in luxury at Caesarea, his mysterious and utter disappearance from the stage of history — these things find a curious echo in our own era. One is reminded of beneficiaries of the ‘Witness Protection Program’ in the States. One is also reminded of the so-called ‘supergrass phenomenon’ in Northern Ireland. In both cases, a member of an illicit organisation — dedicated to organised crime or to paramilitary terrorism — is ‘turned’ by the authorities. He consents to give evidence and testify, in exchange for immunity, protection, relocation and money. Like Paul, he would incur the vengeful wrath of his colleagues. Like Paul, he would be placed under seemingly disproportionate military and/or police protection. Like Paul, he would be smuggled out under escort. Having co-operated with the authorities, he would then be given a ‘new identity’ and, together with his family, resettled somewhere theoretically out of reach of his vindictive comrades. So far as the world at large was concerned, he would, like Paul, disappear.
Does Paul, then, belong in the company of history’s ‘secret agents’? Of history’s informers and ‘supergrasses’? These are some of the questions generated by Robert Eisenman’s research. But in any case, Paul’s arrival on the scene set a train of events in motion that was to prove irreversible. What began as a localised movement within the framework of existing Judaism, its influence extending no further than the Holy Land, was transformed into something of a scale and magnitude that no one at the time can have foreseen. The movement entrusted to the ‘early Church’ and the Qumran community was effectively hijacked and converted into something that could no longer accommodate its progenitors. There emerged a skein of thought which, heretical at its inception, was to evolve in the course of the next two centuries into an entirely new religion. What had been heresy within the framework of Judaism was now to become the orthodoxy of Christianity. Few accidents of history can have had more far-reaching consequences.
Postscript
The story of the scrolls is, needless to say, unfinished. The plot continues to unfold, taking new twists and turns. Much has happened since this book appeared in Great Britain in May 1991. By the autumn, things had built to a climax, and the scrolls were the subject of front page coverage, as well as editorials, in such newspapers as
In May, the Israeli ‘Oversight Committee’ granted to Oxford University a complete set of photographs of all scroll material, and a centre for scroll research was established under the auspices of Gaza Vermes. Access, however, was still rigorously restricted, still denied to independent scholars. Interviewed on British television, Professor Norman Golb of the University of Chicago queried the purpose of such a centre. Was it, he asked, simply to be a centre of frustration?
On 5 September, the American press reported that two scholars at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Professor Ben-Zion Wacholder and one of his doctoral students, Martin G. Abegg, had ‘broken the monopoly’ of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Using the concordance prepared by the international team in the 1950s, they had then employed a computer to reconstruct the texts themselves. The results, said to be 80 percent accurate, were published by the Biblical Archaeology Society under Hershel Shanks. The surviving members of the international team were predictably furious. Professor Cross inveighed against ‘piracy’. ‘What else would you call it,’ the deposed John Strugnall fulminated, ‘but stealing?’ On 7 September, however, an editorial in
Some on the committee might be tempted to charge the Cincinnati scholars with piracy. On the contrary, Mr. Wacholder and Mr. Abegg are to be applauded for their work — and for sifting through layer upon layer of obfuscation. The committee, with its obsessive secrecy and cloak-and-dagger scholarship, long ago exhausted its credibility with scholars and laymen alike. The two Cincinnatians seem to know what the scroll committee forgot: that the scrolls and what they say about the common roots of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism belong to civilisation, not to a few sequestered professors.
A more electrifying revelation was soon to follow. On 22 September, the Huntingdon Library in California disclosed that it possessed a complete set of photographs of all unpublished scroll material. These had been entrusted to the library by Betty Bechtel of the Bechtel Corporation, who had commissioned them around 1961. Having learned of the photographs’ existence, members of the international team had demanded them back. The Huntingdon had responded with defiance. Not only did the library make its possession of the photographs public but it also announced its intention of making them accessible to any scholar who wished to see them. Microfilm copies were to be offered for as little as ten dollars. ‘When you free the scrolls,’ said William A. Moffett, the library’s director, ‘you free the scholars.’
Again, of course, members of the international team kicked up a rumpus, this time more petulant than before. Again, there were charges of ‘theft of scholarly work’. One independent professor replied, however, that most people ‘… will regard [the Hunting-ton] as Robin Hoods, stealing from the academically privileged to give to those hungry for… knowledge.’
Amir Drori, head of the Israeli Antiquities Authority, accused the Huntington of sundry legal transgressions — even though the photographs had been taken long before the scrolls passed into Israeli hands as spoils of war. Magen Broshi, director of the Shrine of the Book, spoke darkly of legal action. The Huntington stood its ground. ‘There’s either freedom of access or not. Our position is that there should be unfettered access.’ By that time, release of the photographs was already a fait accompli, and any attempt to reverse the process would have been futile. ‘It’s too late,’ the Huntington declared. ‘It’s done.’
On 25 September, the Israeli government gave way, carefully distancing itself from Drori’s and Broshi’s pronouncements. Drori and Broshi were said to have been ‘speaking as individuals, not as representatives of the Israeli government.’ Yuvel Ne’eman, Israel’s Minister of Science, issued a press statement asserting that
…every scholar should be granted free access to examine the scrolls and publish his findings. It is fortunate that this opportunity has now become feasible through public exposure of the scrolls’ photographic collection by the Huntington Library.
In the meantime, at 11:05 that morning, Robert Eisenman’s name had gone down on record as that of the first scholar formally to request and obtain access to the Huntingdon’s photographs of scroll material. The battle for access had been won. There still remains, however, the process of dismantling the ‘orthodoxy of interpretation’ promulgated for the last forty years by the international team.
By the time the events chronicled above had hit the headlines, Eisenman had begun to pursue his research on other fronts as well. In 1988, he had pointed out that the excavations at Qumran were far from complete, far from exhaustive. The surrounding terrain is, in fact, ideal for the preservation of manuscripts, and virtually all experts in the field agree that there are more discoveries to be made. It is not just possible, but probable, that additional scroll material still exists, buried under landslides and rock-falls. Many caves have yet to be excavated properly — that is, through the rubble of fallen roofs and down to bed-rock. Other caves, previously explored only by the Bedouin, have to be explored anew, since the Bedouin tended to overlook some concealed documents and to leave behind many fragments; and, in any case, officially sanctioned Bedouin excavations effectively ceased with the 1967 war. There are other sites in the general vicinity of Qumran that have yet to be thoroughly explored. Nine miles to the south, for example, on the shores of the Dead Sea, at a place called En el-Ghuweir, an Israeli archaeologist found Qumran-style graves and the ruins of a Qumran-style (albeit smaller) residence.1 It is certainly reasonable to suppose that the caves in the nearby wadis, hitherto unexcavated, may also be repositories for scrolls.
With these facts in mind, Eisenman determined to embark on his own archaeological explorations. His primary objective was, of course, to look for additional scroll material. Such material might — as proved to be the case with the ‘Temple Scroll’ — be entirely new. But even if it duplicated material already in the hands of the
