The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

an attitude of patroning condescension. He was too distinguished to be insulted or abused; but he could be ignored, or dismissed superciliously as an intelligent and well-intentioned amateur who simply did not understand the complexities and subtleties of the issues involved, and who, in his alleged naivete, might make ‘rash statements’.⁵ It was thus that many scholars were intimidated against saying what they actually believed. Academic reputations are fragile things, and only the most audacious or secure individuals could afford to incur the risk involved — the risk of being discredited, of being isolated by a concerted critical barrage from adherents of the consensus. ‘The scrolls are a fief, Shemaryahu Talmon, himself a prominent Israeli professor in the field, observed; and the scholars who monopolized them were, in effect, ‘a cabal’.⁶

Not even such cabals, however, can be omnipotent in suppressing dissent. Edmund Wilson may have been an outsider, but deviation from the international team’s consensus was beginning to surface within the cocooned sphere of biblical scholarship itself. As early as 1950, five years before Wilson’s book, Andre Dupont-Sommer, Professor of Semitic Language and Civilisation at the Sorbonne, had

presented a public paper which caused a sensation.⁷ He addressed himself to one of the Qumran texts recently translated. It described, he explained to his audience, a self-styled ‘Sect of the New Covenant’, whose leader, known as the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’, was held to be a Messiah, was persecuted, tortured and martyred. The ‘Teacher’s’ followers believed the end of the world to be imminent, and only those with faith in him would be saved. And albeit cautiously, Dupont-Sommer did not shrink from drawing the obvious conclusion — that the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ was in many ways ‘the exact prototype of Jesus’.⁸

These assertions provoked a squall of controversy and protest, Jesus’ uniqueness and originality were held to be under attack, and the Catholic establishment, especially in France and the States, began to unleash its critical artillery. Dupont-Sommer himself was somewhat shaken by the reaction and, in subsequent statements, sought shelter behind more circumspect phraseology. Anyone who might have been inclined to support him was also, for a time, obliged to duck for cover. Yet the seed of doubt had been planted, and was eventually to bear fruit. From the standpoint of Christian theological tradition, that fruit was to be particularly poisonous when it burgeoned amidst the international team themselves, in the very precincts of the Rockefeller Museum’s ‘Scrollery’.

^{1. Solomon Schecter surrounded by boxes of the manuscripts he obtained from the Cairo geniza in 1896 and brought to Cambridge.}

^{2. Muhammad adh-Dhib, (right) who discovered the first cave of Dead Sea Scrolls.}

^{3. Kando and George Isaiah, who first brought the scrolls to the attention of the Metropolitan of the Syrian Church.}

^{4. Professor Eleazar Sukenik, who in 1947 was the first Israeli scholar to obtain and translate some of the Dead Sea Scrolls.}

^{5. A portion of one of the scrolls, the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’, which tells of a battle between the leader of the Dead Sea community and two opponents, the ‘Liar’ and the ‘Wicked Priest’.}

^{6–7. Examples of scroll fragments purchased from the Bedouin after their identification and arrangement. Few of these thousands of fragments can be pieced together precisely.}

^{8. Father Josef Milik.}

^{9. Dr Frank Cross.}

^{10. Excavations among the Qumran ruins: Father de Vaux and Father Milik with Gerald Lankester Harding of the Department of Antiquities.}

^{11. One of the pots containing animal bones found during the excavations and never satisfactorily explained. They appear to be the remains of sacred meals.}

^{12–13. The Qumran ruins during one of the excavations led by Father de Vaux and Gerald Lankester Harding.}

^{14. Professor H. Wright Baker of Manchester University cutting the ‘Copper Scroll’ into segments in order for it to be translated. It proved to contain a list of treasures from the Temple of Jerusalem.}

^{15. The unopened ‘Copper Scroll’, found broken into two sections in Cave 3 in 1952.}

Among the scholars of Father de Vaux’s original international team, perhaps the most dynamic, original and audacious was John Marco Allegro. Certainly he was the most spontaneous, the most independent-minded, the most resistant to suppression of material. Born in 1923, he saw service in the Royal Navy during the war and in 1947 — the year the first Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered — entered Manchester University as an undergraduate studying Logic, Greek and Hebrew. A year later, he transferred to the honours course in Semitic Studies. He also developed an interest in philology, the study of the origins of language, its underlying structure and development. Bringing his philological expertise to bear on biblical texts, he quickly became convinced that scripture could not be taken at face value and proclaimed himself an agnostic. In June 1951, he graduated with a BA, first-class honours, in Oriental Studies, and the following year received his MA for his thesis, ‘A Linguistic Study of the Balaam Oracles in the Book of Numbers’. In October of that year, he enrolled in the doctoral programme at Oxford under the supervision of the distinguished Semitic scholar, Professor Godfrey R. Driver. A year later, Driver recommended him for the international team then being assembled by de Vaux, and Allegro was assigned the crucial material found in Cave 4 at Qumran. He departed for Jerusalem in September 1953. By that time, he had already published four acclaimed articles in academic journals — a track record more impressive than anyone else on the team could claim.

In 1956, Allegro published a popular book, The Dead Sea Scrolls, following this in 1968 with his own research on the texts and fragl ments from Cave 4 in the fifth volume of the definitive Oxford University Press series, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert. At this point, Allegro was one of the most esteemed and prestigious figures in the field of biblical scholarship. Yet within two years, he was to abandon his colleagues on the international team, turn his back upon the academic world and resign his university post at Manchester. He was also to be vilified and discredited. What had happened?

It quickly became clear, to the academic community in general as well as to the international team, that Allegro was the only one among them who was not only an agnostic, but also uninhibited about ‘rocking the boat’. Unconstrained by any personal religious bias, he explained things, often impetuously, as he saw them; and he rapidly lost patience with his colleagues’ refusal to countenance any theories, or even evidence, that might contradict the accepted ‘party line’ on Christian origins. In particular, he grew exasperated with the strained attempts to distance Christianity from the scrolls and the Qumran community. He insisted on the obvious connection between the two, and suggested that connection might be closer than anyone had hitherto believed — or, at any rate, dared to suppose.

The first major storm occurred in 1956, when Allegro agreed to give a series of three short talks on the Dead Sea Scrolls, to be transmitted on radio in the north of England on 16, 23 and 30 January. It was clear that he