The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

The Life of Jesus transformed attitudes towards biblical scholarship almost beyond recognition. And for the next thirty years of his life, Renan was to remain a thorn in the Church’s side, publishing subsequent works on the Apostles, on Paul and on early Christianity in the context of imperial Roman thought and culture. He produced two epic series of texts, Histoire des origines du christianisme (1863-83) and Histoire du peuple d’Israel (1887-93). It is no exaggeration to say that Renan released from its bottle a genie which Christianity has never since managed to recapture or tame.

At the same time, of course, Rome was being buffeted from other quarters as well. Four years before The Life of Jesus, Charles Darwin had published The Origin of Species, and followed it in 1871 with The Descent of Man, a more theologically oriented work which questioned scriptural accounts of the creation. In Darwin’s wake, there followed the great age of English agnosticism, exemplified by Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer. Influential and widely read philosophers — Schopenhauer, for example, and particularly Nietzsche — were also challenging, even blasphemously demolishing, conventional Christian ethical and theological assumptions. Under the doctrine of ‘l’art pour l’art’, the arts were becoming established as a self-contained religion of their own, moving into sacred territory which organised religion seemed increasingly to have abdicated. Bayreuth became, in effect, the temple of a new cult, a new creed; and well-educated Europeans deemed it quite as acceptable to be ‘a Wagnerian’ as to be a Christian.

The Church was under sustained political attack as well. In 1870-72, Prussia’s shattering victory in her war with France, and the creation of the new German Empire, produced, for the first time in modern history, a supreme military power in Europe which owed no allegiance whatever to Rome. To the extent that the new empire was Christian at all, it was Lutheran; but the Lutheran Church, to all intents and purposes, was little more than an adjunct of the War Office. Most traumatic of all, Garibaldi’s partisan army, by 1870, had finally effected the unification of Italy — had captured Rome, had wrested the Papal States and all other territory from the Church, and reduced Catholicism to the status of a non-secular power.

^{16. Father Jean Starcky celebrating Mass at the ruins of Qumran prior to the day’s archaeological excavations.}

^{17. Members of the international team at the Rockefeller Museum, Jerusalem, working on the scrolls from Cave 4. Centre, bearded, is Fathc de Vaux, with Father Milik to his right and Father Starcky to his left. John Allegro is seated to the right of the illustration.}

^{18. Members of the international team working on scroll fragments in the ‘Scrollery’: (left to right) Father Patrick Skehan, John Strugnell, John Allegro.}

^{19. (left to right) John Strugnell, Frank Cross, Father Milik, John Allegro and Father Starcky.}

^{20. John Allegro and John Strugnell working in the ‘Scrollery’.}

^{21. (left to right) John Strugnell, John Allegro, Father Skehan, Dr Claus-Hunno Hunzinger and Father Milik.}

^{22. John Allegro working on the ‘Nahum Commentary’ in the ‘Scrollery’.}

^{23. Father Milik, flanked by Dr Hunzinger and Father Benoit, studying some newly purchased scroll fragments in January 1956. The fragments probably came from Cave II.}

^{24. Dr Hunzinger in January 1956 holding the ‘Psalms Scroll’ from Qumran, Cave II. This scroll was not to be published until 1965.}

^{25. Scroll fragments as they were brought in by the Bedouin who discovered them in January 1956.}

^{26. The ‘Psalms Scroll’ from Cave II before it was unrolled.}

^{27. A seal found at the Qumran ruins with, curiously, the owner’s name, ‘Josephus’, written in Greek rather than Hebrew or Aramaic.}

Beleaguered by onslaughts from science, from philosophy, from the arts and from secular political powers, Rome was more shaken than she had been at any time since the beginning of the Lutheran Reformation three and a half centuries before. She responded with a number of desperate defensive measures. She sought — vainly, it anspired — political allegiances with Catholic, or nominally Catho-ic, powers, such as the Habsburg Empire. On 18 July 1870, after a vote by the First Vatican Council, Pope Pius IX — characterised by Metternich as ‘warm of heart, weak of head and lacking utterly in common sense’⁹ — promulgated the dogma of Papal Infallibility.¹⁰ And to counter the depredations being wrought on scripture by Renan and German biblical scholarship, the Church began equipping her own cadres of meticulous scholars — elite intellectual ‘shock troops’ who were supposed to confront Catholicism’s adversaries on their own ground. Thus arose the Catholic Modernist Movement.

The Modernists were originally intended to deploy the rigour and precision of Germanic methodology not to challenge scripture, but to support it. A generation of clerical scholars was painstakingly trained and groomed to provide the Church with a kind of academic strike force, a corps specifically formed to defend the literal truth of scripture with all the heavy ordnance of the most up-to-date critical scholarship. To Rome’s chagrin and mortification, however, the programme backfired. The more it sought to arm younger clerics with the requisite tools for combat in the modern polemical arena, the more those same clerics began to desert the cause for which they had been recruited. Critical scrutiny of the Bible revealed a multitude of inconsistencies, discrepancies and implications that were positively inimical to Roman dogma. The Modernists themselves quickly began to question and subvert what they were supposed to be defending.

Thus, for example, Alfred Loisy, one of the most prominent and prestigious Modernists, wondered publicly how, in the light of recent biblical history and archaeology, many of the Church’s doctrines could still be justified. ‘Jesus proclaimed the coming of the Kingdom’, Loisy declared, ‘but what came was the Church.’¹¹ Loisy argued that many points of dogma had crystallised as historically conditioned reactions to specific events, at specific places and times. In consequence, they were not to be regarded as fixed and immutable truths, but as — at best — symbols. According to Loisy, such basic tenets of Christian teaching as the Virgin Birth and Jesus’ divinity were no longer tenable.

Rome, in trying to play Frankenstein, had created a monster in her own laboratory. In 1902, shortly before his death, Pope Leo XIII created the Pontifical Biblical Commission, to supervise and monitor the work of Catholic scriptural scholarship. Later that year, Leo’s successor, Pius X, placed Loisy’s works on the Inquisition’s Index of forbidden books. In 1904, the new Pope issued two encyclicals opposing all scholarship which questioned the origins and early history of Christianity. All Catholic teachers suspected of ‘Modernist tendencies’ were summarily dismissed from their posts.

The Modernists, of course, comprising the best-educated, most erudite and articulate enclave in the Church, did not hesitate to fight back. They were supported by prominent thinkers, by distinguished cultural and literary figures. In Italy, one such was Antonio Fogazzaro. In 1896, Fogazzaro had become a senator. He was also regarded as ‘the leading Catholic layman of his day’ and, by his contemporaries at least, as the greatest novelist Italy had produced since Manzoni. In The Saint, published in 1905, Fogazzaro wrote: ‘The Catholic Church, calling herself the fountain of truth, today opposes the search after truth when her foundations, the sacred books, the formulae of her dogmas, her alleged infallibility, become objects of research. To us, this signifies that she no longer has faith in herself.’¹²