Monsignor Benigni was pleased. Later he would collaborate closely with the O VRA, the Italian equivalent of the Gestapo. One can imagine the enthusiasm with which, had he lived to see it, he would have embraced Franco's Phalangist movement in Spain.
13
The Dead Sea Scrolls
The traumatic events of the first half of the twentieth century – the two world wars, the clash of ideologies, the revolutions and civil conflicts in Mexico, Russia, Spain and elsewhere – demonstrated the extent to which the Church had become marginalised from the course of Western history. Except in such isolated cases as Ireland, Western history had become increasingly secular. And Rome, ever more bereft of secular power and influence, was reduced to the status of one plaintive voice amid a greater chorus. It is true, of course, that the Church had been ineffectual enough on numerous occasions in the past – during the Napoleonic Wars, or before that, during the struggle for empire and continental dominance in the eighteenth century. In the past, however, the West had still, if only nominally, been ‘Christian’; and as long as it remained so, the Church could still claim a role. But as the twentieth century unfolded, Christianity became progressively less relevant; and in consequence, the Church was reduced to a new nadir of impotence. Among the unseemly scrum of ‘isms’ contending for supremacy, Catholicism was one of the more feeble.
Such, at any rate, was the situation so far as the corridors of power were concerned, the decision-making machinery that determined public policy and the march of events. Among the hapless multitudes at the mercy of such machinery, the Church retained a substantial congregation – a congregation more numerous, indeed, than that of any other religious denomination in the world. If this congregation could no longer be mobilised for crusades or holy wars, it could still be influenced in the realm of the psyche and the spirit. In the realm of the psyche and the spirit, it remained vulnerable. And in the realm of the psyche and the spirit, the Church still possessed weapons to deploy. One of these was the age-old measure of excommunication.
Nearly a millennium before, Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) had turned excommunication into a finely honed political instrument. It could be exploited even in the deposing of princes, kings, emperors. During the centuries that followed, however, the overuse of excommunication had debased and devalued its currency. During the nineteenth century, for example, young people were routinely excommunicated by the Holy Office for not denouncing parents who ate meat on Fridays, or for reading a book prohibited by the Index.1 In the aftermath of the Second World War, Pope Pius XII threatened to excommunicate any member of the Church who voted for a Communist in an election rather than for a Catholic candidate. Such profligacy in its utilisation could only render excommunication increasingly puerile, increasingly drained of puissance.
For most Catholics, however, excommunication remained – and, indeed, still remains – a potential source of terror, and thus a potent instrument for intimidation. To be ‘excommunicant’ – ejected, that is, from the community of the Church and the communion it offers – is to be rendered an outcast, with all the sense of isolation and loneliness that such status entails. The excommunicant individual is forbidden to participate in the Mass or any other public worship. He cannot receive any sacraments other than last rites. He cannot be married by a priest or bishop, cannot enjoy any benefit of the Church, cannot continue to enjoy any spiritual privileges previously granted. In the more severe of the two forms of excommunication, one must be completely shunned by all other Catholics. Technically speaking, excommunication can only exclude the individual from the Church, the body or congregation of the faithful. It does not and cannot sunder a person from God. For many believers, however, this distinction is blurred, and excommunication is perceived as tantamount to damnation. The resulting psychological impact can often be devastating.
Modern Canon Law specifies a number of offences punishable by excommunication. These include abortion, apostasy, heresy, schism, discarding or misusing a consecrated host, physically attacking the Pope and consecrating a bishop without the Pope's permission. It has also been used to muzzle dissent or opposition within the Church. Thus, for example, the Modernist Alfred Loisy was excommunicated in 1908; more recent Catholic writers and commentators have also suffered. Investigations and tribunals for possible excommunication would be conducted officially by the Holy Office. On its recommendation, the sentence of excommunication would then be pronounced by the Pope.
Excommunication was one instrument by means of which the Church, working through the Holy Office, exercised control over its congregation. A second instrument, for the first half of the century at least, was the Index, which effectively denied Catholics access to any material Rome deemed inimical – including historical studies of Freemasonry and of the Inquisition itself. As has been seen, the Index was first instituted in 1559 and remained in force for the next 400-odd years. As recently as the early 1960s, Catholic students and scholars at universities were restricted from reading not only established classics by writers like Voltaire and Stendhal, but also the topically relevant works of such figures as Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and André Gide – works that would appear on almost every university syllabus of the period.
By this time, however, the Index was becoming increasingly untenable. Texts previously banned by secular authorities – Ulysses, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lolita, even the works of the Marquis de Sade – were readily available in any well-stocked city bookshop, not to mention those of the universities. Literature itself was becoming ever more explicit, and four-letter words, as well as graphic sexual or blasphemous passages unprintable a few years before, were now almost obligatory. In The Last Temptation, Nikos Kazantzakis not only portrayed Jesus in a highly heterodox light, but also depicted him, if only in a dream sequence, engaging in sexual union with the Magdalene. Despite endorsements from such luminaries as diverse as Thomas Mann and Albert Schweitzer, Kazantzakis’ novel was promptly added to the Index. But there were too many other works, often of high literary quality, for even the most fanatically zealous Inquisitors to keep pace. In 1966, the Index was formally abolished by Pope Paul VI.
Control over the Dead Sea Scrolls
To some extent, the abolition of the Index was a mere formality. For some time previously, it had been doomed by trends of modern secular culture. Literate Catholics had inevitably been incurring sustained exposure to theologically unacceptable material, regardless of the prohibitions of the Church. But there were other spheres in which the Church still remained capable of regulating, controlling and restricting both access to knowledge and the flow of information, as rigorously as it had done in the Middle Ages. Perhaps the most notorious such instance was that of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In its handling of the Scrolls, the Holy Office, working on behalf of the Church through the Pontifical Biblical Commission, perpetrated what one scholar has called ‘the academic scandal par excellence of the twentieth century’.2
In the 1880s, the fledgling Modernist movement had not yet become subversive, not yet fallen into disrepute. Among the young Modernist scholars of the era, there was a naive credulity and idealistic optimism, a complacent assumption that disciplined archaeological research would validate, not contradict, the literal truth of scripture. The Ecole Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jérusalem – which eventually came to tyrannise and manipulate Dead Sea Scroll scholarship – was spawned by the first generation of Modernism, before the Church recognised how vertiginously close it had come to undermining itself. The school had its inception in 1882, when a French Dominican monk on pilgrimage in the Holy Land determined to establish a Dominican house in Jerusalem, comprising a church and a monastery. He selected a location where the ruins of an earlier church had been revealed by excavations. On this spot, according to tradition, Saint Stephen, supposedly the first Christian martyr, had been stoned to death.
Rome not only endorsed the idea, but proceeded to elaborate and expand on it. Pope Leo XIII recommended that a school of biblical st
udies also be created. It was duly founded in 1890 by Father Albert Lagrange and opened officially in 1892, containing living accommodation for fifteen resident students. The institution was one of many typically Modernist ventures of the time. Within its precincts, Catholic scholars were to be equipped with the academic expertise required to fortify the faith against the challenge posed by advances in historical and archaeological research.
Ten years later, disillusionment prevailed and Modernism had fallen under a cloud of official opprobrium. In 1903 Pope Leo had created the Pontifical Biblical Commission, an institution devised to work in tandem with the Holy Office in supervising and monitoring the work of Catholic scriptural scholarship. By this time, the mere suggestion of historical and archaeological research was sufficient to incur condemnation; and Father Lagrange along with his biblical school were duly investigated by the Commission. It was quickly confirmed, however, that Lagrange remained loyal to official doctrine and tradition, and that his heart was still in the right place so far as the Church was concerned. Indeed, much of his writing had endeavoured systematically to refute Modernist contentions. Lagrange was consequently appointed a member, or ‘consultant’, of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. His journal, Revue biblique, became the Commission's official publication; and this arrangement continued until 1908, when the Commission launched a journal of its own.
Despite the endorsement he had received, Lagrange continued to attract accusations of Modernism from the lower echelons of the clerical hierarchy. These accusations so demoralised him that in 1907 he abandoned his work in Old Testament studies. In 1912, he determined to relinquish biblical scholarship entirely and decamped from Jerusalem. But the Pope hastened to support him, ordered him back to his post and urged him to resume his work. Under his obedient auspices, the Ecole Biblique, originally founded as an adjunct of Modernism, now became a bulwark against it. Such, half a century later, was the institution that contrived to establish a virtual monopoly over the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In 1947, the first of these ancient texts – documents dating from the dawn of the Christian era and before – were discovered in a cave near Qumran, a forty-minute car drive east of Jerusalem, on the shores of the Dead Sea. The cave, subsequently known as Cave 1, proved to contain more than one Scroll. During the ensuing decade, another ten caves were found nearby to contain additional Scroll material, sometimes in substantially complete form, sometimes in fragments that had to be assembled like a jigsaw puzzle. American and Israeli scholars were quick to publish their findings, which generated immense excitement across the world. The Qumran texts were the earliest such documents ever to come to light in the Holy Land. They clearly dated from some time around the beginning of the Christian era. They bore testimony to a messianic, apocalyptic religious community that had occupied the site some 2,000 or more years before.
As long as the Scrolls could be associated exclusively with an isolated Judaic sect, the Church and the Holy Office remained indifferent to them, regarding them merely as interesting historical and archaeological material. In 1950, however, a professor at the Sorbonne, André Dupont-Sommer, gave a public lecture that caused an international sensation. He described one of the Dead Sea texts as depicting a ‘Sect of the New Covenant’. The leader of this sect was a messianic figure known as the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’, who suffered persecution and martyrdom. His followers believed the end of the world to be imminent. Only those having faith in the ‘Teacher’ would be saved. To worldwide consternation, Dupont-Sommer concluded that the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ was in many respects ‘the exact prototype of Jesus’.3
The Church promptly panicked. Documents pertaining to an isolated Judaic sect were one thing, documents that might cast a compromising or equivocal light on the origins of Christianity quite another. Catholic scholars had previously been offered access to Scroll material and expressed little interest. Now, however, an operation in damage limitation had to be launched and a cover-up instituted. Control of research and scholarship on the Scrolls had to established. At all costs the Qumran texts had to be presented to the public in a manner that distanced them from the origins of Christianity, that rendered them incidental or irrelevant to Catholic tradition, teaching, doctrine and dogma. Although he possessed no archaeological qualifications whatever, the Dominican director of the Ecole Biblique, Father Roland de Vaux, embarked on a concerted campaign to arrogate authority over as much Scroll material as possible.
Between 1951 and 1956, de Vaux undertook his own excavations at Qumran. His objective was to find – or if necessary contrive – proof that the Scrolls were indeed irrelevant to early Christianity, that they pertained merely to an isolated and unrepresentative desert community divorced even from the ‘official’ Judaism of the time. As a matter of course, dating of the Scrolls had to be brought into accord with this interpretation. In consequence, de Vaux had to engage in some distinctly dubious archaeological procedures – such as, for example, inventing walls where none existed by the simple expedient of leaving sections of a site unexcavated.4 By means of such devices, he endeavoured to establish his own chronology for the Scrolls, dating them safely and uncontroversially from before the Christian era.5
In the meantime, additional Scrolls and Scroll fragments were continuing to come to light – sometimes in substantial quantity at some locations. A picture was coalescing that threatened to become even more embarrassing for the Church than had first been supposed. There were indeed disturbing parallels between early Christianity and the community at Qumran to which the Scrolls bore witness. At the same time, the community at Qumran was emerging not as a remote desert enclave, but as a centre that had figured with some prominence in New Testament times, playing a significant role in the period's events. Worse still, it was emerging not only as messianic and apocalyptic, but also as militant and revolutionary, intent on wresting the Holy Land from the yoke of the Roman Empire and restoring the Judaic monarchy of the Old Testament. In other words, its orientation was as much political as religious.6 Such an orientation was increasingly difficult to reconcile with the meek lamblike Saviour of Christian tradition, who rendered unto Caesar what was Caesar's and urged his followers to turn the other cheek in pacific martyrdom. To establish control and management over the Scrolls, and over the awkward revelations they might contain, was thus becoming a matter of intensifying urgency for the Church.
By dint of dexterous machiavellian politicking, de Vaux contrived to get himself appointed head of an international team of scholars assigned to assemble, translate and publish the texts found at Qumran. He also contrived to bring the international team, and thus all work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, under the auspices of the Ecole Biblique – a Dominican institution, it must be remembered, accountable through the Pontifical Biblical Commission to the Holy Office. He further consolidated his authority by publishing the official academic journal devoted to the material found at Qumran. And he got himself appointed editor-in-chief of the supposedly definitive translation of Qumran texts, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, issued under the imprint of Oxford University Press. By these means he was able to exercise control over what was and was not published, how it was edited and translated. As a result he was able to establish an ostensibly unimpugnable orthodoxy of interpretation over all Qumran documents. De Vaux and his protégés thus became the internationally recognised experts on the Dead Sea Scrolls; and there seemed no reason for the world at large to doubt their integrity.
Such were the circumstances in which Dead Sea Scroll scholarship proceeded for some forty-five years. In a previous publication, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (1991), the authors of this book chronicled the story in detail. Here, it is sufficient to note that until the early 1990s, the Ecole Biblique maintained a virtually exclusive monopoly over Dead Sea Scroll research and over all new discoveries. Access to the texts was restricted to scholars whose interpretations would not embarrass the Church or its doctrinal teachings. When John Allegro – a non-Catholic member of the te
am entrusted with custody of the Scrolls – presumed to challenge the ‘official’ interpretation, he was systematically marginalised and academically discredited.
For forty-five years, the Scrolls remained in effect a private fiefdom – the exclusive domain of a team of predominantly Catholic scholars accountable to the Ecole Biblique, the Pontifical Biblical Commission and the Holy Office. This team equivocated, prevaricated and procrastinated. The release of certain material potentially embarrassing to the Church was inexplicably delayed. Other material was not released until a consensus of orchestrated interpretation had been established that cast it in the least compromising light. Questionable dating was deliberately promulgated, so as to distance the Scrolls from Christianity and prevent them from seeming to pertain in any way to Jesus, Saint Paul, Saint James or the movement that coalesced into the early Church of Christian tradition. Passages that bore too close a textual similarity to the New Testament were mistranslated and, in at least one dramatic instance, held back for decades.
On 9 July 1958, to cite but one example, de Vaux's team of scholars obtained a new Scroll fragment containing a bit of text. It was duly assigned an identifying number, 4Q246, denoting fragment 246 from Cave 4 at Qumran. The text proved easy and straightforward enough to translate. Indeed, a researcher present at the time told one of the authors of this book that a basic translation was completed by the following morning – by which time all the members of de Vaux's team had read it or knew what it said. But what it said was potentially explosive: ‘He will be called son of God, and they will call him son of the Most High… His kingdom will be an eternal kingdom.’7
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