The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

All the Dead Sea Scrolls controversy needed in order to flare up into a full-scale conspiracy theory was a couple of savvy writers on the look-out for a religious story to follow their hit book Holy Blood, Holy Grail. In The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (1991) journalists Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh energetically purpled up the musings of Dupont-Sommer, Allegro and Eisenman into the theory that de Vaux was a Vatican fixer who sought to bury (literally) texts found in Cave 4 which proved that Jesus’s life was mythicized by Paul, a Roman agent who faked his «conversion» in order to undermine anti-Roman messianic cults. The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, in other words, suggested that the Vatican, Paul’s church, was illegitimate — and that Christianity pre-dated Christ. Small wonder, if this were true, that de Vaux worked overtime in Cave 4 burying the evidence. Baigent and Leigh’s book became a bestseller.

Among Old Testament scholars there was no consensus on the Qumran documents. Some believed them to have been produced on site by a Jewish apocalyptic cult, the Essenes, while Karl Rengstorf of the University of Minister asserted that the Qumran scrolls had been taken from the Jewish temple in Jerusalem for safekeeping during the siege of AD 67–70, a view supported by Professor Norman Golb of Chicago. In a sense the strength of Baigent and Leigh’s case was the weakness and uncertainty of the alternatives.

Even on its publication, however, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception looked a shaky proposition, and time has tumbled it to ruin. Far from being a Vatican hit-squad, the «International Team» comprised scholars of several Christian denominations, one of whom, Millar Burrows, wrote:

It is quite true that as a liberal Protestant I do not share all the beliefs of my more conservative brethren. It is my considered conclusion, however, that if one will go through any of the historic statements of Christian faith he will find nothing that has been or can be disproved by the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is as true of things that I myself do not believe as it is of my most firm and cherished convictions. If I were so rash as to undertake a theological debate with a professor from either the Moody Bible Institute or Fordham University [a Catholic University] — which God forbid — I fear I should find no ammunition in the Dead Sea Scrolls to use against them.

Repeated carbon testing of the scrolls dates them to the last two centuries BC, a dating which agrees with archaeological and palaeographic evidence. Unless all the carbon-testing machines used have faulty meters, or the test results were faked, the scrolls pre-date Christ and have no bearing on the foundation of Christianity at all.

In the same year that The Dead Sea Deception hit the shelves, so began the publishing of all the scrolls so far found — and the claim that the Vatican was suppressing controversial scrolls was dealt a sledgehammer blow. The delay in publishing the contents of Cave 4 was largely due to innocent factors. As Florentine Garcia Martinez and Julio Trebolle Barrera write in The People of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Their Writings, Beliefs and Practices:

The real explanations for the delay in the publication of the texts are many and varied. The war, a tangled political situation and the premature death of the first two directors of the editorial project (Roland de Vaux and Pierre Benoit); also, several of the editors (Patrick Skehan, Yigael Yadin and Jean Starky) died before finishing their work. These are some of the factors which have influenced the present situation. However, the most important factor is the actual condition of the still unpublished texts, hundreds of minute fragments, with pathetic remains of incomplete works.

When the texts in question have been preserved in relatively large fragments, the task of reading, translation and interpretation is not extremely complicated. Even texts previously unknown can be published with relative speed. However, even in such cases, the speed of publication can have disastrous results, as the publication of the first set of texts from Cave 4 proves. Their publication in the official series, under John Allegro, appeared with great speed in 1968. However, this hasty edition (of only 90 pages of text) is so flawed that it cannot be used without the corrections (of over 100 pages) published in 1971 by the later director of the international team for the edition of the texts, John Strugnell, of the University of Harvard.

Martinez and Barrera might have added that academic jealousies also played their role in delay. At one juncture a dispute over which academic team had the right to publish went to court.