The Dead Sea Scroll Deception: The Explosive Contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls & How the Church Conspired to Suppress Them [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

The Dead Sea Scrolls is a name given to a general collection of scrolls found in the area of Qumran, in the desert near the Dead Sea in the West Bank of the Jordan River. The first scrolls from this region were found in 1947/48. Many more scrolls have been found since then (and there may be some still missing, or hidden, by various regional authorities and antiquities dealers and collectors), including some in areas as far away as the British Museum (manuscripts collected from a Cairo genizah 50 years earlier were later found to match the scrolls).

Part of the politics of around the scrolls, which always featured into their saga, was that, while they were primary early Jewish texts (the Hebrew Bible, additional psalms, community writings of early sects of Judaism, etc.), the scrolls were found in what was then Arab territory by Arab traders and bedouins. The fragile state of Israeli/Palestinian/Jordanian politics always factored into the scrolls' fate; the scrolls came under control first of the Orthodox (Christian) leaders in East Jerusalem (then in Arab control), then later as scholars were sought under general Western academic supervision. It just so happened that many of the noted scholars in ancient Hebrew manuscripts (apart from Jewish scholars, who were prevented from participating) came from the ranks of the churches and seminaries, particularly the Roman Catholic Church.

This is where the seeds of mistrust and division were sown. For decades, the scrolls had to be reconstructed, as many of them were in fragmentary condition. Like a giant jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing, the pieces had to be reassembled as best they could be. This takes much longer than one might think - in the pre-computer days, without electronic assistance for cataloguing and matching, things had to be done manually, with cards, files, and photographs. It is true that many of the larger, in-tact scrolls were published early. But as time dragged on, it seemed somewhat as if there was a deliberate with-holding of information.

Baigent and Leigh trace the history of the scrolls and the history of the ideas of deception and restriction around the scrolls. Unfortunately, the issues are a bit overblown at times, to make the book more sensational. The feeling of 'they're hiding something' was certainly very real, and scholars, church leaders and the general public were clamouring for more access to the scrolls, if only to prove that there was not something vastly damaging to the church being hidden. Ideas were floated wildly speculating that there were writings that showed Jesus was never crucified, or somehow didn't die, that he had children and they continued a 'royal' line (it doesn't hurt to remember here that Baigent and Leigh co-authored the book, 'Holy Blood, Holy Grail', that attempted to trace the origins of the legends of the Holy Grail to the descendents of Jesus and his family). The idea was also given that the Roman Catholic scholars, at the instruction of the Vatican, were suppressing these damaging writings. This of course leaves aside the fact that there were non-catholics as part of the International Team, but that became problematic in and of itself, as the one avowed atheist, John Allegro, published scroll findings for which his published later had to issue retractions and apologies.

After the 1967 war, Jewish scholars gained access on a more equal footing with the European (mostly Christian) academics, but the general access was still restricted. Conspiracy theories grew.

Alas, history is sometimes far more mundane than one might hope - it wasn't vast conspiracies of keeping damaging texts hidden that was driving the restricted access, but largely academic politics and careerism of a rather common stamp (despite the fact that they were working with world-famous materials). When it became apparent that particular scholars (who were, along the way, assigned and given 'authority' over particular sub-sets of the scrolls) were keeping access so as to have first publication rights, and were treating these assignments as personal goods to be passed along to successors of their own choosing, this is when things really came to a head.

Complete copies of the scrolls had been made and deposited in other places around the world (given the general insecurity of the Middle East, which meant that a war could destroy them quite easily), but stringent security measures guarding access to these copies were put in place, and rigourous controls over who could use them meant that the scrolls were still hidden. However, the computer age made assembling large compendia of data fairly easy - such cataloguing of scrolls and scroll-bits was available, along with word and letter studies, and computers made it a task of weeks rather than decades to reconstruct the entire set of the scrolls. Once this was done, and then distributed (without permission), while the scroll team kicked up a fuss, the genie was out of the bottle, and the Huntington Library in California, one of the depositories of the copies, made them generally available. It is now more than 10 years after the scrolls have been freed, so some material is a little out of date.

Baigent and Leigh's work here gives the most sensational of conspiratorial leanings, while eventually coming down to the mundane side of things. They add an overview of the scrolls' content and interpretations, too, making this interesting both from the standpoint of the scrolls as well as history of the scroll battle.

The authors almost ascribe too innocent of a motive to the lack of release of meaningful information from the scrolls for the last 50 years, but then make up for it by tracing the forces behind the Bible School in East Jerusalem which controls access to the scrolls -- straight to the office of the Inquisitor at the Vatican. This is captivating reading. The authors compare the situation to that in the novel The Name of the Rose, but in point of fact, it looks more like a modern intelligence agency that divvies up information among the trustworthy on a "need-to-know" basis. The whole point is suppression. But what is the Church trying to suppress? The authors claim there is nothing in the Dead Sea Scrolls that might destroy the Church. After reading between the lines in their book, I'm not so sure.

Thankfully, the authors rightly call the various names of groups, Zealots, Zadokites, etc, variations on a single theme. That undoubtedly was true in the last days of Israel, the various messianic, baptist and so on cults from Galilee and elsewhere DID coalesce around a single point, which was to free Israel from the foreign yoke. Their interpretation of the true location of "Damascus" also seems correct. Their derivation of the term "Essene" also seems good, as "osim" or doers, never mind John Allegro's assertion it is ultimately a Sumerian word borrowed into Aramaic. It was also nice to see Allegro's book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross figure in this work, even if it was widely discredited at the time it was published. Allegro's central theme, namely that the historical Jesus did not exist, doesn't get aired much in this book, but again, reading between the lines, perhaps this is the main point the reader comes away with: Jesus may have been only a marginal figure in the struggle his so-called, probably correctly, brother James the Just, legitimate pretender to the office of High Priest at the Temple in Jerusalem, was carrying on against the foreigner. The authors skim over this possibility and let Jesus stand as a central figure in the last days of Israel, although the only real documentation we have for this seems to be the New Testament.

This attempt to make sense of the Qumran scrolls in light of the New Testament also leads the authors, and not without reason, to cast St. Paul, Saul of Tarsus, in the role of the Liar mentioned in the scrolls. James becomes the Righteous Teacher and the priesthood installed by Herod (he himself being a foreigner) the source of the Wicked Priest. This seems to be based on a chronology that is a close fit and character roles that do coincide. It also may be a biased supposition made from information in the Gospels. Another possibility presents itself, again, between the lines. It is possible the scrolls are talking about figures twenty or fifty years earlier than those supposed by the authors. A generation removed provides John the Baptist (or conceivably still James the Just) as the Righteous Teacher, wicked priests galore, and the mantle of Liar falls on Jesus himself. Jesus may have been a Qumranian who was excommunicated for breaking the rules or preaching against the prevailing notions of the Righteous Teacher, who later went on to attempt to form his own Community, i.e. the Apostles. He could be reviled in semi-veiled language, as the Liar, but not totally condemned, since his blood brother James was the rightful heir to the high priesthood. One suspects in first century Palestine there was widespread clan affiliation. In such a situation someone in the extreme north of the country might know about the goings-on in the south, but the agents would be identified by clan. James and Jesus would be painted with a single brush. James might also feel the onus of defending his wayward brother from criticism. The use of the term liar in reference to Jesus is also found among the Mandaeans, an interesting group in that only they still speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus, James, John and most of first-century Palestine (Hebrew was only a liturgical language, as Aramaic now is in Syria). The Mandaeans claim Jesus learned of the mystical Way from John the Baptist, a figure central in their canon, but later erred and started spreading falsehoods. The Mandaeans at that time by all rights SHOULD HAVE BEEN first-hand eyewitnesses to the events taking place at the mouth of Jordan and the Dead Sea, where John was busy baptising and ministering. They later fled to the marshlands around present-day Basra, Iraq, where they still live, it is said. Their traditions of John dovetail, if you like, with Allegro's theories: there really does seem to be a power struggle hiding just beneath the seemingly calm surface of the account of John's baptism of Jesus in the Jordan. Who is serving whom? Who is supplicant? Who is teacher?

That Jesus was called Liar by his contemporaries, that his apostles may not have actually been his to any great extent-this certainly would be dangerous news for the Catholic Church. St Paul would then be the man who continued the work of the apostate Qumranian Jesus. The authors do make an excellent case for Paul having worked for Rome, one strengthened by a re-reading of the apocryphal letters between Paul and Seneca, but I wonder how much he was a turncoat so much as what would today be called a counter-intelligence infiltrator. Assuming the mantle of turncoat against the Roman authorities in favor of his ethnic brethren would've been excellent tradecraft as far as first century espionage goes.

It is perhaps important, but it goes unmentioned in this book, to remember the heterodoxy that was Judaism at the time of the fall of Israel. Besides James and the Zealots who seemed interested in defending the nation and the regalia of state, the regalia from the Temple in Jerusalem and the Temple itself, there were others who may not have cared for being dominated by the Romans, but who also still held grudges that worship was centralised under the auspices of the state at Jerusalem instead of the old, decentralised tradition. James the Just may have represented the majority of Israelites in their opposition to Roman rule, but he couldn't have had universal support. Jesus would have been a bit player in this particular drama. Anti-Solomon sentiment was probably alive and well even then, under the auspices of Roboam's spiritual descendants. Anti-Moses feeling probably also existed in the extreme hinterlands of the Semitic-Judaic tribes. It may be telling that some of the fragments from Qumran are written in Greek.

To sum up, the book is definitely worth reading for anyone interested in the Scrolls, the history of the Scrolls and early Christianity. The authors make out early Christianity as more akin to modern Islamic fundamentalist terrorist activity, or the Kamikaze of WWII, which is certainly closer to the mark than we have been told, except by Bishop Pike in his Wilderness Revolt. The style leaves a little to be desired. It almost feels like the conversation between two professors who have their own pet phrases, instead of a seamless piece of writing, at certain points. Still, the style has its finer points to recommend it as well. I came away with the distinct impression the French Catholic team in charge of the scrolls may be capable of destroying material they don't like, or archiving it for eternity at the Vatican library in Rome. This will certainly be something for the Palestinian Authority to worry about when they take control of East Jerusalem. I wondered about the ethnicity of the players: Herod was an Arab, fine, but then, Aramaic (the main language of the scrolls alongside liturgical Hebrew) speakers, at least a portion of them, must have been Aramaeans, not strictly Hebrews. How is it that the national struggle for Israel was conducted by people speaking a foreign language who vehemently reject admixture with foreigners? The term Zadok almost certainly is one and the same with Saducee-is Jesus then railing against his former co-religionists after his excommunication? It is interesting to note the Mandaeans have a term strikingly similar to Nazorite for one class of priest - was Jesus trying to become a nazir? Was the term placed above him on the cross by the Romans actually NASI...? I picture his co-religionists giving him up to the Roman authorities. Allegro pointed out that Iscariot is a reference to a Qumranian Community office, that of paymaster. The gospel story of Judas may reflect the special role Christ played in giving up his co-religionists. Judas is certainly cast in a sympathetic light: he does what he has to do in accordance to the Will of God, he weeps over it later and kills himself.

Great book, I gave it two thumbs distended.

Geoffrey Vasiliauskas