Books, Arts & Manners: The Scroll Wars

Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls, edited by Hershel Shanks (Random House, 296 pp., $23)

FEW events of recent years have disturbed the peace of the academy as much as the discovery by Beduin, 45 years ago, of ancient Jewish scrolls in the neighborhood of the Dead Sea. In a New Yorker article of May 1955, Edmund Wilson gave wide currency to the thesis of an eminent French specialist, André Dupont-Sommer, that the scrolls published up to that time came from a community that anticipated many of the features of early Christianity and was founded by a certain Teacher of Righteousness who preached much the same message as Jesus, who met the same fate at the hands of his enemies, and whose followers expected him to return as judge and savior. While this sensational announcement was quickly repudiated by the specialists, rumors of disconcerting revelations from the unpublished material continued to circulate. In 1991 Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh published The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, which claimed to uncover a Vatican-led conspiracy aimed at suppressing the publication of Qumran material opposed to such traditional Christian beliefs as the divinity of Jesus and the virgin birth. Nobody in the business took them very seriously, although the team of scholars to whom publication of the vast cache of material had been entrusted, including five Roman Catholic priests, had left themselves open to suspicions of this kind. This was not so much because of their less than impressive rate of publication (so far only about 20 per cent of the cache from Cave 4 has appeared), as because of their failure to make photographic reproductions available to their academic colleagues, a normal procedure in situations of this kind.

JB

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Joseph Blenkinsopp

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Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls, edited by Hershel Shanks (Random House, 296 pp., $23)

FEW events of recent years have disturbed the peace of the academy as much as the discovery by Beduin, 45 years ago, of ancient Jewish scrolls in the neighborhood of the Dead Sea. In a New Yorker article of May 1955, Edmund Wilson gave wide currency to the thesis of an eminent French specialist, André Dupont-Sommer, that the scrolls published up to that time came from a community that anticipated many of the features of early Christianity and was founded by a certain Teacher of Righteousness who preached much the same message as Jesus, who met the same fate at the hands of his enemies, and whose followers expected him to return as judge and savior. While this sensational announcement was quickly repudiated by the specialists, rumors of disconcerting revelations from the unpublished material continued to circulate. In 1991 Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh published The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, which claimed to uncover a Vatican-led conspiracy aimed at suppressing the publication of Qumran material opposed to such traditional Christian beliefs as the divinity of Jesus and the virgin birth. Nobody in the business took them very seriously, although the team of scholars to whom publication of the vast cache of material had been entrusted, including five Roman Catholic priests, had left themselves open to suspicions of this kind. This was not so much because of their less than impressive rate of publication (so far only about 20 per cent of the cache from Cave 4 has appeared), as because of their failure to make photographic reproductions available to their academic colleagues, a normal procedure in situations of this kind.