The Scandal of the Dead Sea Scrolls
This article follows on from another which discussed the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts, which were a major shock for Christianity. The Roman Catholic Church had been telling everyone for hundreds of years what they had to believe, and that it was all true. They must therefore have been very concerned when texts which had been lost for centuries were discovered in 1945. These were Gnostic texts, and Gnosticism was the chief ‘heresy’ that was ruthlessly suppressed by the Catholic Church, allied with the military dictatorship of the Roman Empire, in a book-burning orgy many hundreds of years earlier. What on earth would these rediscovered books contain? Suppressed information perhaps, or an alternative understanding, even a superior one?
Another blow was struck soon afterwards. Having suffered the problems associated with the Nag Hammadi discovery, the Vatican hierarchy must, if you’ll pardon the expression, have been shitting themselves when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered only two years later in the caves of Qumran. What more damaging material might be found in them?
On this occasion, however, they got lucky. Father Roland de Vaux, a practising Catholic and monk, was installed as head of a team of international scholars, and technical director for subsequent excavations. At the time of his appointment, he was the director of the Dominican-sponsored Ecole Biblique et Archéologique in Jerusalem, whose Roman Catholic priests dominated work on the Scrolls. According to scholar Ahmed Osman, “the Ecole has close links with the Pontifical Biblical Commission, founded by the Vatican at the turn of the century to protect ‘God’s words’ from ‘every rash opinion’ and to endeavour to ‘safeguard the authority of the scriptures and to promote their right interpretation’ ”¹.
De Vaux was obviously, therefore, the ideal person to lead a team investigating a discovery that might challenge the very foundations of Christianity! Who knows what editing and censorship the team indulged in; they are widely suspected of doing precisely that. The scandal of my title then followed. This group, under the leadership of de Vaux, awarded itself exclusive access to the Scrolls, preventing other scholars from seeing them. Ahmed Osman, writing in 1992, said: “Despite the passage of the better part of half a century, a large amount of the contents — some scholars put it as high as 80 percent — remains unpublished and there are indications that some of the published material has been subjected to discreet censorship”¹. Scholar Robert Eisenman, quoted by Osman, “wasted a whole year in Jerusalem trying to obtain a sight of the remaining Scrolls”, and “believes that the shroud of secrecy surrounding them lies in the fact that the material they contain would give religious offence to Jews as well as Christians”¹. He wrote subsequently: “Later writers too — even modern researchers — sometimes forget the motives of their predecessors, adopting the position and point of view of the tradition or theology they are heirs to. In the recent controversy regarding the Dead Sea Scrolls, a struggle developed with just such an academic and religious élite, not only over the publication of all the documents but even more importantly — and this conflict continues at the time of writing — over their interpretation”².
The Scrolls then fell “under the control of the Israeli Antiquity Department (after) the fall of Jerusalem in the Six Day War of 1967”, the scholar Hershel Shanks complaining that they had been “quite unjustifiably withheld from view year after year”¹. The scandal continued when “in 1971, on Father de Vaux’s death, an extraordinary situation developed. Although he did not in any legal sense own the scrolls, he nevertheless bequeathed his rights to them to one of his colleagues, Father Pierre Benoit, another Dominican and subsequently de Vaux’s successor as head of the international team and of the Ecole Biblique. For Father Benoit actually to inherit de Vaux’s rights, privileges and prerogatives of access and control was, as a scholastic procedure, unprecedented. From a legal point of view, it was, to say the least, extremely irregular”. “Thus the Catholic scholars at the core of the international team maintained their monopoly and control, and the consensus remained unchallenged. Not until 1987, on the death of Father Benoit, were their methods to be contested”³. The same authors agree with Eisenman: “A ‘consensus’ view… was indeed to emerge, or be imposed, by the international team working under de Vaux at the Rockefeller. A rigid orthodoxy of interpretation evolved, from which any deviation was tantamount to heresy”.
What exactly was it that was so potentially explosive about the Scrolls? Osman quotes critic and author Edmund Wilson, saying that their authors were the cradle of Christianity: “Christian scholars were afraid to work on the Scrolls… He had encountered resistance to admitting ‘that the morality and mysticism of the Gospels may perfectly well be explained as the creation of several generations of Jews working by and for themselves, in their own religious tradition’ ”¹.
That is a very important suggestion, but may not be quite terminologically accurate, because the Essenes, the inhabitants of Qumran where the Scrolls were discovered, were, according to Osman (and others), “a secret Jewish sect that separated itself from the Jewish community at large and from the Jerusalem priesthood, whose beliefs and teachings they regarded as false”¹. Osman, like Wilson, uses the word ‘Jewish’, but we can only interpret this as referring to their nationality, not to their religion since, as he says, they rejected the religion of the Jewish community and priesthood. They could not therefore have been Jews in the religious sense.
Returning to the scandal of the Scrolls, not everything went according to the script. There was one potential whistle-blower on the original team who was not willing to cooperate with the official line. This was John Allegro, of whom Baigent/Leigh say: “Allegro’s material seems to have been rather more explosive than anyone at the time had anticipated, and he himself was something of a maverick. He had, certainly, no compunction about breaking the ‘consensus’ de Vaux was trying to establish and… was soon to be ousted from the team and replaced by John Strugnell” (p60–61). Ahmed Osman believes that the latter was also sacked, even though “failing health and emotional distress were cited as the reason for his dismissal”, having given an interview highly critical of Judaism, which he described as “a Christian heresy”¹. It’s worth noting that he had spent nearly 40 years — “virtually his entire working life” — studying the Dead Sea Scrolls. What had he found in them?
Allegro had been chosen because he was a brilliant scholar but, according to Baigent/Leigh, “he was the most spontaneous, the most independent-minded, the most resistant to suppression of material”, “uninhibited about rocking the boat”. He was also the only one on the team who was openly agnostic about religious matters, and therefore had no agenda that he wanted to stick to. He therefore “grew exasperated with the strained attempts to distance Christianity from the Scrolls and the Qumran community. He insisted on the obvious connection between the two, and suggested that the connection might be closer than anyone had hitherto believed — or, at any rate, dared to suppose” (p83–84). The Roman Catholic Church had been saying for hundreds of years that Jesus was a one-off incarnation of God on Earth. One can easily see why they would want to suppress any documents which suggested otherwise, that he might have been human, and belonging to a pre-existing tradition. (That is on the assumption that he existed at all — the Scrolls, as we now have them, make no direct reference to the Jesus of the Gospels.)
Returning to the theme of how dangerous the Scrolls were to Christian orthodoxy, in a letter to Strugnell, who was considering a career in the Church, Allegro wrote, advising him not to pursue this, since “by the time I’ve finished there won’t be any Church left for you to join”⁴.
Allegro also went on to write The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross⁵, where he “asserted that Jesus had never existed in historical reality, (but) was merely an image evoked in the psyche under the influence of an hallucinatory drug, psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms” (Baigent/ Leigh, p105). We can only assume that he came to this conclusion from his reading of the scrolls that he was working on.
As you can imagine, such a claim made him somewhat unpopular in academic and religious circles. It’s not something I agree with when put in those extreme terms, but the idea that early Christians took psychoactive mushrooms as a sacramental ritual is an interesting claim, which is highly relevant to an ongoing series of articles that I’m writing about the origins and history of Christianity, and the apostle Paul. That’s why I have drawn attention to the Dead Sea Scrolls scandal at this point. (If you’re interested in learning more about this, I highly recommend Baigent/Leigh’s book.)
More to follow.
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I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, more on Christianity, psychology, science, politics, and astrology. All these articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here).
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Footnotes:
1. The House of the Messiah, HarperCollins, 1992, republished as Jesus in the House of the Pharoahs, Bear & Company, 2004, all quotes chapter 1
2. James the Brother of Jesus, Faber & Faber 1997, my copy Watkins, 2002, Pxxxv
3. Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, Corgi, 1992, quotes from Arrow edition, 2006, p65–66
4. Undated letter assumed to have been written in December 1955, quoted by Baigent/Leigh, p84
5. Hodder & Stoughton, 1970
