The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

had been warned and briefed by de Vaux, wrote back. The treasure listed in the ‘Copper Scroll’, he said, didn’t appear to be connected with the Qumran community at all. Nor could it possibly be a real cache — the value of the items cited was too great. The ‘Copper Scroll’ was merely a collation of ‘buried treasure’ legends.²⁸ Four days later, on 1 June, the official press release pertaining to the ‘Copper Scroll’ was issued. It echoed Harding’s assertions. The scroll was said to contain ‘a collection of traditions about buried treasure’.²⁹

Allegro appears to have been stunned by this duplicity. On 5 June, he wrote to Harding, ‘I don’t quite follow whether this incredible “traditions” gag you and your chums are putting out is for newspaper, government, Bedu or my consumption. Or you may even believe it, bless you.’³⁰ At the same time, however, he was still appealing to Harding as a possible ally against the phalanx of Catholic interests. Did not Harding think, he asked, that ‘a bit more ready information on these scroll matters might not be a good idea? It’s well known now that the copper scroll was completely open in January, and despite your attempts to squash it, it is also known that my translation went to you immediately… A little general information… saves a good deal of rumour-mongering, which has now taken on a somewhat sinister note.’³¹ He adds that ‘the feeling would get around that the Roman Catholic brethren of the team, by far in the majority, were trying to hide things’.³² The same point is stressed in a letter to Frank Cross in August: ‘In lay quarters it is firmly believed that the Roman Church in de Vaux and Co. are intent on suppressing this material.’³³ To de Vaux personally, he observed drily, ‘I notice that you have been careful to keep it dark that the treasure is Temple possessions.’³⁴

Allegro had originally believed a full translation of the text of the ‘Copper Scroll’ would be released fairly promptly. It must now have been clear to him that this wasn’t going to occur. In fact, four years were to pass before a translation of the text appeared, and then it was published by Allegro himself, who by that time had lost all patience with the international team. He still would have preferred to publish his popular book after the ‘official’ translation, scheduled to be done by Father Milik, and was led to believe this would be possible. Milik’s translation, however, was suddenly and unexpectedly subject to further delays, which may well have been deliberate. Allegro was asked to postpone his own publication accordingly. At one point, indeed, this request, transmitted through an intermediary, appears to have been attended by threats — from a member of the team whose name cannot be divulged for legal reasons. Allegro replied that, ‘As conveyed to me, the request was accompanied by the expression of some rather strange sentiments originating, it was said, from yourself and those for whom you were acting. There appeared even to be some forecast of consequences were I not to accede to this request.’³⁵ The recipient of this letter wrote back sweetly that Allegro must not imagine himself the victim of persecution.³⁶ Thus, when Allegro went ahead with his own publication, he found himself in the embarrassing position of seeming to have pre-empted the work of a colleague. In effect, he had been manoeuvred into providing the international team with further ammunition to use against him — and, of course, to alienate him further from them. Milik’s translation, in fact, did not appear until 1962 — two years after Allegro’s, six years after the ‘Copper Scroll’ had been sliced open in Manchester and ten years after it had been discovered.

In the meantime, The Dead Sea Scrolls — Allegro’s popular book on the Qumran material, from which all mention of the ‘Copper Scroll’ had been withheld — had appeared in the late summer of 1956, some five months after the controversy surrounding his radio broadcasts. The controversy, and especially the letter to The Times, had, as Allegro predicted, ensured the book’s success. The first edition of forty thousand copies sold out in seventeen days, and Edmund Wilson reviewed it enthusiastically on the BBC. The Dead Sea Scrolls, now in its second edition and nineteenth printing, continues to be one of the best introductions to the Qumran material. De Vaux did not see it that way, and sent Allegro a lengthy critique. In his reply, dated 16 September 1956, Allegro stated that ‘you are unable to treat Christianity any more in an objective light; a pity, but understandable in the circumstances’.³⁷ In the same letter, he draws attention to a text among the scrolls which refers to the ‘son of God’:

You go on to talk blithely about what the first Jewish-Christians thought in Jerusalem, and no one would guess that your only real evidence — if you can call it such — is the New Testament, that body of much worked- over traditions whose ‘evidence’ would not stand for two minutes in a court of law… As for… Jesus as a ‘son of God’ and ‘Messiah’ — I don’t dispute it for a moment; we now know from Qumran that their own Davidic Messiah was reckoned a ‘son of God’, ‘begotten’ of God — but that doesn’t prove the Church’s fantastic claim for Jesus that he was God Himself. There’s no ‘contrast’ in their terminology at all — the contrast is in its interpretation.³⁸

After everything that had passed, Allegro would have been extremely naive to assume that he could still be accepted by his erstwhile colleagues as a member of their team. Nevertheless, that was precisely what he seems to have done. In the summer of 1957, he returned to Jerusalem and spent July, August and September working on his material in the ‘Scrollery’. From his letters of the time, it is clear that he did indeed feel himself part of the team again and had no doubt that all was well. In the autumn, he travelled back to London and arranged with the BBC to make a television programme on the scrolls. In October, he returned to Jerusalem with producer and film crew. They immediately went to see Awni Dajani, Jordanian curator of the Rockefeller Museum and one of Allegro’s closest friends. The next morning, Dajani took them round ‘to get things moving with de Vaux’. In a letter of 31 October to Frank Cross, whom he still assumed to be his ally, Allegro described the ensuing events:

We foregathered… and explained what we hoped to do, only to be met with a blank refusal by De V. to collaborate in any way. We stared open-mouthed for some time, and then Dajani and the producer started trying to find out what it was all about. The whole thing was a complete knock-out because, as far as I was aware I had left my dear colleagues on the best of terms — or pretty much so. Certainly no bitterness on my side about anything. But De Vaux said that he had called a meeting of ‘his scholars’ and that they had agreed to have nothing to do with anything I had anything to do with! My pal the producer then took the old gent outside and explained in words of one syllable that we were avoiding any controversial matter at all in the program on the religious side, but he (de Vaux) was quite adamant. He said that whereas he could not stop us taking pictures of the monastery at Qumran, he would not allow us in the Scrollery or the Museum generally.³⁹

Allegro described himself as still flummoxed. Awni Dajani, however, was beginning to get annoyed. He apparently saw the programme as ‘a very definite boost for Jordan — antiquities and tourism’, and declared a preparedness to assert his authority. He was, after all, an official representative of the Jordanian government, whom not even de Vaux could afford to defy:

as soon as it became clear to my dear colleagues that even without them the programme was going forward… they started putting their cards on the table. It was not the programme they objected to, only Allegro… They then called in a taxi at our hotel and made the producer an offer — if he would drop Allegro completely, and have Strugnell as his script writer, or Milik, they would collaborate… Then one day, after we had returned from an exhausting day at Qumran, Awni phoned to say that when he had got in it was to find a note (anonymous) waiting for him, offering ?150 to him to stop us going to Amman and photographing in the Museum there.⁴⁰

In the same letter, Allegro tried to persuade Cross to appear in the programme. After consulting with de Vaux, Cross refused. By now, the penny had pretty much dropped for Allegro and he knew precisely where he stood in relation to his former colleagues. On the same day that he wrote to Cross, he had also written to another scholar, a man who was not officially a member of the international team but had been allowed to work with the scrolls. Allegro repeated the account of his contretemps and then added that he was ‘starting a campaign, very quietly for the moment, to get the scrollery clique broken up and new blood injected, with the idea of getting some of the stuff Milik, Strugnell and Starcky are sitting on, published quickly in provisional form’.⁴¹ Two months later, on 24 December 1957, he wrote to the same scholar saying that he was worried:

From the way the publication of the fragments is being planned, the non-Catholic members of the team are being removed as quickly as possible… In fact, so vast is Milik’s, Starcky’s and Strugnell’s lots of 4Q [Cave 4 material], I believe that they should be split up immediately and new scholars brought in to get the stuff out quickly.