The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception
Page 9
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’:
There is no doubt… that the evidence from the scrolls undermines the uniqueness of the Christians as a sect… In fact we know damn all about the origins of Christianity. However, these documents do lift the curtain.49
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:
On this thirtieth anniversary of their first coming to light the world is entitled to ask the authorities responsible for the publication of the Qumran scrolls… what they intend to do about this lamentable state of affairs. For unless drastic measures are taken at once, the greatest and the most valuable of all Hebrew and Aramaic manuscript discoveries is likely to become the academic scandal par excellence of the twentieth century.52
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:
Eight years ago I defined this situation as ‘a lamentable state of affairs’ and warned that it was ‘likely to become the academic scandal par excellence of the twentieth century’ unless drastic measures were taken at once. Regrettably, this has not happened and the present chief editor of the fragments has in the meantime gone on the record as one who rejects as unjust and unreasonable any criticism regarding the delay.53
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 exa
ctly 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.