yet to be divulged may confront us a little more inescapably with the scale and pointlessness of our own madness — and shame us, thereby, at least by a degree or so, in the general direction of sanity. The Dead Sea Scrolls offer a new perspective on the three great religions born in the Middle East. The more one examines those religions, the more one will discern not how much they differ, but how much they overlap and have in common — how much they derive from essentially the same source — and the extent to which most of the quarrels between them, when not precipitated by simple misunderstanding, have stemmed less from spiritual values than from politics, from greed, from selfishness and the presumptuous arrogance of interpretation. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all, at present, beset by a resurgent fundamentalism. One would like to believe – though this may be too much to hope for — that greater understanding of their common roots might help curb the prejudice, the bigotry, the intolerance and fanaticism to which fundamentalism is chronically prone.
The full bibliographical details, when not cited here, are to be found in the Bibliography.
Preface
1. Eisenman,
1. The Discovery of the Scrolls
1. The true story of the discovery will probably never be known. All the various accounts differ in certain details. Arguments over the correct sequence of events continued into the 1960s. For the different accounts, see: Allegro,
2. See, for example, Brownlee, op. cit., p.486, and n.6; Allegro, op. cit., p.20.
3. Wilson, op. cit,, p.4.
4. Van der Ploeg,
5. Interviews, Miles Copeland, 10 April and 1 May 1990. A search of CIA archives requested under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act has failed to locate the photographs.
6. Interview, 21 May 1990.
7. Yadin,
8. Ibid., p. 14.
9. Trever,
10.
11. Allegro, op. cit., pp.38-9.
12. Ibid., p.41.
13. Pliny,
14. De Vaux,
15. Reports of this survey can be found in the following: de Vaux, ‘Exploration de la region de Qumran’, pp. 540ff.; Reed, ‘The Qumran Caves Expedition of March 1952’, pp.8ff.
16. Ibid.
17. Allegro,
18.
19. Yadin, op. cit., p.40.
20. Ibid., pp.41-52.
21. Sharon to Eisenman, 16 January 1990.
2. The International Team
1. Pryce-Jones, ‘A New Chapter in the History of Christ?’, p.12ff.
2. Ibid., p. 14.
3. Ibid.
4. Pryce-Jones to authors, 11 January 1990.
5. Interview, Magen Broshi, 12 November 1989.
6. Interview, Frank Cross, 18 May 1990.
7. Private communication.
8. Interview, Abraham Biran, 4 December 1989.
9. Interview, James Robinson, 3 November 1989.
10. North, ‘Qumran and its Archaeology’, p. 429.
11. Interview, Norman Golb, 1 November 1989.
12. Interview, Shemaryahu Talmon, 8 November 1989.
13.
14.
15. Interview, James Robinson, 3 November 1989.
16. See Robinson, ‘The Jung Codex: the Rise and Fall of a Monopoly’; see also Robinson, ‘Getting the Nag Hammadi Library into English’.
17. A total of three volumes of
18.
19.
20. Ibid., p.66. The magazine adds: ‘Obviously, the existence of this factor is controversial and disputed.’
21. Ibid., p.66.
22.
23.
24. Cross,
25. Allegro,
26. This letter and many following are to be found in the private correspondence file of John Allegro’s
