The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

Biblique gang’. We wondered why this association should constantly be made. Why were the international team and the Ecole Biblique treated as though they were the same thing? What was the relationship between them? Was it formally defined and delineated? Was the international team ‘officially’ an adjunct of the Ecole Biblique? Or was the overlap between them so great as to render any distinction superfluous? With some advice and pointers from Eisenman, we endeavoured to clarify the matter.

As we have noted, the international team, from its very beginnings, was dominated by Father de Vaux, then director of the Ecole Biblique, and by his close friend and disciple, the then Father Milik. As Allegro complained, both men would constantly arrogate first claim to all incoming texts: ‘All fragments are brought first to De V. or Milik, and… complete secrecy is kept over what they are till long after they have been studied by this group.’¹ Even Strugnell stated that when fresh material came in, Milik would invariably pounce on it, claiming it fell within the parameters of his own particular assignment.²

Not surprisingly, then, Milik ended up with the lion’s share of the most important material — and particularly of the controversial ‘sectarian’ material. The creation of his monopoly was facilitated by the fact that he was permanently resident in Jerusalem at the time, along with two of his staunchest supporters, de Vaux and Father Jean Starcky. Father Skehan, though not permanently resident in Jerusalem, threw his weight behind this triumvirate. So did Professor Cross — who had been assigned ‘biblical’ rather than ‘sectarian’ material anyway. Allegro, of course, cast himself in the role of rebel, but his opposition was hampered by the fact that he was in Jerusalem only intermittently. Of those residing in Jerusalem during the crucial period of excavation, purchase of material, allocation of texts and collation of fragments, only the young John Strugnell (who would hardly have challenged de Vaux anyway) was not Catholic — and he subsequently converted. All the others were, in fact, Roman Catholic priests, attached to, and residing at, the Ecole Biblique. Among the other current members of the team or writers in the area of Qumran studies working at the Ecole are Father Emile Puech and Father Jerome Murphy-O’Connor.

It was not just by virtue of being on the spot that this Catholic conclave came to dominate Qumran scholarship. Neither, certainly, was it by virtue of any outstanding pre-eminence in the field. Indeed, there was no shortage of no less competent or qualified scholars who, as we have noted, were excluded. A major determining factor was the Ecole Biblique itself, which systematically undertook to establish for itself, as an institution, a position of unrivalled pre-eminence. The Ecole had its own journal, for example, Revue biblique, edited by de Vaux, who published in its pages some of the most consequential and influential early articles on Qumran — articles bearing the stamp of first-hand authority. And in 1958, the Ecole launched a second journal, Revue de Qumran, devoted exclusively to the Dead Sea Scrolls and related matters. Thus the Ecole officially controlled the two most prominent and prestigious forums for discussion of Qumran material. The Ecole’s editors could accept or reject articles as they saw fit, and were thereby enabled to exert a decisive influence on the entire course of Qumran scholarship. This situation was inaugurated at the very inception of Qumran studies.

In addition to its publications, the Ecole created a special research library oriented specifically towards Qumran studies. A card index was compiled, which documented every book, every scholarly article, every newspaper or magazine report published on the Dead Sea Scrolls anywhere in the world. All publications on the subject were collected and filed in the library — which was not open to the general public. Although some of the secret, unclassified and still unassigned scroll material was kept at the Ecole, most of it was housed at the Rockefeller Museum. Nevertheless, the Rockefeller was reduced to the status of a mere ‘workshop’. The Ecole became the ‘headquarters’, the ‘offices’, the ‘school’ and the ‘nerve centre’. Thus the Ecole contrived to establish itself as the de facto and generally recognised centre of all Qumran scholarship, the focus of all legitimate and academically respectable research in the field. The Ecole’s ‘stamp of approval’ could, in effect, underwrite, certify and guarantee a scholar’s reputation. Withholding such endorsement was tantamount to destroying a man’s credibility.

Officially, of course, the studies over which the Ecole presided were supposed to be non-denominational, non-partisan, impartial, unbiased. The Ecole presented to the world a faqade of ‘scientific objectivity’. But could such ‘objectivity’ in fact be expected on the part of a Dominican institution, with vested Catholic interests to protect? ‘My faith has nothing to fear from my scholarship’, de Vaux once stated to Edmund Wilson.³ No doubt it didn’t, but that was never in fact the real question. The real question was whether his scholarship, and its reliability, had anything to fear from his faith.

As we ourselves became au fait with the situation, we began to wonder if the correct questions were indeed being asked, if blame was indeed being correctly apportioned. Biblical Archaeology Review, for example, had focused on the Israeli government as a primary culprit. But if the Israeli government was guilty of anything, it was guilty only of an understandable sin of omission. By virtue of John Allegro’s success in persuading the Jordanian government to nationalise the Rockefeller Museum,⁴ and political and military circumstance — the Six Day War and its aftermath — Israel suddenly found itself, as a fait accompli, in possession of Arab East Jerusalem, where the Rockefeller Museum and the Ecole Biblique were situated. As ‘spoils of war’, the Dead Sea Scrolls thus became de facto Israeli. But Israel was fighting for its own survival at the time. In the turmoil of the moment, there were more urgent matters to deal with than the sorting out of scholarly disputes or the rectifying of academic inequities. Neither could Israel afford to isolate itself further on the international scene by antagonising a body of prestigious researchers and thereby provoking a reaction from the intellectual community — as well, quite possibly, as from the Vatican. In consequence, the Israeli government had taken the expedient course of doing nothing, of implicitly sanctioning the status quo. The international team had simply been asked to get on with their business.

It was, of course, more accurate to assign responsibility to the international team themselves — as, indeed, a number of commentators had not hesitated to do. But were the motives ascribed to the team wholly accurate? Was it simply a matter of what the New York Times called ‘the vanity of scholars’, and Professor Neusner in BAR ‘arrogance and self-importance’?⁵ These factors undoubtedly played a part. But the real question was one of accountability. To whom, ultimately, were the international team accountable? In theory, they should have been accountable to their peers, to other scholars. But was that indeed the case? In reality, the international team seemed to recognise no accountability whatever, except to the Ecole Biblique. And to whom was the Ecole Biblique accountable? Although he’d not investigated the matter himself, Eisenman prompted us, when we probed him, to explore the connection between the Ecole and the Vatican.

We approached other scholars in the field, some of whom had gone publicly on record to condemn the ‘scandal’. Not one of them, it transpired, had thought to look into the Ecole Biblique’s background and official allegiances. They had, of course, recognised that the Ecole was Catholic, but they did not know whether it had any direct or formal connection with the Vatican. Professor Davies at Sheffield, for example, confessed that he found the question intriguing. Now that he thought about it, he said, he found it striking how criticism was so often and so assiduously deflected away from the Ecole.⁶ According to Professor Golb at the University of Chicago, ‘people hint… that there are connections’ between the Ecole and the Vatican. ‘A lot of events,’ he said, ‘fit the theory [of connection].’⁷ Like his colleagues, however, he had not explored the matter any further. Given the Ecole’s undisputed dominance of Qumran scholarship, it seemed to us particularly important to ascertain the institution’s official orientation, attitudes, allegiances and accountability. Here, we decided, was something we ourselves could undertake to investigate in detail. The results were to prove a major revelation, not just to us, but to other independent researchers in the field as well.

Today, in the late 20th century, one takes the procedures and methodology of historical and archaeological research more or less for granted. Until the mid-19th century, however, historical and archaeological research, as we understand such things today, simply didn’t exist at all. There were no accepted methods or procedures; there was no coherent discipline or training; there was no real awareness that such research in any sense constituted a form of ‘science’, requiring the rigour, the ‘objectivity’, the systematic approach that any science does. The ‘field’, such as it was, existed not as a sphere of formal academic study but as a happy hunting-ground for learned — and often not so learned — amateurs. The territory was as yet too uncharted to accommodate anything that might be called ‘professionalism’.