The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

by Michael Baigent

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

  If the treasure were real, moreover, there were theological grounds for concern. De Vaux and the international team had been intent on depicting the Qumran community as an isolated enclave, having no connection with public events, political developments or the ‘mainstream’ of 1st-century history. If the ‘Copper Scroll’ did indeed indicate where the actual contents of the Temple lay hidden, Qumran could no longer be so depicted. On the contrary, connections would become apparent between Qumran and the Temple, the centre and focus of all Judaic affairs. Qumran would no longer be a self-contained and insulated phenomenon, but an adjunct of something much broader — something that might encroach dangerously on the origins of Christianity. More disturbing still, if the ‘Copper Scroll’ referred to a real treasure, it could only be a treasure removed from the Temple in the wake of the ad 66 revolt. This would upset the ‘safe’ dating and chronology which the international team had established for the entire corpus of scrolls.

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

  Allegro had consented to a temporary delay in releasing information about the ‘Copper Scroll’. He certainly didn’t expect the delay to prolong itself indefinitely. Still less did he expect the international team to defuse the scroll’s significance by dismissing the treasure it inventoried as purely fictitious. When Milik proceeded to do so, Allegro did not at first suspect any sort of conspiracy. In a letter to another of his colleagues, dated 23 April 1956, he gave vent to his impatience, but remained excited and optimistic, and referred to Milik with cavalier disdain:

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

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

  You go on to talk blithely about what the first Jewish-Christians thought in Jerusalem, and no one would guess that your only real evidence — if you can call it such — is the New Testament, that body of much work
ed-over traditions whose ‘evidence’ would not stand for two minutes in a court of law… As for… Jesus as a ‘son of God’ and ‘Messiah’ — I don’t dispute it for a moment; we now know from Qumran that their own Davidic Messiah was reckoned a ‘son of God’, ‘begotten’ of God — but that doesn’t prove the Church’s fantastic claim for Jesus that he was God Himself. There’s no ‘contrast’ in their terminology at all — the contrast is in its interpretation.38

  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:

  We foregathered… and explained what we hoped to do, only to be met with a blank refusal by De V. to collaborate in any way. We stared open-mouthed for some time, and then Dajani and the producer started trying to find out what it was all about. The whole thing was a complete knock-out because, as far as I was aware I had left my dear colleagues on the best of terms — or pretty much so. Certainly no bitterness on my side about anything. But De Vaux said that he had called a meeting of ‘his scholars’ and that they had agreed to have nothing to do with anything I had anything to do with! My pal the producer then took the old gent outside and explained in words of one syllable that we were avoiding any controversial matter at all in the program on the religious side, but he (de Vaux) was quite adamant. He said that whereas he could not stop us taking pictures of the monastery at Qumran, he would not allow us in the Scrollery or the Museum generally.39

  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:

  as soon as it became clear to my dear colleagues that even without them the programme was going forward… they started putting their cards on the table. It was not the programme they objected to, only Allegro… They then called in a taxi at our hotel and made the producer an offer — if he would drop Allegro completely, and have Strugnell as his script writer, or Milik, they would collaborate… Then one day, after we had returned from an exhausting day at Qumran, Awni phoned to say that when he had got in it was to find a note (anonymous) waiting for him, offering £150 to him to stop us going to Amman and photographing in the Museum there.40

  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:

  From the way the publication of the fragments is being planned, the non-Catholic members of the team are being removed as quickly as possible… In fact, so vast is Milik’s, Starcky’s and Strugnell’s lots of 4Q [Cave 4 material], I believe that they should be split up immediately and new scholars brought in to get the stuff out quickly.

  …a dangerous situation is fast developing where the original idea of an international and interdenominational editing group is being bypassed. All fragments are brought first to De V. or Milik, and, as with cave Eleven, complete secrecy is kept over what they are till long after they have been studied by this group.42

  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’:

  I believe that a rule should be laid down that preliminary publications must be made immediately the document is collected as far as it seems possible, and that a steady stream of these publications should be made in one journal… This business of holding up publication of fragments merely to avoid the ‘deflowering’ of the final volume seems to me most unscholarly, as is the business of keeping competent scholars away from the fragments… There was perhaps good reason… when we were in the first stages of collecting the pieces. But now that most of this work is done, anybody can work over a document and publish it in at least provisional form.43

  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:

  Well, they’ve done it again. For the fifth time the BBC have put off showing that TV programme on the Scrolls… There can be no reasonable doubt now that De Vaux’s cronies in London are using their influence to kill the programme, as he wished… De Vaux will stop at nothing to control the Scrolls material. Somehow or other he must be removed from his present controlling position. I am convinced that if something does turn up which affects the Roman Catholic dogma, the world will never see it. De Vaux will scrape the money out of some or other barrel and send the lot to the Vatican to be hidden or destroyed…44

  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. I
t 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.