The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

by Michael Baigent

  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’:

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

  Professor Cross makes it clear that each member of the team knew what all the others were doing. All the material had been laid out and arranged in a single room, the ‘Scrollery’, and anyone was free to wander about and see how his colleagues were progressing.[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, le
isure 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:

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

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

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