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, m
ore 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:
As soon as one sets out to study the controversies provoked by the Dead Sea Scrolls, one becomes aware of a certain ‘tension’… But the tension does not all arise from the at first much disputed problems of dating, and the contention about the dating itself had, perhaps, behind it other anxieties than the purely scholarly ones.1
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:
One would like to see these problems discussed; and in the meantime, one cannot but ask oneself whether the scholars who have been working on the scrolls — so many of whom have taken Christian orders or have been trained in the rabbinical tradition — may not have been somewhat inhibited in dealing with such questions as these by their various religious commitments… one feels a certain nervousness, a reluctance, to take hold of the subject and to place it in historical perspective.2
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:
If, in any case, we look now at Jesus in the perspective supplied by the scrolls, we can trace a new continuity and, at last, get some sense of the drama that culminated in Christianity… The monastery [of Qumran]… is perhaps, more than Bethlehem or Nazareth, the cradle of Christianity.3
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’.
1. Solomon Schecter surrounded by boxes of the manuscripts he obtained from the Cairo geniza in 1896 and brought to Cambridge.
2. Muhammad adh-Dhib, (right) who discovered the first cave of Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception Page 6