The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

contradictions.

It was at this point that we came upon the work of Robert Eisenman, Chairman of the Department of Religious Studies and Professor of Middle East Religions at California State University in Long Beach. Eisenman had been an undergraduate at Cornell at the same time as Thomas Pynchon. He studied Comparative Literature there under Vladimir Nabokov, receiving his BA in Physics and Philosophy in 1958, and his MA in Hebrew and Near Eastern Studies from New York University in 1966. In 1971 he was awarded a PhD in Middle East Languages and Cultures by Columbia University, having concentrated specifically on Palestinian history and Islamic law. He has also been an External Fellow of the University of Calabria in Italy and a lecturer in Islamic law, Islamic religion and culture, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Christian origins at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1985-6, he was Research Fellow in Residence at the William F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, and in 1986-7 Visiting Senior Member of Linacre College, Oxford, and Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies.

We came upon Eisenman’s work initially in the form of a slender text cumbersomely entitled Maccabees, Zadokites, Christians and Qumran, which was published in 1983 by E.J. Brill of Leiden, Holland. The book was precisely the sort of thing one might expect from such an author writing for an academic publisher. There were more footnotes than there was text. There was a presupposition of enormous background knowledge and a forbidding welter of sources and references. But there was also a central thesis of exhilarating commonsense and lucidity. As we hacked our way through the density of the text, the questions that had perplexed us began to resolve themselves, clearly and organically, without ingeniously contrived theories, and without crucial fragments being ignored.

We drew extensively on Eisenman’s work in the first section of The Messianic Legacy (London, 1986). Our conclusions owed much to the perspective he had opened for us on biblical scholarship and the historical background to the New Testament. However, certain questions remained unanswered. We could not have known it at the time, but we had overlooked a crucial link — a link that has, over the last five years, become a focus for controversy, a topic for front-page articles in national newspapers. That link proved to be the information provided by the Dead Sea Scrolls.

At the centre of the puzzle, we were to discover, was a hitherto unknown connection between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the elusive figure of St James, Jesus’ brother, whose dispute with Paul precipitated the formulation of the new religion subsequently known as Christianity. It was this link that had been painstakingly concealed by a small enclave of biblical scholars, whose conveniently orthodox interpretation of the scrolls Eisenman came to call the ‘consensus’.

According to Robert Eisenman:

A small group of specialists, largely working together, developed a consensus… In lieu of clear historical insight… preconceptions and reconstructions, such as they were, were stated as facts, and these results, which were used to corroborate each other, in turn became new assumptions, that were used to draw away a whole generation of students unwilling (or simply unable) to question the work of their mentors.¹

The result has been the upholding of an official orthodoxy of interpretation — a framework of assumptions and conclusions which, to outsiders, appears to have the solidity of established and undisputed fact. In this fashion, many of the so-called donnees, the ‘givens’ of history, were produced. Those responsible for developing the consensus view of Christianity have been able to exercise a monopoly aver certain crucial sources, regulating the flow of information in a manner that enables its release to serve one’s own purpose. This is the phenomenon explored by Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose, where the monastery, and the library within it, reflect the medieval Church’s monopoly of learning, constituting a kind of closed shop’, an exclusive ‘country club’ of knowledge from which ill but a select few are banned — a select few prepared to toe the ‘party line’.

Those purveying the ‘party line’ can bolster the authority they arrogate to themselves by claiming that they alone have seen the relevant sources, access to which is closed to all outsiders. For outsiders, assembling the disparate available fragments into a coherent order amounts to an exercise in semiotics — and in the realm of semiotic exercises it becomes perfectly possible to hold the Knights Templar responsible for everything, and Umberto Eco himself responsible for the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano. Thus, most outsiders, in the absence of any access to the relevant sources, have no choice but to accept the interpretations of the ‘party line’. To challenge those interpretations is to find oneself labelled at best a crank, at worst, a renegade, apostate or heretic. Few scholars have the combination of courage, standing and expertise to issue such a challenge and hold on to their reputations. Robert Eisenman, whose currency and credibility have placed him among the most prominent and influential figures in his field, has done so. His story provided the impetus for this book.

I. THE DECEPTION

1. The Discovery of the Scrolls

East of Jerusalem, a long road slopes gradually down between barren hills sprinkled with occasional Bedouin camps. It sinks 3800 feet, to a depth of 1300 feet below sea-level, and then emerges to give a panoramic vista of the Jordan Valley. Away to the left, one can discern Jericho. In the haze ahead lie Jordan itself and, as though seen in a mirage, the mountains of Moab. To the right lies the northern shore of the Dead Sea. The skin of water, and the yellow cliffs rising 1200 feet or more which line this (the Israeli) side of it, conduce to awe — and to acute discomfort. The air here, so far below sea-level, is not just hot, but palpably so, with a thickness to it, a pressure, almost a weight.

The beauty, the majesty and the silence of the place are spellbinding. So, too, is the sense of antiquity the landscape conveys — the sense of a world older than most Western visitors are likely to have experienced. It is therefore all the more shocking when the 20th century intrudes with a roar that seems to rupture the sky — a tight formation of Israeli F-16s or Mirages swooping low over the water, the pilots clearly discernible in their cockpits. Afterburners blasting, the jets surge almost vertically upwards into invisibility. One waits, numbed. Seconds later, the entire structure of cliffs judders to the receding sonic booms. Only then does one remember that this place exists, technically, in a state of permanent war — that this side of the Dead Sea has never, during the last forty-odd years, made peace with the other. But then again, the soil here has witnessed incessant conflict since the very beginning of recorded history. Too many gods, it seems, have clashed here, demanding blood sacrifice from their adherents.

The ruins of Qumran (or, to be more accurate, Khirbet Qumran) appear to the right, just as the road reaches the cliffs overlooking the Dead Sea. Thereafter, the road bends to follow the cliffs southwards, along the shore of the water, towards the site of the fortress of Masada, thirty-three miles away. Qumran stands on a white terrace of marl, a hundred feet or so above the road, slightly more than a mile and a quarter from the Dead Sea. The ruins themselves are not very prepossessing. One is first struck by a tower, two floors of which remain intact, with walls three feet thick — obviously built initially with defence in mind. Adjacent to the tower are a number of cisterns, large and small, connected by a complicated network of water channels. Some may have been used for ritual bathing. Most, however, if not all, would have been used to store the water the Qumran community needed to survive here in the desert. Between the ruins and the Dead Sea, on the lower levels of the marl terrace, lies an immense cemetery of some 1200 graves. Each is marked by a long mound of stones aligned — contrary to both Judaic and Muslim practice — north—south.

Even today, Qumran feels remote, though several hundred people live in a nearby kibbutz and the place can be reached quickly and easily by a modern road running to Jerusalem — a drive of some twenty miles and forty minutes. Day and night, huge articulated lorries thunder along the road, which links Eilat in the extreme south of Israel with Tiberius in the north. Tourist buses stop regularly, disgorging sweating Western Europeans and Americans, who are guided briefly around the ruins, then to an air-conditioned bookshop and restaurant for coffee