however, and in the media, they carried considerable weight. Increasingly, the international team were finding themselves on the defensive; furthermore, they were beginning, albeit slowly, to give way. Thus, for example, Milik, while the public battle raged, quietly passed over one text — the very text Eisenman and Davies had requested to see in their letter to Strugnell — to Professor Joseph Baumgarten of Hebrew College in Baltimore. Baumgarten, of course, who was now a member of the international team, characteristically refused to let anyone else see the text in question. Neither did Strugnell — who as head of the team was supposed to authorise and supervise such transactions — bother to inform Eisenman or Davies what had occurred. But the mere fact that Milik was handing over material at all reflected some progress, some sense that he felt sufficiently pressured to relinquish at least part of his private fiefdom — and with it, some of the onus of responsibility.

More promising still, Milik, in 1990, surrendered a second text, this time to Professor James VanderKamm of North Carolina State University. VanderKamm, in a break with the international team’s tradition, promptly offered access to other scholars. ‘I will show the photographs to anyone who is interested in seeing them’, he announced.³ Milik, not surprisingly, described VanderKamm’s behaviour as ‘irresponsible’.⁴ VanderKamm then withdrew his offer.

An important role in the campaign to obtain open access to the Dead Sea Scrolls was, as we have already indicated, played by Hershel Shank’s journal, Biblical Archaeology Review. It was BAR that fired the opening salvo of the current media campaign, when in 1985 it published a long and hard-hitting article on the delays in releasing Qumran material. And when Eisenman obtained a copy of the computer print-out listing all the fragments in the international team’s possession, he leaked this document to BAR. He thus furnished BAR with invaluable ammunition. In return, BAR was only too eager to provide publicity and an open forum.

As we have also noted, however, BAR’s attack, at least in part, was directed at the Israeli government, whom it held as responsible for the delays as the international team themselves.⁵ Eisenman was careful to distance himself from BAR’s position in this respect. To attack the Israeli government, he felt, was simply to divert attention from the real problem — the withholding of information.

Despite this initial difference of approach, however, BAR’s contribution has been immense. Since the spring of 1989, in particular, the magazine has sustained a relentless, non-stop barrage of articles directed at the delays and deficiencies of Qumran scholarship and research. BAR’s basic position is that, ‘in the end the Dead Sea Scrolls are public treasures’.⁶ As for the international team: ‘The team of editors has now become more an obstacle to publication than a source of information. ‘⁷BAR has in general pulled very few punches and, indeed, often comes very close to the legal limits of what can be printed. And while Eisenman may not have shared BAR’s eagerness to attack the Israeli government, there is no question that those attacks have helped to produce at least some results.

Thus, for example, the Israeli authorities were persuaded to assume some measure of authority over the unpublished Qumran material. In April 1989 the Israeli Archaeological Council appointed a ‘Scroll Oversight Committee’ to supervise the publication of all Qumran texts and ensure that the members of the international team were indeed fulfilling their assigned tasks. In the beginning, the creation of this committee may have been something of a cosmetic exercise, intended merely to convey the impression that something constructive was being done. In practice, however, as the international team have continued to drag their feet, the committee has assumed more and more power.

As we have noted, Father Benoit’s timetable, according to which the whole of the Qumran material would be published by 1993, was superseded by Strugnell’s new and (theoretically at least) more realistic timetable, with a deadline of 1996. Eisenman had remained profoundly sceptical of the team’s intentions. BAR was more vociferous. The ‘suggested Timetable’, the magazine proclaimed, was ‘a hoax and a fraud’.⁸ It was not signed, BAR pointed out; it technically bound no one to anything; it made no provision whatever for progress reports or proof that the international team were actually doing their jobs. What would happen, BAR asked the Israeli Department of Antiquities, if the stipulated deadlines were not met?

The Department of Antiquities did not reply directly to this query, but on 1 July 1989, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Amir Drori, the department’s director, issued what might be construed as a nebulous threat: ‘For the first time, we have a plan, and if someone does not complete his work on time we have the right to deliver the scrolls to someone else.’⁹ Strugnell himself, however, in an interview with the International Herald Tribune, made clear how lightly he took such threats. ‘We are not running a railroad’,¹⁰ he said. And in an interview with ABC Television, he was even more explicit: ‘If I don’t meet [the deadline] by one or two years, I won’t worry at all.’¹¹ Milik, in the meantime, remained, as Time Magazine put it, ‘elusive’, although the magazine did manage to extract one characteristically arrogant statement from him: ‘The world will see the manuscripts when I have done the necessary work.’¹²

Justifiably unappeased, BAR continued its campaign. In the ABC Television interview, Strugnell, with somewhat lumbering humour, and manifest contempt, had complained of the recent attacks to which he and his colleagues had been subjected. ‘It seems we’ve acquired a bunch of fleas’, he said, ‘who are in the business of annoying us.’¹³BAR promptly ran a signally unflattering photograph of Professor Strugnell surrounded by ‘named fleas’. In addition to Eisenman and Davies, the ‘named fleas’ included Professors Joseph Fitzmyer of Catholic University, David Noel Freedman of the University of Michigan, Dieter Georgi of the University of Frankfurt, Norman Golb of the University of Chicago, Z.J. Kapera of Krakow, Philip King of Boston College, T.H. Gaster and Morton Smith of Columbia, and Geza Vermes of Oxford University. BAR invited all other biblical scholars who wished to be named publicly as ‘fleas’ to write in. This invitation elicited a stream of letters, including one from Professor Jacob Neusner of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, author of a number of important works on the origins of Judaism and the formative years of Christianity. Speaking of the international team’s work, Professor Neusner described the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship as ‘a monumental failure’, which he attributed to ‘arrogance and self-importance’.¹⁴

By the autumn of 1989, we had already begun to research this book and, in the process, to become embroiled, albeit quietly, in the controversy. On a trip to Israel to gather material and interview a number of scholars, Michael Baigent decided to check on the so-called ‘Oversight Committee’, recently formed to supervise the work of the international team. In theory, the committee might be anything. On the one hand, it might be a ‘paper tiger’, a means of formally institutionalising official inaction. On the other, it might offer a real possibility of power being taken from the international team and placed in more assiduous hands. Would the committee merely serve to cosmeticise further delays? Or did it possess both the authority and the will to do something constructive about the existing situation?

Among the individuals making up the committee were two members of the Israeli Department of Antiquities — Amir Drori, the department’s head, and Mrs Ayala Sussman. Baigent had arranged initially to speak with Drori. On his arrival at the Department of Antiquities, however, he was urged to speak instead with Mrs Sussman, who presided over the sub-department in charge of the Qumran texts themselves. Drori, in other words, had a number of matters on his plate. Mrs Sussman’s activities were focused more specifically on the scrolls.

The meeting with Mrs Sussman took place on 7 November 1989. She clearly, and perhaps understandably, regarded it as an unwelcome intrusion on her already busy schedule. While being scrupulously polite, she was also therefore impatient, dismissive and vague, vouchsafing few details, endeavouring to get the conversation over with as soon as possible. Baigent was also, of course, polite; but it proved necessary for him to become tiresomely insistent, conveying the impression that he was prepared to wait in the office all day unless some answers to his queries were forthcoming. Eventually, Mrs Sussman capitulated.

Baigent’s first questions concerned the formation and purposes of the ‘Oversight Committee’. Mrs Sussman, at that point, apparently regarding her interviewer not as a researcher with some background in the subject, but as a casual journalist skating on the surface of a story, imprudently confided that the committee had been formed to deflect criticism from the Department of Antiquities. In effect, Baigent was given the impression that the committee had no real interest in the scrolls themselves, but was merely a species of bureaucratic screen.

What was its nominally official role, Baigent asked, and how much actual authority did it exercise? Mrs Sussman remained vague. The committee’s job, she said, was to ‘advise’ Amir Drori, Director of the Department of Antiquities, in his dealings with Professor Strugnell, chief editor for any publication of Qumran material. The committee intended, she added, to work closely with Strugnell, Cross and other members of the international team, towards whom the Department of Antiquities felt an obligation. ‘Some,’ she declared, ‘have gone very far with their work, and we do not want to take it away from them.’¹⁵

What about BAR’s suggestion, Baigent asked, and the resolution adopted by the convention at Mogilany two months before — of making facsimiles or photographs available to all interested scholars? Mrs Sussman’s gesture was that of a woman dropping an irrelevant letter into a wastepaper basket. ‘No one discussed it seriously,’ she said. On the other hand, and somewhat more reassuringly, she stated that the new timetable, according to which all Qumran documents would be published by 1996, was correct. ‘We can reassign,’ she stressed, ‘if, for example, Milik doesn’t meet the dates.’¹⁶ Every text in Milik’s possession, she emphasised, had been allocated a publication date in the schedule. At the same time, she acknowledged her sympathy for Strugnell’s position. Her husband, she revealed, a professor of Talmudic studies, was helping Strugnell on the translation — all 121 lines of it — of the long-delayed ‘MMT’ document.

So far as Mrs Sussman was concerned, everything on the whole seemed to be in order and proceeding acceptably. Her chief preoccupation, however, seemed to be less the Qumran material itself than the adverse publicity directed at the Department of Antiquities. This profoundly disturbed her. The scrolls, after all, were ‘not our job’. ‘Why is it causing trouble?’ she asked, almost plaintively. ‘We have other, more important things to do.’¹⁷

Baigent, needless to say, left the meeting disquieted. It is accepted wisdom in Israel that if one wishes to bury a subject, one creates a committee to study it. And as a matter of historical fact, every previous official attempt to oversee the work of the international team had been circumvented by de Vaux and Benoit. Was there any reason to suppose the situation would change?

The following day, Baigent met with Professor Shemaryahu Talmon, one of two scholars at Hebrew University who were also members of the ‘Oversight Committee’. Professor Talmon proved to be congenial company indeed — wry, witty, well-travelled, sophisticated. Unlike Mrs Sussman, moreover, he seemed to have not only an overview of the problem, but a familiarity with its minutiae and details — and a manifest sympathy for independent scholars seeking access to the Qumran material. Indeed, he said, he had had difficulties himself in the past, had been unable to obtain access to original texts, had been obliged to work with transcriptions and secondary sources — whose accuracy, in some instances, had subsequently proved to be questionable.

’Controversy is the lifeblood of scholarship,’ Professor Talmon declared at the very beginning of Baigent’s meeting with him.¹⁸ He made it clear that he regarded his membership of the ‘Oversight Committee’ as a welcome opportunity to help change the situation. ‘If it is only a watch-dog committee,’ he said, ‘then I shall resign.’¹⁹ The committee, he stressed, had to be able to achieve some concrete results if it was to justify its existence. He acknowledged the problems confronted by the international team: ‘Scholars are always under pressure and always take on too much. A deadline is always dead. ‘²⁰ But, he added, if a particular researcher had more texts in his possession than he could effectively handle, he must pass some of them on. The committee would ‘encourage’ researchers to do precisely this. In passing, Talmon also mentioned that, according to rumour, there were still large fragments in the archives, hitherto unknown and yet to be assigned. This rumour was subsequently to prove correct.

Baigent asked Professor Talmon about the fuss resulting from Eisenman and Davies’s requesting to see certain documents. Talmon said he was wholly in favour of access being granted them. There was, he stated, a ‘need to help people in utilising unpublished information. This is a legitimate demand.’²¹ The scrolls, he concluded, should be made available to all interested and qualified researchers. At the same time, he acknowledged that certain technical difficulties had to be sorted out. These difficulties, which were now being taken in hand, fell under three headings: first, the now out-of-date and superseded catalogue needed revision and updating; second, there was still no full inventory of all the scrolls and scroll fragments, some of which were still unassigned (’the only person who knows what is where is Strugnell’); and finally, there was an urgent need for a general concordance encompassing all the known texts.

As for the timetable according to which everything would be published by 1996, Talmon was honestly doubtful. Quite apart from whether or not the international team met their deadlines, he queried whether Oxford University Press would be able to produce so many volumes in so short a time. Looking at the schedule, he observed that no fewer than nine volumes were due to appear between 1990 and 1993. Could OUP cope with this? And could Strugnell handle the editing of so much while still pursuing his own research?

If they arose, however, these obstacles would at least be legitimate obstacles, not attributable to obstruction or deliberate withholding of material. They were, in effect, the only obstacles Talmon was prepared to tolerate. This was genuinely reassuring. In Talmon, the ‘Oversight Committee’ appeared to have a serious and responsible scholar who understood the problems, was determined to confront them and would not be deflected by obfuscation.

Baigent had learned that the ‘Oversight Committee’ was scheduled to meet the following day, at ten in the morning. He had therefore arranged a meeting for nine o’clock with Professor Jonas Greenfield, another member of the committee who was on the staff at Hebrew University. He put to Greenfield what had now become a routine question — would the ‘Oversight Committee’ ‘have teeth’? ‘We would like it to have teeth,’ Greenfield replied, ‘but they will have to grow.’²² Having nothing to lose, Baigent decided to put the cat among the pigeons. He repeated to Professor Greenfield what Ayala Sussman had said to him — that the committee had been formed primarily to deflect criticism from the Department of Antiquities. Perhaps this would elicit some reaction.

It most certainly did. The next morning, Mrs Sussman telephoned Baigent. Sounding somewhat rattled at first, she stated she was annoyed with him for telling Professor Greenfield she had made so dismissive a remark. It wasn’t true, she protested. She couldn’t possibly have said anything like that. ‘We are very keen,’ she stressed, ‘for this committee to do things.’²³ Baigent asked if she wished him to read back to her his notes; when she said yes, he did so. No, Mrs Sussman insisted: ‘The committee was formed to advise the Department [of Antiquities] on sensitive matters.’²⁴ As for her dismissive remarks, she had thought she was speaking ‘off the record’. Baigent replied that he had originally arranged his interview with Amir Drori, the department’s director, in order to obtain, precisely for the record, a statement of official policy on the matter. Drori had passed him on to Mrs Sussman, whom he had no reason to suppose was expressing anything other than the ‘official line’. The interview, therefore, had been very much ‘on the record’.

Baigent then became somewhat more conciliatory, explaining the grounds for his concern. The ‘Oversight Committee’, he said, was potentially the best thing that had happened in the whole sorry saga of Dead Sea Scroll research. It offered, for the first time, a genuine possibility of breaking the log-jam, of transcending academic squabbles and ensuring the release of texts which should have been made public forty years ago. It had thus been profoundly disconcerting to hear that this unique opportunity might be squandered, and that the committee might be no more than a bureaucratic mechanism for maintaining the status quo. On the other hand, Baigent concluded, he had been reassured by his conversations with Professors Talmon and Greenfield, both of whom had expressed an unimpugnably sincere desire for the committee to be both active and effective. Mrs Sussman now hastened to concur with her colleagues. ‘We are very keen to get this moving,’ she affirmed. ‘We are searching for ways to do it. We want to get the whole project moving as fast as possible.^’25

Partly through the determination of Professors Talmon and Greenfield, partly through Mrs Sussman’s embarrassment, the ‘Oversight Committee’ had been galvanised into some sort of resolve. There remained, however, the disquieting question raised by Professor Talmon — whether it was technically and mechanically possible for Oxford University Press to produce the stipulated volumes in accordance with Strugnell’s timetable. Had the timetable perhaps been drawn up in full knowledge that it couldn’t conceivably be met? Might it perhaps have been just another tactic for delaying things, while at the same time absolving the international team of any blame?

On his return to the United Kingdom, Baigent telephoned Strugnell’s editor at Oxford University Press. Was the schedule, he asked, feasible? Could eighteen volumes of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert be produced between 1989 and 1996? If a blanch could be audible over the telephone, Baigent would have heard one. The prospect, Strugnell’s editor replied, ‘seems highly unlikely’. She reported that she’d just had a meeting with Strugnell. She’d also just had a fax on the matter from the Israeli Department of Antiquities. It was generally accepted, she said, that ‘the dates were very vague. Each date was taken with a pinch of salt. We couldn’t cope with more than two or three a year at the most.’²⁶

Baigent reported that both the Department of Antiquities and the ‘Oversight Committee’ were worried about whether the timetable could be met. ‘They are right to be worried about the dates,’ the editor at OUP replied.²⁷ She then expressed what sounded disturbingly like a desire to fob off the entire project. OUP, she said, felt no need to demand that the series be reserved wholly for themselves. Perhaps some other press — university or otherwise — might be interested in co-publication? She wasn’t even sure that OUP covered its costs on each volume.

During the last four months of 1990, developments pertaining to the international team and their monopoly began to occur with accelerating momentum. Criticism by scholars denied access to the Qumran material received increasing publicity and currency, and the Israeli government, it seems, was susceptible to the mounting pressure. This pressure was intensified by an article which appeared in November in Scientific American, fiercely castigating the delays and the general situation, and according independent scholars space in which to voice their grievances.

In mid-November, news broke that the Israeli government had appointed a Dead Sea Scroll scholar, Emmanuel Tov, to act as ‘joint editor-in-chief of the project to translate and publish the entire corpus of Qumran material. This appointment was apparently made without consulting the existing editor-in-chief, John Strugnell, who was reported to have opposed it. By that time, however, Strugnell was ill in hospital and not available for comment — or, it would seem, for any serious opposition. By that time, too, even his former colleagues, such as Frank Cross, were beginning to distance themselves from him and to criticise him publicly.

There were also other reasons for this sequence of events. Earlier in November, Strugnell, from his quarters at the Ecole Biblique, had given an interview to a journalist for Ha aretz, a leading Tel Aviv newspaper. The precise context of his remarks is not, at the moment, altogether clear; but the remarks themselves, as reported by the world’s press, were hardly calculated to endear him to the Israeli authorities — and display, for a man in his position, what can only be described as a flamboyant lack of tact. According to the New York Times of 12 December 1990, Strugnell — a Protestant convert to Catholicism — said of Judaism: ‘It’s a horrible religion. It’s a Christian heresy, and we deal with our heretics in different ways.’ Two days later, the Times contained more of Strugnell’s statement: ‘I think Judaism is a racist religion, something very primitive. What bothers me about Judaism is the very existence of Jews as a group…’ According to London’s Independent, Strugnell also said that the ‘solution’ — an ominous word — for Judaism was ‘mass conversion to Christianity’.

In themselves, of course, these comments had no direct relevance to the question of Dead Sea Scroll scholarship, to the withholding of Qumran material from other researchers and the procrastination in its release. But such comments could hardly have been expected to enhance the credibility of a man responsible for the translation and publication of ancient Judaic texts. Not surprisingly, a major scandal ensued. It was covered by British newspapers. It was a front-page item for newspapers in Israel, France and the United States. Strugnell’s former colleagues, as gracefully but as hastily as possible, endeavoured to disown him. By the middle of December, it was announced that he had been dismissed from his post — a decision in which, apparently, his former colleagues and the Israeli authorities had concurred. Delays in publication and problems of health were cited as factors contributing to his dismissal.