The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

by Michael Baigent

  As we have noted, the international team, from its very beginnings, was dominated by Father de Vaux, then director of the Ecole Biblique, and by his close friend and disciple, the then Father Milik. As Allegro complained, both men would constantly arrogate first claim to all incoming texts: ‘All fragments are brought first to De V. or Milik, and… complete secrecy is kept over what they are till long after they have been studied by this group.’1 Even Strugnell stated that when fresh material came in, Milik would invariably pounce on it, claiming it fell within the parameters of his own particular assignment.2

  Not surprisingly, then, Milik ended up with the lion’s share of the most important material — and particularly of the controversial ‘sectarian’ material. The creation of his monopoly was facilitated by the fact that he was permanently resident in Jerusalem at the time, along with two of his staunchest supporters, de Vaux and Father Jean Starcky. Father Skehan, though not permanently resident in Jerusalem, threw his weight behind this triumvirate. So did Professor Cross — who had been assigned ‘biblical’ rather than ‘sectarian’ material anyway. Allegro, of course, cast himself in the role of rebel, but his opposition was hampered by the fact that he was in Jerusalem only intermittently. Of those residing in Jerusalem during the crucial period of excavation, purchase of material, allocation of texts and collation of fragments, only the young John Strugnell (who would hardly have challenged de Vaux anyway) was not Catholic — and he subsequently converted. All the others were, in fact, Roman Catholic priests, attached to, and residing at, the Ecole Biblique. Among the other current members of the team or writers in the area of Qumran studies working at the Ecole are Father Emile Puech and Father Jerome Murphy-O’Connor.

  It was not just by virtue of being on the spot that this Catholic conclave came to dominate Qumran scholarship. Neither, certainly, was it by virtue of any outstanding pre-eminence in the field. Indeed, there was no shortage of no less competent or qualified scholars who, as we have noted, were excluded. A major determining factor was the Ecole Biblique itself, which systematically undertook to establish for itself, as an institution, a position of unrivalled pre-eminence. The Ecole had its own journal, for example, Revue biblique, edited by de Vaux, who published in its pages some of the most consequential and influential early articles on Qumran — articles bearing the stamp of first-hand authority. And in 1958, the Ecole launched a second journal, Revue de Qumran, devoted exclusively to the Dead Sea Scrolls and related matters. Thus the Ecole officially controlled the two most prominent and prestigious forums for discussion of Qumran material. The Ecole’s editors could accept or reject articles as they saw fit, and were thereby enabled to exert a decisive influence on the entire course of Qumran scholarship. This situation was inaugurated at the very inception of Qumran studies.

  In addition to its publications, the Ecole created a special research library oriented specifically towards Qumran studies. A card index was compiled, which documented every book, every scholarly article, every newspaper or magazine report published on the Dead Sea Scrolls anywhere in the world. All publications on the subject were collected and filed in the library — which was not open to the general public. Although some of the secret, unclassified and still unassigned scroll material was kept at the Ecole, most of it was housed at the Rockefeller Museum. Nevertheless, the Rockefeller was reduced to the status of a mere ‘workshop’. The Ecole became the ‘headquarters’, the ‘offices’, the ‘school’ and the ‘nerve centre’. Thus the Ecole contrived to establish itself as the de facto and generally recognised centre of all Qumran scholarship, the focus of all legitimate and academically respectable research in the field. The Ecole’s ‘stamp of approval’ could, in effect, underwrite, certify and guarantee a scholar’s reputation. Withholding such endorsement was tantamount to destroying a man’s credibility.

  Officially, of course, the studies over which the Ecole presided were supposed to be non-denominational, non-partisan, impartial, unbiased. The Ecole presented to the world a faqade of ‘scientific objectivity’. But could such ‘objectivity’ in fact be expected on the part of a Dominican institution, with vested Catholic interests to protect? ‘My faith has nothing to fear from my scholarship’, de Vaux once stated to Edmund Wilson.3 No doubt it didn’t, but that was never in fact the real question. The real question was whether his scholarship, and its reliability, had anything to fear from his faith.

  As we ourselves became au fait with the situation, we began to wonder if the correct questions were indeed being asked, if blame was indeed being correctly apportioned. Biblical Archaeology Review, for example, had focused on the Israeli government as a primary culprit. But if the Israeli government was guilty of anything, it was guilty only of an understandable sin of omission. By virtue of John Allegro’s success in persuading the Jordanian government to nationalise the Rockefeller Museum,4 and political and military circumstance — the Six Day War and its aftermath — Israel suddenly found itself, as a fait accompli, in possession of Arab East Jerusalem, where the Rockefeller Museum and the Ecole Biblique were situated. As ‘spoils of war’, the Dead Sea Scrolls thus became de facto Israeli. But Israel was fighting for its own survival at the time. In the turmoil of the moment, there were more urgent matters to deal with than the sorting out of scholarly disputes or the rectifying of academic inequities. Neither could Israel afford to isolate itself further on the international scene by antagonising a body of prestigious researchers and thereby provoking a reaction from the intellectual community — as well, quite possibly, as from the Vatican. In consequence, the Israeli government had taken the expedient course of doing nothing, of implicitly sanctioning the status quo. The international team had simply been asked to get on with their business.

  It was, of course, more accurate to assign responsibility to the international team themselves — as, indeed, a number of commentators had not hesitated to do. But were the motives ascribed to the team wholly accurate? Was it simply a matter of what the New York Times called ‘the vanity of scholars’, and Professor Neusner in BAR ‘arrogance and self-importance’?5 These factors undoubtedly played a part. But the real question was one of accountability. To whom, ultimately, were the international team accountable? In theory, they should have been accountable to their peers, to other scholars. But was that indeed the case? In reality, the international team seemed to recognise no accountability whatever, except to the Ecole Biblique. And to whom was the Ecole Biblique accountable? Although he’d not investigated the matter himself, Eisenman prompted us, when we probed him, to explore the connection between the Ecole and the Vatican.

  We approached other scholars in the field, some of whom had gone publicly on record to condemn the ‘scandal’. Not one of them, it transpired, had thought to look into the Ecole Biblique’s background and official allegiances. They had, of course, recognised that the Ecole was Catholic, but they did not know whether it had any direct or formal connection with the Vatican. Professor Davies at Sheffield, for example, confessed that he found the question intriguing. Now that he thought about it, he said, he found it striking how criticism was so often and so assiduously deflected away from the Ecole.6 According to Professor Golb at the University of Chicago, ‘people hint… that there are connections’ between the Ecole and the Vatican. ‘A lot of events,’ he said, ‘fit the theory [of connection].’7 Like his colleagues, however, he had not explored the matter any further. Given the Ecole’s undisputed dominance of Qumran scholarship, it seemed to us particularly important to ascertain the institution’s official orientation, attitudes, allegiances and accountability. Here, we decided, was something we ourselves could undertake to investigate in detail. The results were to prove a major revelation, not just to us, but to other independent researchers in the field as well.

  Today, in the late 20th century, one takes the procedures and methodology of historical and archaeological research more or less for granted. Until the mid-19th century, however, historical and archaeological research, as we understand su
ch things today, simply didn’t exist at all. There were no accepted methods or procedures; there was no coherent discipline or training; there was no real awareness that such research in any sense constituted a form of ‘science’, requiring the rigour, the ‘objectivity’, the systematic approach that any science does. The ‘field’, such as it was, existed not as a sphere of formal academic study but as a happy hunting-ground for learned — and often not so learned — amateurs. The territory was as yet too uncharted to accommodate anything that might be called ‘professionalism’.

  Thus, for example, in the early 19th century, wealthy Europeans, on their ‘grand tour’, might rummage about at random for Greek or Roman artefacts to ship back to the chateau, schloss or country house at home. In their search for antiquities, a few ventured further afield, digging holes all over the fertile terrain of the vast and moribund Ottoman Empire. Such enterprises amounted, in effect, not to anything that might pass for archaeology, but to treasure-hunting. Knowledge of the past was deemed less important than whatever booty it might provide; and funds for the plundering of such booty were supplied by, or for, various museums in quest of large and dramatic statues to place on display. Public demand for relics of this sort was considerable. Crowds would flock to museums to see the latest trophies, and the popular press would have a field day. But the trophies themselves were more an inspiration to the imagination, and to imaginative speculation, than to any form of scientific method. Flaubert’s Salammbô, for example, published in 1862, represents an extraordinary feat of ‘literary archaeology’, a grandiose imaginative attempt to reconstruct, with meticulous scientific precision, the splendour of ancient Carthage. But science itself had not yet caught up with Flaubert’s aesthetic objectives. Certainly no historian had ever attempted to use scientific or archaeological data to bring ancient Carthage so vividly back to life.

  Until the mid-19th century, what passed for archaeology was, more often than not, a sorry business indeed. Wall paintings, carvings and other artefacts would visibly disintegrate before the bemused eyes of their discoverers — who, of course, had no real concept of conservation. Priceless statues would be demolished in the search for some supposed treasure concealed within them. Or they might be hacked into fragments to make transportation easier — and then lost, when the barges transporting them sank. To the extent that any systematic form of excavation was practised at all, it had not yet been yoked to history — to the principle of illuminating the past. The excavators themselves lacked the knowledge, the skill and the technology to turn their discoveries to account.

  The acknowledged ‘father of modern archaeology’ was the German-born Heinrich Schliemann (1822-90), naturalised as an American citizen in 1850. From his boyhood, Schliemann had been a passionate admirer of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. He was firmly convinced that these epics were not ‘mere fables’, but mythologised history, chronicles inflated to legendary status, perhaps, but still referring to events, people and places which had once actually existed. The Trojan War, Schliemann insisted, to the mockery and scepticism of his contemporaries, was an event in historical fact. Troy was not just a figment of a poet’s imagination. On the contrary, it had once been a ‘real’ city. One could use Homer’s work as a species of map. One could identify certain recognisable geographical and topographical features. One could compute approximate speeds of travel at the time, and thereby estimate the distance between one point and another cited by Homer. By such means, Schliemann concluded, one could retrace the itinerary of the Greek fleet in the Iliad and locate the actual historical site of Troy. After performing the requisite calculations, Schliemann was firmly convinced he had found ‘the X that marked the spot’.

  Having amassed a fortune in commerce, Schliemann embarked on what his contemporaries regarded as a quixotic enterprise — to undertake a full-scale excavation of the ‘X’ he had located. In 1868, he went to Greece and proceeded, using a poem that was two and a half millennia old as his guide, to retrace the alleged route of the Greek fleet. At what he believed to be the relevant site in Turkey, he began to dig. And to the world’s consternation, astonishment and admiration, Schliemann there found Troy — or, at any rate, a city that conformed to Homer’s account of Troy. As a matter of fact, Schliemann found a number of cities. In four campaigns of excavation, he uncovered no fewer than nine, each superimposed on the ruins of what had been its predecessor. Nor, after this initial spectacular success, did he confine himself to Troy. A few years later, between 1874 and 1876, he excavated at Mycenae in Greece, where his discoveries were deemed to be perhaps even more important than those made in Turkey.

  Schliemann demonstrated triumphantly that archaeology could do more than just prove or disprove the historical validity underlying archaic legends. He also demonstrated that it could add flesh and substance to the often bald, stark chronicles of the past — could provide a recognisably human and social context for them, could provide a matrix of daily life and practices that enabled one to understand the mentality and milieu from which they had issued. What was more, he demonstrated the applicability of strict scientific method and procedures, the careful observation and recording of data. In addressing himself to the nine superimposed cities at Troy, Schliemann employed the same techniques that had only recently come into favour in geological studies. These enabled him to conclude what to the modern mind appears self-evident — that one stratum of deposits can be distinguished from others on the basic premise that the lowest is the earliest in time. Schliemann thus became the pioneer of the archaeological discipline known as ‘stratigraphy’. Almost single-handed, he revolutionised archaeological thought and methodology.

  It was quickly recognised, of course, that Schliemann’s scientific approach could readily be brought to bear on the field of biblical archaeology. In 1864, four years before the discovery of Troy, Sir Charles Wilson, then a captain in the Royal Engineers, had been sent to Jerusalem, to survey the city and produce a definitive map. In the course of his work, Wilson became the first modern researcher to excavate and explore beneath the Temple, where he discovered what were believed to have been Solomon’s stables. His endeavours inspired him to help co-found the Palestine Exploration Fund, the chief patron of which was no less a person than Queen Victoria herself. At first, the work of this organisation proceeded in a characteristically uncoordinated fashion. At the 1886 annual meeting, however, Wilson announced that ‘some of the wealthy men of England would follow Dr. Schliemann’s example’ and apply his scientific approach to a specific biblical site.8 The enterprise was entrusted to the charge of a prominent archaeologist then active in Egypt, William Matthew Flinders Petrie. Adopting Schliemann’s methods, Flinders Petrie, after two false starts, discovered a mound containing the ruins of eleven superimposed cities.

  During his work in Egypt, Flinders Petrie had evolved another technique for the dating of ancient ruins, based on a pattern of gradual development and change in the shape, design and embellishment of household pottery. This enabled him to establish a chronological sequence not just for the artefacts themselves, but for the rubble surrounding them as well. Although certainly not foolproof, Petrie’s approach brought another manifestation of scientific methodology and observation to bear on archaeological research. It became one of the standard procedures employed by his team in Palestine — a team which, in 1926, was joined by the young Gerald Lankester Harding. As we have noted, Harding, eventually head of Jordan’s Department of Antiquities, was to play a crucial role in the early excavation and compilation of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  While British archaeologists in Egypt and Palestine followed in Schliemann’s footsteps, the Germans refined and elaborated his procedures. German archaeology endeavoured to do, in fact, what

  Flaubert, in Salammbô, had done in fiction — to re-create, down to the most minute detail, the entire milieu and society from which specific archaeological artefacts had issued. This, needless to say, was a slow, painstaking process, requiring much care and inexhaustible patience
. It did not just involve the excavation of ‘treasures’, or of monumental structures. It also involved the excavation and reconstruction of administrative, commercial and residential buildings. Using this approach, Robert Koldeway, between 1899 and 1913, excavated the ruins of Babylon. From his work, there evolved a coherent and comprehensively detailed picture of what had previously, to all intents and purposes, been a ‘lost civilisation’.

  The archaeological advances of the 19th century stemmed in large part from Schliemann’s critical scrutiny of Homer’s epics, his methodical scientific insistence on disengaging fact from fiction. It was, needless to say, only a matter of time before scripture itself was subjected to the same sort of rigorous scrutiny. The man most responsible for this process was the French theologian and historian Ernest Renan. Born in 1823, Renan embarked on a career in the priesthood, enrolling in the seminary of St Sulpice. In 1845, however, he renounced his intended vocation, having been led by Germanic biblical scholarship to question the literal truth of Christian teaching. In 1860, Renan embarked on an archaeological journey to Palestine and Syria. Three years later, he published his famous (or notorious) La vie de Jésus, {The Life of Jesus), which was translated into English the following year. Renan’s book sought to demystify Christianity. It portrayed Jesus as ‘an incomparable man’, but still a man — an eminently mortal and non-divine personage — and formulated a hierarchy of values which today would be called a form of ‘secular humanism’. Renan was no obscure academic or fly-by-night sensationalist. On the contrary, he was one of the most esteemed and prestigious intellectual figures of his age. As a result, The Life of Jesus created one of the greatest upsets in the history of 19th-century thought. It became one of the half-dozen or so best-selling books of the entire century, and has never subsequently been out of print. For the ‘educated classes’ of the time, Renan became as much a household name as Freud or Jung might be today; and, in the absence of television, he was probably much more widely read. At a single stroke, The Life of Jesus transformed attitudes towards biblical scholarship almost beyond recognition. And for the next thirty years of his life, Renan was to remain a thorn in the Church’s side, publishing subsequent works on the Apostles, on Paul and on early Christianity in the context of imperial Roman thought and culture. He produced two epic series of texts, Histoire des origines du christianisme (1863-83) and Histoire du peuple d’Israel (1887-93). It is no exaggeration to say that Renan released from its bottle a genie which Christianity has never since managed to recapture or tame.