and questioning. According to one commentator, Ratzinger seeks ‘a return to Catholic fundamentalism… and reasserting the literal truth of papally-defined dogma’.19 Through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger’s attitudes determine the attitudes of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, of which he is also head, and filter down from there into the Ecole Biblique.
During the course of 1990, these attitudes served to place the Congregation prominently in the news. In May, the Congregation issued a preliminary draft of the new, revised and updated ‘Universal Catechism of the Catholic Church’ — the official formulation of tenets in which all Catholics are obliged formally to believe. Allowing no flexibility whatever, the new ‘Catechism’ definitively condemns, along with a catalogue of other things, divorce, homosexuality, masturbation and sexual relations before or outside marriage. It lays down, as basic tenets of the Catholic faith, papal infallibility, the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, as well as the ‘Universal Authority of the Catholic Church’. In one particularly dogmatic passage, the new ‘Catechism’ declares that ‘the task of giving an authentic interpretation of the Word of God… has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church alone’.20
In June, there appeared a second document, published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and written by Cardinal Ratzinger himself. This document addresses itself specifically to the functions and obligations of the theologian, a term intended to encompass the biblical historian and archaeologist as well. According to this document, approved and endorsed by the Pope, Catholic theologians have no right to dissent from the established teachings of the Church. Indeed, dissent is itself promoted (or demoted) to the status of an actual ‘sin’: ‘To succumb to the temptation of dissent… [allows] infidelity to the Holy Spirit…’21 If a theologian begins to question Church doctrine, he is thus, by skilful psychological manipulation, made to feel morally tainted for doing so. Any propensity to question is effectively turned back on the questioner and transformed into guilt — something in which the Church has always trafficked most profitably. In the same document, Cardinal Ratzinger states:
The freedom of the act of faith cannot justify a right to dissent. This freedom does not indicate freedom with regard to the truth, but signifies the free determination of the person in conformity with his moral obligations to accept the truth.22
In other words, one is perfectly free to accept the teachings of the Church, but not to question or reject them. Freedom cannot be manifested or expressed except through submission. It is a curious definition of freedom.
Such restrictions are monstrous enough when imposed on Catholics alone — monstrous in the psychological and emotional damage they will cause, the guilt, intolerance and bigotry they will foster, the horizons of knowledge and understanding they will curtail. When confined to a creed, however, they apply only to those who voluntarily submit to them, and the non-Catholic population of the world is free to ignore them. The Dead Sea Scrolls, however, are not articles of faith, but documents of historical and archaeological importance which belong properly not to the Catholic Church, but to humanity as a whole. It is a sobering and profoundly disturbing thought that, if Cardinal Ratzinger has his way, everything we ever learn about the Qumran texts will be subject to the censorship machinery of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — will be, in effect, filtered and edited for us by the Inquisition.
Given its obligatory allegiance to the Congregation, one is justified in wondering whether, quite simply, the Ecole Biblique can be trusted. Even if the Israeli government clamped down and ordered the immediate release of all Qumran material, how could we be sure that items potentially compromising to the Church would ever see the light of day? We personally, in this book, should like to pose publicly certain basic questions to Father Jean-Luc Vesco, the Ecole Biblique’s current director.
• If the Ecole Biblique is accountable to the Pontifical Biblical Commission and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, what are its responsibilities to scholarship?
• How can any reputable academic institution function under the strain of such potentially divided, even mutually hostile, loyalties?
• And what exactly would the Ecole Biblique do if, among the unpublished or perhaps as yet undiscovered Qumran material, something inimical to Church doctrine turned up?
III. THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS
8. The Dilemma for Christian Orthodoxy
There is virtually unanimous agreement among all the concerned parties — apart, of course, from the international team themselves and the Ecole Biblique — that the history of Dead Sea Scroll scholarship does constitute a ‘scandal’. And there would seem to be little doubt that something irregular — licit, perhaps, but without moral or academic sanction — lurks behind the delays, the procrastinations, the equivocation, the restrictions on material. To some extent, of course, this irregularity may indeed stem simply from venal motives — from academic jealousy and rivalry, and from the protection of vested interests. Reputations do, after all, stand to be made or broken, and there is no higher currency in the academic world than reputation. The stakes, therefore, at least for those ‘on the inside’, are high.
They would be high, however, in any sphere where a lack of reliable first-hand testimony had to be redressed by historical and archaeological research. They would be high if, for example, a corpus of documents pertaining to Arthurian Britain were suddenly to come to light. But would there be the same suppression of material as there is in connection with the Dead Sea Scrolls? And would one find, looming as a supreme arbiter in the background, the shadowy presence of an ecclesiastical institution such as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith? The Nag Hammadi Scrolls are a case in point. Certainly, they afforded ample opportunity for venal motives to come into play. Such motives, to one or another degree, may indeed have done so. But the Church had no opportunity to establish control over the texts found at Nag Hammadi. And, venal motives notwithstanding, the entire corpus of Nag Hammadi material found its way quickly into print and the public domain.
The Church’s high-level involvement in Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship must inevitably foster a grave element of suspicion. Can one ignore the possibility of a causal connection between that involvement and the shambles that Qumran research has become? One is compelled to ask (as, indeed, many informed ‘outsiders’ have) whether some other vested interest may be at stake, a vested interest larger than the reputations of individual scholars — the vested interest of Christianity as a whole, for example, and of Christian doctrine, at least as propounded by the Church and its traditions. Ever since the Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered, one single, all-pervasive question has haunted the imagination, generating excitement, anxiety and, perhaps, dread. Might these texts, issuing from so close to ‘the source’, and (unlike the New Testament) never having been edited or tampered with, shed some significant new light on the origins of Christianity, on the so-called ‘early Church’ in Jerusalem and perhaps on Jesus himself? Might they contain something compromising, something that challenges, possibly even refutes, established traditions?
Certainly official interpretation ensured that they did not. There is, of course, nothing to suggest any deliberate or systematic falsification of evidence on the part of the international team. But for Father de Vaux, his most intensely personal convictions were deeply engaged and were bound to have exerted some influence. The key factor in determining the significance of the scrolls, and their relation, or lack of it, to Christianity, consisted, of course, in their dating. Were they pre- or post-Christian? How closely did they coincide with Jesus’ activities, around ad 30? With the travels and letters of Paul, roughly between AD 40 and 65? With the composition of the Gospels, between ad 70 and 95? Whatever the date ascribed to them, they might be a source of possible embarrassment to Christendom, but the degree of embarrassment would be variable. If, for example, the scrolls could be dated from well before the Christian era, they might threaten to compromise Jesus’ originality and uniqueness — might show some of his words and concepts to have been not wholly his own, but to have derived from a current of thought,
