The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

even more explicit: ‘If I don’t meet [the deadline] by one or two years, I won’t worry at all.’¹¹ Milik, in the meantime, remained, as Time Magazine put it, ‘elusive’, although the magazine did manage to extract one characteristically arrogant statement from him: ‘The world will see the manuscripts when I have done the necessary work.’¹²

Justifiably unappeased, BAR continued its campaign. In the ABC Television interview, Strugnell, with somewhat lumbering humour, and manifest contempt, had complained of the recent attacks to which he and his colleagues had been subjected. ‘It seems we’ve acquired a bunch of fleas’, he said, ‘who are in the business of annoying us.’¹³BAR promptly ran a signally unflattering photograph of Professor Strugnell surrounded by ‘named fleas’. In addition to Eisenman and Davies, the ‘named fleas’ included Professors Joseph Fitzmyer of Catholic University, David Noel Freedman of the University of Michigan, Dieter Georgi of the University of Frankfurt, Norman Golb of the University of Chicago, Z.J. Kapera of Krakow, Philip King of Boston College, T.H. Gaster and Morton Smith of Columbia, and Geza Vermes of Oxford University. BAR invited all other biblical scholars who wished to be named publicly as ‘fleas’ to write in. This invitation elicited a stream of letters, including one from Professor Jacob Neusner of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, author of a number of important works on the origins of Judaism and the formative years of Christianity. Speaking of the international team’s work, Professor Neusner described the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship as ‘a monumental failure’, which he attributed to ‘arrogance and self- importance’.¹⁴

By the autumn of 1989, we had already begun to research this book and, in the process, to become embroiled, albeit quietly, in the controversy. On a trip to Israel to gather material and interview a number of scholars, Michael Baigent decided to check on the so-called ‘Oversight Committee’, recently formed to supervise the work of the international team. In theory, the committee might be anything. On the one hand, it might be a ‘paper tiger’, a means of formally institutionalising official inaction. On the other, it might offer a real possibility of power being taken from the international team and placed in more assiduous hands. Would the committee merely serve to cosmeticise further delays? Or did it possess both the authority and the will to do something constructive about the existing situation?

Among the individuals making up the committee were two members of the Israeli Department of Antiquities — Amir Drori, the department’s head, and Mrs Ayala Sussman. Baigent had arranged initially to speak with Drori. On his arrival at the Department of Antiquities, however, he was urged to speak instead with Mrs Sussman, who presided over the sub-department in charge of the Qumran texts themselves. Drori, in other words, had a number of matters on his plate. Mrs Sussman’s activities were focused more specifically on the scrolls.

The meeting with Mrs Sussman took place on 7 November 1989. She clearly, and perhaps understandably, regarded it as an unwelcome intrusion on her already busy schedule. While being scrupulously polite, she was also therefore impatient, dismissive and vague, vouchsafing few details, endeavouring to get the conversation over with as soon as possible. Baigent was also, of course, polite; but it proved necessary for him to become tiresomely insistent, conveying the impression that he was prepared to wait in the office all day unless some answers to his queries were forthcoming. Eventually, Mrs Sussman capitulated.

Baigent’s first questions concerned the formation and purposes of the ‘Oversight Committee’. Mrs Sussman, at that point, apparently regarding her interviewer not as a researcher with some background in the subject, but as a casual journalist skating on the surface of a story, imprudently confided that the committee had been formed to deflect criticism from the Department of Antiquities. In effect, Baigent was given the impression that the committee had no real interest in the scrolls themselves, but was merely a species of bureaucratic screen.

What was its nominally official role, Baigent asked, and how much actual authority did it exercise? Mrs Sussman remained vague. The committee’s job, she said, was to ‘advise’ Amir Drori, Director of the Department of Antiquities, in his dealings with Professor Strugnell, chief editor for any publication of Qumran material. The committee intended, she added, to work closely with Strugnell, Cross and other members of the international team, towards whom the Department of Antiquities felt an obligation. ‘Some,’ she declared, ‘have gone very far with their work, and we do not want to take it away from them.’¹⁵

What about BAR’s suggestion, Baigent asked, and the resolution adopted by the convention at Mogilany two months before — of making facsimiles or photographs available to all interested scholars? Mrs Sussman’s gesture was that of a woman dropping an irrelevant letter into a wastepaper basket. ‘No one discussed it seriously,’ she said. On the other hand, and somewhat more reassuringly, she stated that the new timetable, according to which all Qumran documents would be published by 1996, was correct. ‘We can reassign,’ she stressed, ‘if, for example, Milik doesn’t meet the dates.’¹⁶ Every text in Milik’s possession, she emphasised, had been allocated a publication date in the schedule. At the same time, she acknowledged her sympathy for Strugnell’s position. Her husband, she revealed, a professor of Talmudic studies, was helping Strugnell on the translation — all 121 lines of it — of the long-delayed ‘MMT’ document.

So far as Mrs Sussman was concerned, everything on the whole seemed to be in order and proceeding acceptably. Her chief preoccupation, however, seemed to be less the Qumran material itself than the adverse publicity directed at the Department of Antiquities. This profoundly disturbed her. The scrolls, after all, were ‘not our job’. ‘Why is it causing trouble?’ she asked, almost plaintively. ‘We have other, more important things to do.’¹⁷

Baigent, needless to say, left the meeting disquieted. It is accepted wisdom in Israel that if one wishes to bury a subject, one creates a committee to study it. And as a matter of historical fact, every previous official attempt to oversee the work of the international team had been circumvented by de Vaux and Benoit. Was there any reason to suppose the situation would change?

The following day, Baigent met with Professor Shemaryahu Talmon, one of two scholars at Hebrew University who were also members of the ‘Oversight Committee’. Professor Talmon proved to be congenial company indeed — wry, witty, well-travelled, sophisticated. Unlike Mrs Sussman, moreover, he seemed to have not only an overview of the problem, but a familiarity with its minutiae and details — and a manifest sympathy for independent scholars seeking access to the Qumran material. Indeed, he said, he had had difficulties himself in the past, had been unable to obtain access to original texts, had been obliged to work with transcriptions and secondary sources — whose accuracy, in some instances, had subsequently proved to be questionable.

’Controversy is the lifeblood of scholarship,’ Professor Talmon declared at the very beginning of Baigent’s meeting with him.¹⁸ He made it clear that he regarded his membership of the ‘Oversight Committee’ as a welcome opportunity to help change the situation. ‘If it is only a watch-dog committee,’ he said, ‘then I shall resign.’¹⁹ The committee, he stressed, had to be able to achieve some concrete results if it was to justify its existence. He acknowledged the problems confronted by the international team: ‘Scholars are always under pressure and always take on too much. A deadline is always dead. ‘²⁰ But, he added, if a particular researcher had more texts in his possession than he could effectively handle, he must pass some of them on. The committee would ‘encourage’ researchers to do precisely this. In passing, Talmon also mentioned that, according to rumour, there were still large fragments in the archives, hitherto unknown and yet to be assigned. This rumour was subsequently to prove correct.

Baigent asked Professor Talmon about the fuss resulting from Eisenman and Davies’s requesting to see certain documents. Talmon said he was wholly in favour of access being granted them. There was, he stated, a ‘need to help people in utilising unpublished information. This is a legitimate demand.’²¹ The scrolls, he concluded, should be made available to all interested and qualified researchers. At the same time, he acknowledged that certain technical difficulties had to be sorted out. These difficulties, which were now being taken in hand, fell under three headings: first, the now out-of-date and superseded catalogue needed revision and updating; second, there was still no full inventory of all the scrolls and scroll fragments, some of which were still unassigned (’the only person who knows what is where is Strugnell’); and finally, there was an urgent need for a general concordance encompassing all the known texts.

As for the timetable according to which everything would be published by 1996, Talmon was honestly doubtful. Quite apart from whether or not the international team met their deadlines, he queried whether Oxford University Press would be able to produce so many volumes in so short a time. Looking at the schedule, he observed that no fewer than nine volumes were due to appear between 1990 and 1993. Could OUP cope with this? And could Strugnell handle the editing of so much while still pursuing his own research?

If they arose, however, these obstacles would at least be legitimate obstacles, not attributable to