The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

the last days. It is in this sense that Jesus ‘fits into a well-defined messianic (not “Essenic” as I was wrongly quoted…) pattern’. There is nothing particularly new or striking in the idea.²²

It is a reasonable enough statement, a legitimate correction of an important misquotation. It also indicates how eager Allegro’s colleagues were to ‘jump on him’, to find an excuse for discrediting him. In any case, Allegro added, ‘It is true that unpublished material in my care made me more willing to accept certain suggestions made previously by other scholars on what have appeared… to be insufficient grounds.’²³

The bickering and ill-feeling continued until finally, on 8 March 1957, Allegro wrote angrily to Strugnell:

You still do not seem to understand what you did in writing a letter to a newspaper in an attempt to smear the words of your own colleague. It was quite unheard of before, an unprecedented case of scholarly stabbing in the back. And, laddie, don’t accuse me of over-dramatising the business. I was here in England… Reuters’ man that morning on the ‘phone to me was classic: ‘But I thought you scholars stuck together!…’ And when it was realised that in fact you were quoting things I never even said, the inference was plain. This letter was not in the interests of scholarly science at all, but to calm the fears of the Roman Catholics of America… And what it all boiled down to was that you guys did not agree with the interpretation I put on certain texts — where I have quite as much chance of being right as you. Rather than argue it out in the journals and scholarly works, you thought it easier to influence public opinion by a scurrilous letter to a newspaper. And you have the neck to call it scholarship. Dear boy, you are very young yet, and have much to learn.²⁴

As we have already noted, Allegro was the first of the international team to publish all the material entrusted to his charge. He remains the only one to have done so. John Strugnell, on the other hand, in accordance with the ‘go-slow’ policy of the team, has published virtually nothing of the substantial materials at his disposal. The only major work to which he did address himself, entitled ‘Notes in the Margin’, comprises 113 pages of criticism of Allegro, which Eisenman labels a ‘hatchet-job’.

In the meantime, the damage had been done. The letter to The Times signed by de Vaux and three other ecclesiastics effectively gave free rein to the Catholic propaganda machine. Opprobrium and vilification intensified. In June 1956, for example, a Jesuit commentator published in the Irish Digest an article entitled ‘The Truth about the Dead Sea Scrolls’. He attacked Wilson, Dupont-Sommer and, especially, Allegro. He then went on to make the extraordinary statement that the ‘Scrolls add surprisingly little to our knowledge of the doctrines current among the Jews from, say, 200 bc to the Christian era’.²⁵ He concluded in positively inflammatory fashion: ‘It was not from such a sect that “Jesus learned how to be Messiah”… Rather, it was from soil such as this that sprang the thorns which tried to choke the seed of the Gospel.’²⁶ Allegro was now being portrayed not merely as an erring scholar, but as a veritable Antichrist.

While this controversy was still raging around him, Allegro was already becoming involved in another. The new bone of contention was to be the so-called ‘Copper Scroll’, found in Cave 3 at Qumran in 1952. As we have noted, the two fragments that made up the ‘Copper Scroll’ remained unopened for three and a half years. Speculation was rife about their contents. One researcher attempted to read the indentations showing through the copper and visible on the outside of the roll. It seemed to say, he suggested, something about treasure. This suggestion elicited a salvo of derision from the international team. It proved, however, to be quite correct.

In 1955, a year before his public dispute with his colleagues on the international team, Allegro had discussed the problem of the ‘Copper Scroll’ with Professor H. Wright-Baker of Manchester College of Technology. Wright- Baker devised a machine that could slice the thin copper into strips, thus rendering the text legible. The first of the two fragments was accordingly sent to Manchester, in Allegro’s care, in the summer of 1955. Wright-Baker’s machine performed its task, and Allegro quickly embarked on a translation of what had been revealed. The contents of the fragment proved so extraordinary that he kept them initially wholly to himself, not even divulging them to Cross or Strugnell, both of whom wrote to beg for details. His reticence cannot have improved his relations with them, but Allegro was in fact waiting for the second fragment of the scroll to arrive in Manchester. Any partial or premature disclosure, he felt, might jeopardise everything. For what the ‘Copper Scroll’ contained was a list of secret sites where the treasure of the Temple of Jerusalem was alleged to have been buried.

The second fragment was received in Manchester in January 1956. It was quickly sliced open and translated. Both fragments, along with accompanying translations, were then returned to Jerusalem. Only then did the real delays begin. De Vaux and the international team were worried about three things.

Their first concern was valid enough. If the contents of the scroll were made public and stories of buried treasure began to circulate, the Bedouin would be digging up the entire Judaean desert, and much of what they found might disappear for ever or elude scholarly hands and slip into the black market. Something of this sort was, in fact, already occurring. On discovering or learning of a potentially productive site, the Bedouin would set up a large black tent over it, loot it, pick it clean and sell their plunder privately to antique dealers.

De Vaux and the international team were also worried that the treasure inventoried in the ‘Copper Scroll’ might actually exist — might be a real treasure rather than an imaginary one. If it were indeed real, it would inevitably attract the attention of the Israeli government, who would almost certainly lay claim to it. Not only might this remove it from the authority of the international team. It might also trigger a major political crisis; for while Israel’s claim might be legitimate enough, much of the treasure, and the scroll specifying its location, would have been found in Jordanian territory.

If the treasure were real, moreover, there were theological grounds for concern. De Vaux and the international team had been intent on depicting the Qumran community as an isolated enclave, having no connection with public events, political developments or the ‘mainstream’ of 1st-century history. If the ‘Copper Scroll’ did indeed indicate where the actual contents of the Temple lay hidden, Qumran could no longer be so depicted. On the contrary, connections would become apparent between Qumran and the Temple, the centre and focus of all Judaic affairs. Qumran would no longer be a self-contained and insulated phenomenon, but an adjunct of something much broader — something that might encroach dangerously on the origins of Christianity. More disturbing still, if the ‘Copper Scroll’ referred to a real treasure, it could only be a treasure removed from the Temple in the wake of the ad 66 revolt. This would upset the ‘safe’ dating and chronology which the international team had established for the entire corpus of scrolls.

The combination of these factors dictated a cover-up. Allegro at first colluded in it, assuming that delays in releasing information about the ‘Copper Scroll’ would only be temporary. In consequence, he agreed not to mention anything of the scroll in the book he was preparing — his general introduction to the Qumran material, scheduled to be published by Penguin Books later in 1956. In the meantime, it was arranged, Father Milik would prepare a definitive translation of the ‘Copper Scroll’, which Allegro would follow with another ‘popular’ book pitched to the general public.

Allegro had consented to a temporary delay in releasing information about the ‘Copper Scroll’. He certainly didn’t expect the delay to prolong itself indefinitely. Still less did he expect the international team to defuse the scroll’s significance by dismissing the treasure it inventoried as purely fictitious. When Milik proceeded to do so, Allegro did not at first suspect any sort of conspiracy. In a letter to another of his colleagues, dated 23 April 1956, he gave vent to his impatience, but remained excited and optimistic, and referred to Milik with cavalier disdain:

Heaven alone knows when, if ever, our friends in Jerusalem are going to release the news of the copper scroll. It’s quite fabulous (Milik thinks literally so, but he’s a clot). Just imagine the agony of having to let my [book] go to the press without being able to breathe a word of it.²⁷

A month later, Allegro wrote to Gerald Lankester Harding, in charge of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, and de Vaux’s colleague. Perhaps he already sensed something was in the wind and was trying to circumvent de Vaux personally, to appeal to an alternative and non-Catholic authority. In any case, he pointed out that as soon as the press release pertaining to the ‘Copper Scroll’ was issued, reporters would descend en masse. To deal with this contingency, he suggested that Harding, the international team and everyone else involved close ranks and adopt a ‘party line’ towards the media. On 28 May, Harding, who