The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

exactly what they said they’d heard.

Crop circles are caused by aliens: ALERT LEVEL 4

Further Reading

Pat Delgado and Colin Andrews, Circular Evidence^ 1989

Jim Schnabel, Round in Circles: Physicists, Poltergeists, Pranksters and the Secret History of the Cropwatchers, 1994

Dead Sea Scrolls

In early 1947, near Qumran on the north-west shore of the Dead Sea, a Bedouin herder named Mohammed Ahmed el-Hamed (or el-Dhib, “the Wolf”) tossed a stone into a cave in an attempt to flush out a missing goat. To his surprise there came back not the bleat of a goat but the sound of pottery breaking. Entering the cave, he found an ancient jar containing scrolls wrapped in linen. Later, through the offices of a local cobbler and antiquities dealer, Khalil Eskander Shahin (“Kando”), el-Dhib managed to sell some of the scrolls he’d discovered, and word slowly spread about the discoveries in the desert. The first archaeological excavations took place in February 1949. In 1952, another series of caves was found, and eventually over 800 scrolls were recovered from 11 caves around Wadi Qumran. The scrolls—many of which exist only as fragments—include versions of all but one book of the Old Testament, along with Biblical commentaries, non-Biblical texts on religious conduct, and oddities such as the Copper Scroll, which lists the hiding places for treasure in Israel. Mostly written in Hebrew, the Dead Sea Scrolls have been carbon-dated to as early as 200 BC. The scrolls thus include the earliest edition of the Bible; before Mohammed el-Dhib tossed his stone into that cave, the oldest known Bible was the Ben Asher text, written in ad 1008.

Most of the discovered scrolls were published promptly, the notable exception being the scrolls and fragments found in Cave 4, which represented nearly 40 per cent of the total Qumran material. The publication of the Cave 4 documents was entrusted to an “International Team” led by Father Roland de Vaux, a Domincan scholar from Jerusalem, and all others were barred from even viewing the material by the so-called “secrecy rule”. Even after de Vaux’s death in 1971, his successors repeatedly refused to allow publication even of photographs of the Cave 4 finds. Speculation began that the “International Team”, predominantly Catholic, had found something in the Cave 4 that it sought to hide. Fanning the fires of surmise were the academics Andre Dupont-Sommer and John Allegro, who noted that the “Teacher of Righteousness” described in some of the Qumran documents strangely paralleled Jesus the Messiah. Then Professor Robert Eisenman, another Scrolls scholar, pumped pure oxygen into the blazing speculations: he mooted that the “Teacher of Righteousness” was actually James, Jesus’s brother, and that James was the true founder of Christianity. Paul (Saul), in Eisenman’s theory, was a Roman fink seeking to bring James’s true Word into disrepute.

All the Dead Sea Scrolls controversy needed in order to flare up into a full-scale conspiracy theory was a couple of savvy writers on the look-out for a religious story to follow their hit book Holy Blood, Holy Grail. In The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (1991) journalists Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh energetically purpled up the musings of Dupont-Sommer, Allegro and Eisenman into the theory that de Vaux was a Vatican fixer who sought to bury (literally) texts found in Cave 4 which proved that Jesus’s life was mythicized by Paul, a Roman agent who faked his “conversion” in order to undermine anti-Roman messianic cults. The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, in other words, suggested that the Vatican, Paul’s church, was illegitimate—and that Christianity pre-dated Christ. Small wonder, if this were true, that de Vaux worked overtime in Cave 4 burying the evidence. Baigent and Leigh’s book became a bestseller.

Among Old Testament scholars there was no consensus on the Qumran documents. Some believed them to have been produced on site by a Jewish apocalyptic cult, the Essenes, while Karl Rengstorf of the University of Minister asserted that the Qumran scrolls had been taken from the Jewish temple in Jerusalem for safekeeping during the siege of AD 67–70, a view supported by Professor Norman Golb of Chicago. In a sense the strength of Baigent and Leigh’s case was the weakness and uncertainty of the alternatives.

Even on its publication, however, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception looked a shaky proposition, and time has tumbled it to ruin. Far from being a Vatican hit-squad, the “International Team” comprised scholars of several Christian denominations, one of whom, Millar Burrows, wrote:

It is quite true that as a liberal Protestant I do not share all the beliefs of my more conservative brethren. It is my considered conclusion, however, that if one will go through any of the historic statements of Christian faith he will find nothing that has been or can be disproved by the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is as true of things that I myself do not believe as it is of my most firm and cherished convictions. If I were so rash as to undertake a theological debate with a professor from either the Moody Bible Institute or Fordham University [a Catholic University]—which God forbid—I fear I should find no ammunition in the Dead Sea Scrolls to use against them.

Repeated carbon testing of the scrolls dates them to the last two centuries BC, a dating which agrees with archaeological and palaeographic evidence. Unless all the carbon-testing machines used have faulty meters, or the test results were faked, the scrolls pre-date Christ and have no bearing on the foundation of Christianity at all.

In the same year that The Dead Sea Deception hit the shelves, so began the publishing of all the scrolls so far found—and the claim that the Vatican was suppressing controversial scrolls was dealt a sledgehammer blow. The delay in publishing the contents of Cave 4 was largely due to innocent factors. As Florentine Garcia Martinez and Julio Trebolle Barrera write in The People of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Their Writings, Beliefs and Practices:

The real explanations for the delay in the publication of the texts are many and varied. The war, a tangled political situation and the premature death of the first two directors of the editorial project (Roland de Vaux and Pierre Benoit); also, several of the editors (Patrick Skehan, Yigael Yadin and Jean Starky) died before finishing their work. These are some of the factors which have influenced the present situation. However, the most important factor is the actual condition of the still unpublished texts, hundreds of minute fragments, with pathetic remains of incomplete works.

When the texts in question have been preserved in relatively large fragments, the task of reading, translation and interpretation is not extremely complicated. Even texts previously unknown can be published with relative speed. However, even in such cases, the speed of publication can have disastrous results, as the publication of the first set of texts from Cave 4 proves. Their publication in the official series, under John Allegro, appeared with great speed in 1968. However, this hasty edition (of only 90 pages of text) is so flawed that it cannot be used without the corrections (of over 100 pages) published in 1971 by the later director of the international team for the edition of the texts, John Strugnell, of the University of Harvard.

Martinez and Barrera might have added that academic jealousies also played their role in delay. At one juncture a dispute over which academic team had the right to publish went to court.

Debate over whether the Essenes authored the Dead Sea Scrolls still continues, warmed by archaeological evidence found in 2004, but few outside Baigent and Leigh’s publishing house continue to seriously suggest that the Vatican has hidden scrolls damaging to its faith. The Dead Sea Scrolls is one alleged cover-up that can have the last rites read over it.

The Vatican suppressed Dead Sea Scrolls which rocked the foundations of the Catholic faith: ALERT LEVEL 1

Further Reading

John Allegro, “The Untold Story of the Dead Sea Scrolls”, Harper’s, August 1966

Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception: Why a Handful of Religious Scholars Conspired to Suppress the Revolutionary Contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1991

Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise, The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered: The First Complete Translation and Interpretation of 50 Key Documents Withheld for over 35 Years, 1992

Florentino Garcia Martinez and Julio Trebolle Barrera, The People of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Their Writings, Beliefs and Practices, tr Wilfred G. E. Watson, 1995