The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

by Michael Baigent

  Eisenman explored the question with lawyers. Yes, they concluded, the High Court might be persuaded to intervene. In order for it to do so, however, Eisenman would have to present it with proof of a miscarriage of justice; he would have to show, preferably in writing, that access to the scrolls by a legitimate scholar had been refused. At the time, no such record existed — not, at least, in the legalistic sense the Court would require. Other scholars had, of course, been refused access to the scrolls; but some of them were dead, others were scattered across the world, and there was none of the required documentation. Strugnell would therefore have to be approached with a series of new requests for access to specific materials — which, as a foregone conclusion, he would refuse. Now that Eisenman had the catalogue numbers, his task would be easier.

  Not wishing to make this request alone, Eisenman felt it would be more impressive if he enlisted the support of others. He approached Philip Davies of Sheffield, who agreed to support him in what both recognised would be only the first shot of a prolonged engagement fought through the Israeli High Court. On 16 March 1989, the two professors submitted a formal letter to John Strugnell. They requested access to certain original fragments, and photographs of fragments, found at the Qumran site designated Cave 4, and listed in the computer print-out which Eisenman had leaked into circulation. In order to preclude any misunderstanding, they cited the reference numbers assigned by the print-out to the photographic negatives. They also requested access to a number of scroll commentaries, or commentary fragments, related to the primary text. They offered to pay all costs involved and promised not to publish any definitive transcription or translation of the material, which would be used only in their own research. They promised, too, to abide by all the normal procedures of copyright law.

  In their letter, Eisenman and Davies acknowledged the time and energy expended over the years by the international team — but, they said, they felt the team had ‘already been adequately compensated’ by enjoying such long and exclusive access to the Qumran material. They stated that thirty-five to forty years was long enough for other scholars to have waited for similar access, without which ‘we can no longer make meaningful progress in our endeavours’. The letter continued:

  Surely your original commission was to publish these materials as quickly as possible for the benefit of the scholarly community as a whole, not to control them. It would have been different, perhaps, if you and your scholars had discovered these materials in the first place. But you did not; they were simply assigned to you…

  …The situation as it now stands is abnormal in the extreme. Therefore, as mature scholars at the height of our powers and abilities, we feel it is an imposition upon us and a hardship to ask us to wait any longer for the research availability of and access to these materials forty years after their discovery.27

  Eisenman and Davies expected Strugnell to refuse their requests. Strugnell, however, did not bother to reply at all. On 2 May, therefore, Eisenman wrote to Amir Drori — who earlier that year had renewed the international team’s monopoly with the publication deadline of 1996. Eisenman enclosed a copy of the letter to Strugnell, mentioning that it had been posted to both of Strugnell’s addresses, at Harvard and in Jerusalem. Of Strugnell’s failure to reply, he wrote: ‘Frankly, we are tired of being treated contemptuously. This kind of cavalier treatment is not really a new phenomenon, but is part and parcel of the process that has been going on for 20-30 years or more…’28

  Since Strugnell would not grant access to the Qumran material, Eisenman requested that Drori, exercising a higher authority, should do so. He then made two particularly important points. As long as the international team continued to control the Qumran texts, it would not be sufficient merely to speed up the publication schedule. Nothing short of free scholarly access would be satisfactory — to check the international team’s conclusions, to allow for variations in translation and interpretation, to discern connections the team themselves might perhaps have overlooked:

  We cannot be sure… that they have exhausted all possible fragments in relation to a given document or that they are putting fragments together in proper sequence. Nor can we be sure if the inventories are in fact complete and that fragments may not have been lost, destroyed or overlooked in some manner or for some reason. Only the whole of the interested scholarly community working together can assure this.29

  The second point would appear, at least with hindsight, to be self-evident. The international team insisted on the importance of archaeology and palaeography. It was on the basis of their supposedly accurate archaeological and palaeographical studies, as Eisenman had explained, that dates for the Qumran texts had been posited — and accepted. Yet the texts themselves had been subject only to carbon-dating tests in use at around the time of the scrolls’ discovery — tests which were very clumsy and consumed much manuscript material. Lest too much text be lost, therefore, only some of the wrappings found in the jars had been tested. These confirmed a date of around the beginning of the Christian era. None of the texts had been tested by the more recent techniques of Carbon-14 dating, even though Carbon-14 dating had now been refined by the newer AMS (Accelerator Mass Spectroscopy) technique. Little material would now be lost in the process and greater accuracy could be achieved. Eisenman therefore suggested that Drori exercise his authority and perform new, up-to-date tests. He also recommended that outsiders be brought into the process to keep it fair. He concluded his letter with a passionate appeal: ‘Please act to release these materials to interested scholars who need them to proceed with professional research without prejudice and without distinction immediately.’30

  No doubt prompted by Drori, Strugnell, in Jerusalem at the time, at last replied on 15 May. Despite the fact that Eisenman’s letter to him had been posted to his address at both Harvard and Jerusalem, he blamed the delay on its having been sent to ‘the wrong country’.31

  According to BAR, ‘Strugnell’s imperious reply to Eisenman’s request for access displays extraordinary intellectual hauteur and academic condescension.’32 In it, he declares himself ‘puzzled’ as to why Eisenman and Davies showed their letter to ‘half the Who’s Who of Israel’. He accuses them of not having followed ‘acceptable norms’ and refers to them as ‘lotus-eaters’, which, in Strugnell’s Mandarin, presumably denotes Californians, though why this term should apply to Philip Davies at Sheffield is an open question. Strugnell contrives not just to deny Eisenman’s and Davies’s request for access, but also to dodge each of the salient points they had raised. He advises them to take as their example the way ‘such requests have been handled in the past’ and go through established channels — ignoring the fact that all such requests ‘in the past’ had been denied. He also complains that the print-out Eisenman and Davies had used to cite reference numbers of photographic negatives was old and out of date. He neglects to mention that this print-out, not to mention any new one, had been unavailable to non-members of the international team until Eisenman put it into circulation.33

  Eisenman responded to Strugnell’s brush-off by going as public as he possibly could. By the middle of 1989, the issue had become a cause célèbre in American and Israeli newspapers, and, to a lesser degree, was picked up by the British press as well. Eisenman was extensively and repeatedly quoted by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Time Magazine and Canada’s Maclean’s Magazine. He stressed five major points:

  1. That all research on the Dead Sea Scrolls was being unfairly monopolised by a small enclave of scholars with vested interests and a biased orientation.

  2. That only a small percentage of the Qumran material was finding its way into print and that most of it was still being withheld.

  3. That it was misleading to claim that the bulk of the so-called ‘biblical’ texts had been released, because the most important material consisted of the so-called ‘sectarian’ texts — new texts, never seen before, with a great bearing on the history and
religious life of the 1st century.

  4. That after forty years, access to the scrolls should be made available to all interested scholars.

  5. That AMS Carbon-14 tests, monitored by independent laboratories and researchers, should immediately be conducted on the Qumran documents.

  As was perhaps inevitable, once the media had begun to sensationalise it, the affair quickly degenerated, with Eisenman being misquoted on two separate occasions, and a barrage of invective coming from both sides. But behind the clash of egos, the central issue remained unresolved. As Philip Davies had written in 1988:

  Any archaeologist or scholar who digs or finds a text but does not pass on what has been found deserves to be locked up as an enemy of science. After forty years we have neither a full and definitive report on the dig nor a full publication of the scrolls.34

  5. Academic Politics and Bureaucratic Inertia

  Early in 1989, Eisenman had been invited to present a paper at a conference on the scrolls to be held at the University of Groningen that summer. The organiser and chairman of the conference was the secretary of the journal Revue de Qumran, the official organ of the Ecole Biblique, the French-Dominican archaeological school in Jerusalem of which most of the international team were members or associates. According to the arrangement, all papers presented at the conference would subsequently be published in the journal. By the time of the conference, however, Eisenman’s conflict with the international team, and the ensuing controversy, had become public. It was not, of course, feasible to retract Eisenman’s invitation. He was therefore allowed to present his paper, but its publication in Revue de Qumran was blocked.[3]

  The chairman of the conference was deeply embarrassed, apologising to Eisenman and explaining there was nothing he could do — his superiors, the editors of the journal, had insisted on excluding Eisenman’s paper.1 Revue de Qumran had thus effectively revealed itself, not as a non-partisan forum for the spectrum of scholarly opinion, but as a species of mouthpiece for the international team.

  The balance was, however, slowly beginning to tilt in Eisenman’s favour. The New York Times, for example, had monitored the dispute throughout, and had assessed the arguments of the opposing factions. On 9 July 1989, it pronounced its judgment in an editorial entitled ‘The Vanity of Scholars’:

  Some works of scholarship, like the compilation of dictionaries, legitimately take a lifetime. But with others, the reasons for delay can be less lofty: greed for glory, pride, or just plain old sloth.

  Consider the sorry saga of the Dead Sea Scrolls, documents that might cast spectacular new light on the early history of Christianity and the doctrinal evolution of Judaism.

  The scrolls were discovered in 1947, but many that are in fragments remain unpublished. More than 40 years later, a coterie of dawdling scholars is still spinning out the work while the world waits and the precious pieces lapse into dust.

  Naturally, they refuse to let others see the material until it is safely published under their names. The publication schedule of J.T. Milik, a Frenchman responsible for more than 50 documents, is a source of particular frustration to other scholars…

  Archaeology is particularly vulnerable to scholars who gain control of materials and then refuse to publish them.2

  Despite the unseemly squabbling, the clack and crack of ruptured amour propre, the fustian and umbrage and general high dudgeon, Eisenman’s arguments were now beginning to carry weight, to convince people. And there was also another development, of comparable importance. The ‘outsiders’ — the adversaries of the international team — were beginning to organise, to consolidate their efforts and conduct conferences of their own. In the months following the editorial in the New York Times, there were to be two such conferences.

  The first of these was arranged by Professor Kapera of Krakow, with the aid of Philip Davies, and took place at Mogilany, Poland. It produced what became known as the ‘Mogilany Resolution’, with two main demands: that ‘the relevant authorities’ in Israel should obtain photographic plates of all unpublished scrolls, and that these should be supplied to Oxford University Press for immediate publication; and that the data obtained from de Vaux’s excavations at Qumran between 1951 and 1956, much of which had not yet appeared, should now be issued in definitive published form.

  Seven and a half months later, a second conference was convened, on Eisenman’s home territory, California State University at Long Beach. Papers were presented by a number of academics, including Eisenman himself, Professor Ludwig Koenen and Professor David Noel Freedman from the University of Michigan, Professor Norman Golb from the University of Chicago and Professor James M. Robinson from Claremont University, who had headed the team responsible for publishing the Nag Hammadi Scrolls. Two resolutions were produced: first, that a facsimile edition of all hitherto unpublished Qumran fragments should be issued immediately — a necessary ‘first step in throwing the field open to scholars irrespective of point of view or approach’; and second, that a data bank of AMS Carbon-14 results on known manuscripts should be established, to facilitate the future dating of all previously undated texts and manuscripts, whether on papyrus, parchment, codex or any other material.

  None of these resolutions, of course, either from Mogilany or from Long Beach, was in any sense legally binding. In the academic community, however, and in the media, they carried considerable weight. Increasingly, the international team were finding themselves on the defensive; furthermore, they were beginning, albeit slowly, to give way. Thus, for example, Milik, while the public battle raged, quietly passed over one text — the very text Eisenman and Davies had requested to see in their letter to Strugnell — to Professor Joseph Baumgarten of Hebrew College in Baltimore. Baumgarten, of course, who was now a member of the international team, characteristically refused to let anyone else see the text in question. Neither did Strugnell — who as head of the team was supposed to authorise and supervise such transactions — bother to inform Eisenman or Davies what had occurred. But the mere fact that Milik was handing over material at all reflected some progress, some sense that he felt sufficiently pressured to relinquish at least part of his private fiefdom — and with it, some of the onus of responsibility.

  More promising still, Milik, in 1990, surrendered a second text, this time to Professor James VanderKamm of North Carolina State University. VanderKamm, in a break with the international team’s tradition, promptly offered access to other scholars. ‘I will show the photographs to anyone who is interested in seeing them’, he announced.3 Milik, not surprisingly, described VanderKamm’s behaviour as ‘irresponsible’.4 VanderKamm then withdrew his offer.

  An important role in the campaign to obtain open access to the Dead Sea Scrolls was, as we have already indicated, played by Hershel Shank’s journal, Biblical Archaeology Review. It was BAR that fired the opening salvo of the current media campaign, when in 1985 it published a long and hard-hitting article on the delays in releasing Qumran material. And when Eisenman obtained a copy of the computer print-out listing all the fragments in the international team’s possession, he leaked this document to BAR. He thus furnished BAR with invaluable ammunition. In return, BAR was only too eager to provide publicity and an open forum.

  As we have also noted, however, BAR’s attack, at least in part, was directed at the Israeli government, whom it held as responsible for the delays as the international team themselves.5 Eisenman was careful to distance himself from BAR’s position in this respect. To attack the Israeli government, he felt, was simply to divert attention from the real problem — the withholding of information.

  Despite this initial difference of approach, however, BAR’s contribution has been immense. Since the spring of 1989, in particular, the magazine has sustained a relentless, non-stop barrage of articles directed at the delays and deficiencies of Qumran scholarship and research. BAR’s basic position is that, ‘in the end the Dead Sea Scrolls are public treasures’.6 As for the international team: ‘The team of editors has now
become more an obstacle to publication than a source of information. ‘7BAR has in general pulled very few punches and, indeed, often comes very close to the legal limits of what can be printed. And while Eisenman may not have shared BAR’s eagerness to attack the Israeli government, there is no question that those attacks have helped to produce at least some results.

  Thus, for example, the Israeli authorities were persuaded to assume some measure of authority over the unpublished Qumran material. In April 1989 the Israeli Archaeological Council appointed a ‘Scroll Oversight Committee’ to supervise the publication of all Qumran texts and ensure that the members of the international team were indeed fulfilling their assigned tasks. In the beginning, the creation of this committee may have been something of a cosmetic exercise, intended merely to convey the impression that something constructive was being done. In practice, however, as the international team have continued to drag their feet, the committee has assumed more and more power.

  As we have noted, Father Benoit’s timetable, according to which the whole of the Qumran material would be published by 1993, was superseded by Strugnell’s new and (theoretically at least) more realistic timetable, with a deadline of 1996. Eisenman had remained profoundly sceptical of the team’s intentions. BAR was more vociferous. The ‘suggested Timetable’, the magazine proclaimed, was ‘a hoax and a fraud’.8 It was not signed, BAR pointed out; it technically bound no one to anything; it made no provision whatever for progress reports or proof that the international team were actually doing their jobs. What would happen, BAR asked the Israeli Department of Antiquities, if the stipulated deadlines were not met?