The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

non-partisan forum for the spectrum of scholarly opinion, but as a species of mouthpiece for the international team.

The balance was, however, slowly beginning to tilt in Eisenman’s favour. The New York Times, for example, had monitored the dispute throughout, and had assessed the arguments of the opposing factions. On 9 July 1989, it pronounced its judgment in an editorial entitled ‘The Vanity of Scholars’:

Some works of scholarship, like the compilation of dictionaries, legitimately take a lifetime. But with others, the reasons for delay can be less lofty: greed for glory, pride, or just plain old sloth.

Consider the sorry saga of the Dead Sea Scrolls, documents that might cast spectacular new light on the early history of Christianity and the doctrinal evolution of Judaism.

The scrolls were discovered in 1947, but many that are in fragments remain unpublished. More than 40 years later, a coterie of dawdling scholars is still spinning out the work while the world waits and the precious pieces lapse into dust.

Naturally, they refuse to let others see the material until it is safely published under their names. The publication schedule of J.T. Milik, a Frenchman responsible for more than 50 documents, is a source of particular frustration to other scholars…

Archaeology is particularly vulnerable to scholars who gain control of materials and then refuse to publish them.²

Despite the unseemly squabbling, the clack and crack of ruptured amour propre, the fustian and umbrage and general high dudgeon, Eisenman’s arguments were now beginning to carry weight, to convince people. And there was also another development, of comparable importance. The ‘outsiders’ — the adversaries of the international team — were beginning to organise, to consolidate their efforts and conduct conferences of their own. In the months following the editorial in the New York Times, there were to be two such conferences.

The first of these was arranged by Professor Kapera of Krakow, with the aid of Philip Davies, and took place at Mogilany, Poland. It produced what became known as the ‘Mogilany Resolution’, with two main demands: that ‘the relevant authorities’ in Israel should obtain photographic plates of all unpublished scrolls, and that these should be supplied to Oxford University Press for immediate publication; and that the data obtained from de Vaux’s excavations at Qumran between 1951 and 1956, much of which had not yet appeared, should now be issued in definitive published form.

Seven and a half months later, a second conference was convened, on Eisenman’s home territory, California State University at Long Beach. Papers were presented by a number of academics, including Eisenman himself, Professor Ludwig Koenen and Professor David Noel Freedman from the University of Michigan, Professor Norman Golb from the University of Chicago and Professor James M. Robinson from Claremont University, who had headed the team responsible for publishing the Nag Hammadi Scrolls. Two resolutions were produced: first, that a facsimile edition of all hitherto unpublished Qumran fragments should be issued immediately — a necessary ‘first step in throwing the field open to scholars irrespective of point of view or approach’; and second, that a data bank of AMS Carbon-14 results on known manuscripts should be established, to facilitate the future dating of all previously undated texts and manuscripts, whether on papyrus, parchment, codex or any other material.

None of these resolutions, of course, either from Mogilany or from Long Beach, was in any sense legally binding. In the academic community, however, and in the media, they carried considerable weight. Increasingly, the international team were finding themselves on the defensive; furthermore, they were beginning, albeit slowly, to give way. Thus, for example, Milik, while the public battle raged, quietly passed over one text — the very text Eisenman and Davies had requested to see in their letter to Strugnell — to Professor Joseph Baumgarten of Hebrew College in Baltimore. Baumgarten, of course, who was now a member of the international team, characteristically refused to let anyone else see the text in question. Neither did Strugnell — who as head of the team was supposed to authorise and supervise such transactions — bother to inform Eisenman or Davies what had occurred. But the mere fact that Milik was handing over material at all reflected some progress, some sense that he felt sufficiently pressured to relinquish at least part of his private fiefdom — and with it, some of the onus of responsibility.

More promising still, Milik, in 1990, surrendered a second text, this time to Professor James VanderKamm of North Carolina State University. VanderKamm, in a break with the international team’s tradition, promptly offered access to other scholars. ‘I will show the photographs to anyone who is interested in seeing them’, he announced.³ Milik, not surprisingly, described VanderKamm’s behaviour as ‘irresponsible’.⁴ VanderKamm then withdrew his offer.

An important role in the campaign to obtain open access to the Dead Sea Scrolls was, as we have already indicated, played by Hershel Shank’s journal, Biblical Archaeology Review. It was BAR that fired the opening salvo of the current media campaign, when in 1985 it published a long and hard-hitting article on the delays in releasing Qumran material. And when Eisenman obtained a copy of the computer print-out listing all the fragments in the international team’s possession, he leaked this document to BAR. He thus furnished BAR with invaluable ammunition. In return, BAR was only too eager to provide publicity and an open forum.

As we have also noted, however, BAR’s attack, at least in part, was directed at the Israeli government, whom it held as responsible for the delays as the international team themselves.⁵ Eisenman was careful to distance himself from BAR’s position in this respect. To attack the Israeli government, he felt, was simply to divert attention from the real problem — the withholding of information.

Despite this initial difference of approach, however, BAR’s contribution has been immense. Since the spring of 1989, in particular, the magazine has sustained a relentless, non-stop barrage of articles directed at the delays and deficiencies of Qumran scholarship and research. BAR’s basic position is that, ‘in the end the Dead Sea Scrolls are public treasures’.⁶ As for the international team: ‘The team of editors has now become more an obstacle to publication than a source of information. ‘⁷BAR has in general pulled very few punches and, indeed, often comes very close to the legal limits of what can be printed. And while Eisenman may not have shared BAR’s eagerness to attack the Israeli government, there is no question that those attacks have helped to produce at least some results.

Thus, for example, the Israeli authorities were persuaded to assume some measure of authority over the unpublished Qumran material. In April 1989 the Israeli Archaeological Council appointed a ‘Scroll Oversight Committee’ to supervise the publication of all Qumran texts and ensure that the members of the international team were indeed fulfilling their assigned tasks. In the beginning, the creation of this committee may have been something of a cosmetic exercise, intended merely to convey the impression that something constructive was being done. In practice, however, as the international team have continued to drag their feet, the committee has assumed more and more power.

As we have noted, Father Benoit’s timetable, according to which the whole of the Qumran material would be published by 1993, was superseded by Strugnell’s new and (theoretically at least) more realistic timetable, with a deadline of 1996. Eisenman had remained profoundly sceptical of the team’s intentions. BAR was more vociferous. The ‘suggested Timetable’, the magazine proclaimed, was ‘a hoax and a fraud’.⁸ It was not signed, BAR pointed out; it technically bound no one to anything; it made no provision whatever for progress reports or proof that the international team were actually doing their jobs. What would happen, BAR asked the Israeli Department of Antiquities, if the stipulated deadlines were not met?

The Department of Antiquities did not reply directly to this query, but on 1 July 1989, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Amir Drori, the department’s director, issued what might be construed as a nebulous threat: ‘For the first time, we have a plan, and if someone does not complete his work on time we have the right to deliver the scrolls to someone else.’⁹ Strugnell himself, however, in an interview with the International Herald Tribune, made clear how lightly he took such threats. ‘We are not running a railroad’,¹⁰ he said. And in an interview with ABC Television, he was