The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

than a week.

Even before he breached the consensus of the international team, Allegro was anxious to speed things up and sceptical of the various reasons proffered for not doing so. But was it merely as a sop that de Vaux wrote to him on 22 March 1959 that all the Qumran texts would be published, and Discoveries in the Judaean Desert complete, by the middle of 1962, the date scheduled for StrugnelFs concluding volume? In the same letter, de Vaux stated that work on the original texts would be finished by June 1960, after which they would be turned over to the various institutions that had paid for them. Today, more than thirty years after de Vaux’s letter, survivors of his team and its new members still cling to the scrolls in their possession, insisting on the need for continued research. And, it is worth repeating, what has been voluntarily released is, for the most part, of least importance.

The Qumran texts are generally classified under two rubrics. On the one hand, there is a corpus of early copies of biblical texts, some with slightly variant readings. These are referred to as ‘biblical material’. On the other, there is a corpus of non-biblical material consisting for the most part of documents never seen before, which can be labelled ‘sectarian material’. Most outsiders, needless to say, instinctively assume the ‘biblical material’ to be of the greater interest and consequence — the simple word ‘biblical’ triggers associations in the mind which lead automatically to such a supposition. To our knowledge, Eisenman was the first to detect, and certainly the first to emphasise, the sophistry involved in this. For the ‘biblical material’ is perfectly innocuous and uncon-troversial, containing no revelations of any kind. It consists of little more than copies of books from the Old Testament, more or less the same as those already in print or with only minor alterations. There is nothing radically new here. In reality, the most significant texts comprise not the ‘biblical’ but the ‘sectarian’ literature. It is these texts — rules, biblical commentaries, theological, astrological and messianic treatises — that pertain to the ‘sect’ alleged to have resided at Qumran and to their teachings. To label this material ‘sectarian’ is effectively and skilfully to defuse interest in it. Thus, it is portrayed as the idiosyncratic doctrine of a fringe and maverick ‘cult’, a small, highly unrepresentative congregation divorced from, and wholly peripheral to, the supposed mainstream of Judaism and early Christianity, the phenomena to which it is in fact most pertinent. Outsiders are thus manipulated into accepting the consensus — that the Qumran community were so-called Essenes and that the Essenes, while interesting as a marginal development, have no real bearing on broader issues. The reality, as we shall see, is very different, and the perfunctorily dismissed ‘sectarian’ texts will prove to contain material of an explosive nature indeed.

3. The Scandal of the Scrolls

Ironically enough, it was not a biblical scholar, not an expert in the field, but an outsider who first detected something suspect in the international team’s position. The outsider was the distinguished American literary and cultural critic, Edmund Wilson, whom most university students in Britain and the States will have encountered through his work in fields far removed from Qumran and 1st-century Palestine. He is known for his own fiction — for I Thought of Daisy and, particularly, Memoirs of Hecate County. He is known as the author of Axel’s Castle, an original and pioneering study of the influence of French symbolism on 20th-century literature. He is known for To the Finland Station, an account of Lenin’s machinations and the Bolshevik hijacking of the Russian Revolution. And he is known for the grotesque, highly publicised literary feud he precipitated with his former friend, Vladimir Nabokov, by presuming to challenge Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin.

As his controversy with Nabokov demonstrated, Wilson had no compunction about venturing into waters beyond his officially acknowledged expertise. But perhaps it was just such recklessness that Qumran research required — the perspective of an outsider, a man capable of establishing some kind of overview. In any case, Wilson, in 1955, wrote a lengthy article for the New Yorker on the Dead Sea Scrolls — an article which, for the first time, made the scrolls a ‘household phrase’ and generated interest in them from the general public. In the same year, Wilson expanded his article and published it as a book, The Scrolls from the Dead Sea. Fourteen years later, in 1969, this text was expanded again, to encompass new material, and was reissued at virtually twice its former length. To this day, it remains one of the basic and most popular investigative works on the Qumran scrolls by an outsider. But even if Wilson was an outsider in the realm of biblical scholarship, he was certainly no mere amateur or dabbler; not even de Vaux’s international team could impugn his integrity or ‘high seriousness’. Wilson was thus able, on behalf of the literate public, to call them in some sense to account.

As early as 1955, Wilson detected a desire on the part of the ‘experts’ to distance the Qumran scrolls from both Judaism and Christianity. The ‘experts’, it seemed to him, were protesting rather too vehemently, and this aroused his suspicions:

As soon as one sets out to study the controversies provoked by the Dead Sea Scrolls, one becomes aware of a certain ‘tension’… But the tension does not all arise from the at first much disputed problems of dating, and the contention about the dating itself had, perhaps, behind it other anxieties than the purely scholarly ones.¹

Wilson stressed how much the scrolls had in common with both rabbinical Judaism, as it was emerging during the 1st century ad, and with the earliest forms of Christianity; and he noted a marked ‘inhibition’, on the part of both Judaic and Christian-oriented scholars, to make the often obvious connections:

One would like to see these problems discussed; and in the meantime, one cannot but ask oneself whether the scholars who have been working on the scrolls — so many of whom have taken Christian orders or have been trained in the rabbinical tradition — may not have been somewhat inhibited in dealing with such questions as these by their various religious commitments… one feels a certain nervousness, a reluctance, to take hold of the subject and to place it in historical perspective.²

In accordance with scholarly decorum, Wilson is, of course, being tactful, couching a fairly serious charge in the most diplomatic of language. He himself had no compunction about taking hold of the subject and placing it in historical perspective:

If, in any case, we look now at Jesus in the perspective supplied by the scrolls, we can trace a new continuity and, at last, get some sense of the drama that culminated in Christianity… The monastery [of Qumran]… is perhaps, more than Bethlehem or Nazareth, the cradle of Christianity.³

It is, alas, characteristic and typical of biblical scholarship, and particularly of scholarship associated with the scrolls, that such a connection should be made not by the ‘experts’ in the field, but by an astute and informed observer. For it was Wilson who gave precise and succinct expression to the very issues the international team endeavoured so diligently to avoid.

These imputations about the bias of most biblical scholars were echoed to us personally by Philip Davies, Professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield and author of two books on the Qumran material. As Professor Davies pointed out, most scholars working with the scrolls were — and, for that matter, still are — Christian-oriented, with a background primarily in the New Testament. He knew a number, he said, whose research sometimes conflicted painfully with their most passionately held personal beliefs, and questioned whether objectivity, in such cases, was really possible. Professor Davies stressed the perennial confusion of theology with history. All too often, he said, the New Testament is taught not just as the former, but also as the latter — as a literal and accurate account of 1st-century events. And if one takes the New Testament — the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles — as incontrovertible historical fact, it is impossible to do scholarly justice to the scrolls. Christian doctrine, in effect, ‘dictates the agenda’.⁴

Because Edmund Wilson was an outsider, the international team could get away with adopting towards him