The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

church’.²⁰ As for the Ecole Biblique and its research on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Skehan says:

Are there not… providential elements also in the curious fact that the Holy Land is the place on earth best suited to be a kind of laboratory for the study of human life continuously, with no major periods missing… I believe that there are…

…Therefore, it seems to me that there is an ultimate religious value which we cannot yet measure, but which has Providence behind it, in the fact that Pere Lagrange established upon Palestinian soil an institute… ²¹

For years, most independent scholars were quite unaware of any such divine mandate having been possessed by the Ecole Biblique, or of the Vatican’s wishful thinking on the matter. On the contrary, the Ecole appeared to be an impartial scholarly institution dedicated, among other things, to collecting, collating, researching, translating and elucidating the Dead Sea Scrolls, not for suppressing them or transforming them into Christian propaganda. Thus, for example, a scholar or graduate student in Britain, or the States, or anywhere else, having established some academic credibility with a thesis or publication in one or another sphere of biblical study, would apply for access to the Qumran material. He’d have no reason to expect a rebuff — would assume the scrolls were available for study by anyone who had acquired legitimate academic credentials. In every case known to us, however, requests for access have been summarily refused, without apology or explanation — and with the inevitable concurrent implication that the applicant himself was somehow inadequate.

Such, to take but one example, was the case for Professor Norman Golb of the University of Chicago. Professor Golb had done his doctoral dissertation on Qumran and on Qumran-related material found in Cairo. Having amassed years of experience in the field, he embarked on a research project to check the palaeographical dating of the scrolls, which had been established by Professor Cross of the international team and which Golb felt could be improved. To confirm his thesis, Golb of course needed to see certain original texts — photographic facsimiles would obviously not have sufficed. In 1970, he was in Jerusalem and accordingly wrote to de Vaux, then head of the Ecole Biblique and the international team, requesting access and explaining that he needed it to validate a research project which had already occupied years of his life. Three days later, de Vaux replied, stating that no access could be granted without ‘the explicit permission of the scholar who is in charge of their edition’.²² The scholar in question was the then Father Milik, who, as de Vaux knew only too well, wasn’t prepared to let anyone see anything. After all the time and effort he had invested in it, Golb was obliged to abandon his project. ‘Since then,’ he told us, ‘I have had good reason to doubt all Cross’s datings of texts by palaeography.’²³

On the other hand, fragments of Qumran material will be made available to researchers affiliated with the Ecole itself, to young scholars and proteges of the international team, to graduate students under the tutelage of one or another team member, who can be assured of toeing the official ‘party line’. Thus, for instance, Eugene Ulrich of Notre Dame, a student of Cross’s, ‘inherited’ the scroll material originally assigned to Father Patrick Skehan. He also appears to have inherited something of Skehan’s attitude to other scholars. When asked why facsimile photographic editions couldn’t be produced, he replied that ‘the vast majority of people who will use these editions — including average university professors — are barely able to judge competently difficult readings’.²⁴

Independent scholars from Britain, the States and elsewhere have thus found it impossible to get access to unpublished scroll material. For Israeli scholars, such access has been inconceivable. As we have noted, Father de Vaux, a former member of the notorious Action Franchise, was a fairly outspoken anti-Semite. To this day, members of the Ecole Biblique seem to remain hostile to Israel, even though it is supposed in theory to be a neutral enclave for impartial scholarship, a refuge from the political and religious divisions rending modern-day Jerusalem. When asked why no scholars from Tel Aviv University were involved in editing the scrolls, Strugnell replied: ‘We are looking for quality in Qumran studies, and you don’t get it there.’²⁵ With his characteristic, and self- incriminating, eloquence, the late Father Skehan effectively articulated his and his colleagues’ anti-Israeli bias in a letter quoted in Jerusalem Post Magazine:

I feel obliged to tell you… that I should not under any circumstances grant through any Israeli functionary, any permission to dispense, for any purpose, or to any extent, of anything whatsoever that is lawfully housed in the Palestine Archaeological Museum. I regard the State of Israel and all of its personnel as having no legal standing whatsoever with respect to the Museum and its contents.²⁶

As we have noted, this attitude is shared by the former Father Milik. Neither he nor another of his colleagues, the late Father Starcky, ever returned to Jerusalem after the 1967 war, when the scrolls passed into Israeli hands. Then again, of course, their position only echoes that of the Vatican itself, which, even today, does not recognise the State of Israel. But one is prompted to ask whether their prejudice simply coincided with official Church policy, or whether it was formally dictated by the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

7. The Inquisition Today

As an antidote to the spreading ‘infection’ of Modernism, Pope Leo XIII, in 1902, had created the Pontifical Biblical Commission to supervise and monitor the progress (or lack thereof) of Catholic scriptural scholarship. It consisted originally of a dozen or more cardinals appointed by the Pope and a number of ‘consultants’, all deemed to be experts in their fields of research and study. According to the New Catholic Encyclopaedia, the Commission’s official function was (and still is) ‘to strive… with all possible care that God’s words… will be shielded not only from every breath of error but even from every rash opinion’.¹ The Commission would further undertake to ensure that scholars ‘endeavour to safeguard the authority of the scriptures and to promote their right interpretation’.²

As we have noted, Father Lagrange, founder of the Ecole Biblique, was one of the earliest members of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. The Ecole Biblique’s journal, Revue biblique, was also, until 1908, the Commission’s official organ. Given the close affiliation between the two institutions, it is clear that the original Ecole Biblique was an adjunct of the Commission’s propaganda machine — an instrument for promulgating Catholic doctrine under the guise of historical and archaeological research, or for enforcing the adherence of historical and archaeological research to the tenets of Catholic doctrine.

One might expect this situation to have changed during the last half-century, and especially in the years since the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s. In fact, it has not. The Ecole Biblique today retains as close an association with the Pontifical Biblical Commission as it did in the past. Degrees at the Ecole, for example, are conferred specifically by the Commission. Most graduates of the Ecole are placed by the Commission as professors in seminaries and other Catholic institutions. Of the Commission’s nineteen official ‘consultants’ today, a number are influential in determining what the general public learns of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thus, for instance, Father Jean-Luc Vesco, the current head of the Ecole Biblique and a member of the Revue biblique’s editorial board, is also a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. So, too, is at least one other member of the journal’s editorial board, Jose Loza. So, too, is a prominent writer on the scrolls, a Jesuit named Joseph Fitzmyer, who has compiled the official concordance for much of the Qumran material.³

In 1956, the name of Father Roland de Vaux, Director of the Ecole Biblique, appeared for the first time on the list of the Commission’s ‘consultants’.⁴ He would have been appointed the year before, in 1955, and he continued as a ‘consultant’ until his death in 1971. The timing of de Vaux’s appointment is interesting. In 1955, it must be remembered, much of the crucial and controversial ‘sectarian’ material from Cave 4 was still being purchased and collated. In December of that year, indeed, the Vatican laid out money for a number of important fragments. In 1955, too, the ‘Copper Scroll’ was unrolled in Manchester, under John Allegro’s auspices, and Allegro himself was beginning to go public in a potentially embarrassing fashion. The Vatican thus became aware, for the first time, of the kind of problems it might have to face in connection with the Qumran material then coming to light. The ecclesiastical hierarchy almost certainly felt the need of some sort of ‘chain of command’, or, at least, ‘chain of accountability’, whereby some measure of control could be exercised over Qumran scholarship. In any case, it is