3. Kando and George Isaiah, who first brought the scrolls to the attention of the Metropolitan of the Syrian Church.
4. Professor Eleazar Sukenik, who in 1947 was the first Israeli scholar to obtain and translate some of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
5. A portion of one of the scrolls, the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’, which tells of a battle between the leader of the Dead Sea community and two opponents, the ‘Liar’ and the ‘Wicked Priest’.
6–7. Examples of scroll fragments purchased from the Bedouin after their identification and arrangement. Few of these thousands of fragments can be pieced together precisely.
8. Father Josef Milik.
9. Dr Frank Cross.
10. Excavations among the Qumran ruins: Father de Vaux and Father Milik with Gerald Lankester Harding of the Department of Antiquities.
11. One of the pots containing animal bones found during the excavations and never satisfactorily explained. They appear to be the remains of sacred meals.
12–13. The Qumran ruins during one of the excavations led by Father de Vaux and Gerald Lankester Harding.
14. Professor H. Wright Baker of Manchester University cutting the ‘Copper Scroll’ into segments in order for it to be translated. It proved to contain a list of treasures from the Temple of Jerusalem.
15. The unopened ‘Copper Scroll’, found broken into two sections in Cave 3 in 1952.
Among the scholars of Father de Vaux’s original international team, perhaps the most dynamic, original and audacious was John Marco Allegro. Certainly he was the most spontaneous, the most independent-minded, the most resistant to suppression of material. Born in 1923, he saw service in the Royal Navy during the war and in 1947 — the year the first Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered — entered Manchester University as an undergraduate studying Logic, Greek and Hebrew. A year later, he transferred to the honours course in Semitic Studies. He also developed an interest in philology, the study of the origins of language, its underlying structure and development. Bringing his philological expertise to bear on biblical texts, he quickly became convinced that scripture could not be taken at face value and proclaimed himself an agnostic. In June 1951, he graduated with a BA, first-class honours, in Oriental Studies, and the following year received his MA for his thesis, ‘A Linguistic Study of the Balaam Oracles in the Book of Numbers’. In October of that year, he enrolled in the doctoral programme at Oxford under the supervision of the distinguished Semitic scholar, Professor Godfrey R. Driver. A year later, Driver recommended him for the international team then being assembled by de Vaux, and Allegro was assigned the crucial material found in Cave 4 at Qumran. He departed for Jerusalem in September 1953. By that time, he had already published four acclaimed articles in academic journals — a track record more impressive than anyone else on the team could claim.
In 1956, Allegro published a popular book, The Dead Sea Scrolls, following this in 1968 with his own research on the texts and fragl ments from Cave 4 in the fifth volume of the definitive Oxford University Press series, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert. At this point, Allegro was one of the most esteemed and prestigious figures in the field of biblical scholarship. Yet within two years, he was to abandon his colleagues on the international team, turn his back upon the academic world and resign his university post at Manchester. He was also to be vilified and discredited. What had happened?
It quickly became clear, to the academic community in general as well as to the international team, that Allegro was the only one among them who was not only an agnostic, but also uninhibited about ‘rocking the boat’. Unconstrained by any personal religious bias, he explained things, often impetuously, as he saw them; and he rapidly lost patience with his colleagues’ refusal to countenance any theories, or even evidence, that might contradict the accepted ‘party line’ on Christian origins. In particular, he 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 connection might be closer than anyone had hitherto believed — or, at any rate, dared to suppose.
The first major storm occurred in 1956, when Allegro agreed to give a series of three short talks on the Dead Sea Scrolls, to be transmitted on radio in the north of England on 16, 23 and 30 January. It was clear that he intended to accelerate the tempo of scroll research by injecting an element of excitement and controversy. ‘I think we can look for fireworks’, he wrote imprudently to John Strugnell, who was then in Jerusalem.9 That statement, as Allegro failed to appreciate, was bound to set alarm bells ringing in the Catholic-dominated ‘Scrollery’. Oblivious of this, he went on to say that ‘recent study of my fragments has convinced me that Dupont-Sommer is more right than he knew’.10 At the time, apparently, Strugnell was considering a career in the Church. Allegro quipped, ‘I shouldn’t worry about that theological job, if I were you: by the time I’ve finished there won’t be any Church left for you to join.’11
Allegro’s first and second broadcasts attracted little attention in Britain, but the second was written up by the New York Times, which misunderstood and misquoted him, yet generated a flurry of debate. The third talk, broadcast on 30 January, was followed on 5 February by an article in the New York Times which could not but cause a sensation. ‘Christian bases seen in scrolls’, the headline proclaimed:
The origins of some Christian ritual and doctrines can be seen in the documents of an extremist Jewish sect that existed for more than 100 years before the birth of Jesus Christ. This is the interpretation placed on the ‘fabulous’ collection of Dead Sea Scrolls by one of an international team of seven scholars… John Allegro… said last night in a broadcast that the historical basis of the Lord’s Supper and part at least of the Lord’s prayer and the New Testament teaching of Jesus were attributable to the Qumranians.12
The same article hinted at trouble to come, quoting a Catholic scholar as saying that ‘any stick now seems big enough to use against Christianity’ provided it could be used ‘to dislodge belief in the uniqueness of Jesus’.13 Allegro, in fact, was beginning to trespass on very sensitive territory indeed. On 6 February, Time Magazine ran an article entitled ‘Crucifixion Before Christ’. Two days later, The Times reported that three American religious leaders, one Jewish, one Catholic and one Protestant, had joined forces to refute Allegro and warn against any attempt to depict ‘the Essenes’ as precursors of Christianity.14 All this controversy was, of course, finding its way back to de Vaux, together with requests that something be done. Allegro, however, appears to have been almost naively insouciant. On 9 February, he wrote to de Vaux claiming he was ‘being accused of saying the most astonishing things, some of which are true, and are indeed astounding, others come from the bosoms of eager reporters’.15
It is clear in retrospect that Allegro never fully realised how sacrosanct the idea of Jesus’ ‘uniqueness’ was, and that, as a result, he underestimated the lengths to which de Vaux and other members of the international team would go in order to distance themselves from his blunt approach. This was his only real mistake, so far — that of expecting his colleagues to accept his assertions without letting their own religious allegiances influence their judgment. In his own view, he was addressing his material as a disinterested scholar, and hoped they might eventually do likewise. His innocent gibe that, by the time he’d finished, there’d be no Church left for Strugnell to join, testifies to his conviction of how important and conclusive he felt his material to be — and to his excitement at the discovery.
On 11 February, de Vaux wrote back to Allegro, distinctly unamused. All the texts available to Allegro, de Vaux said, were also available to the other members of the team in Jerusalem. They had failed to find anything that supported Allegro’s interpretation.
In his reply, on 20 February, Allegro attempted to stand his ground and at the same time repair the rift with his colleagues and defuse the public controversy: ‘You will excuse me if I think that everyone in the world is
going stark, raving mad. I am enclosing my broadcast talks, as you request, and if, after reading them, you are left wondering what all the fuss is about, you will be in precisely my position.’16 Noting that Strugnell and Milik were alleged to be preparing rebuttals of his statements, he commented, ‘I am not waging any war against the Church, and if I were, you may rest assured I would not let any loopholes in… I stand by everything I said in my three talks but I am quite prepared to believe that there may be other interpretations of my readings.’17
On 4 March, de Vaux replied, warning Allegro that a rebuttal was indeed being prepared. It would not be just from Strugnell and Milik, however. Neither would it be confined to a scholarly journal. On the contrary, it would take the form of a letter to The Times in London and would be signed by all the members of the international team.
Instead of being intimidated, Allegro was defiant. Not mincing words, he responded that a letter to The Times ‘should be most interesting to the London public, who have never heard my broadcasts’:
I have already pointed out to you that these broadcasts were made on the local Northern station… You and your friends are now apparently going to draw the attention of the gutter press of this country to these passages, of which neither they nor the majority of their readers have heard, and start a witch hunt… I congratulate you. What will certainly happen is that the press, scenting trouble, will descend like hawks on me and want to know what it is all about… they will have added fuel in what appears on the face of it to be a controversy developing between the ecclesiastics of the Scroll team and the one unattached member.18
He went on to invoke Edmund Wilson, indicating just how worried de Vaux’s team should be by the suspicions Wilson had voiced. In effect, he was attempting to use Wilson as a deterrent:
Having regard to what Wilson has already said about the unwillingness of the Church to tackle these texts objectively, you can imagine what will be made out of this rumpus.
With all respect I must point out to you that this nonsense of Wilson’s has been taken seriously here. At every lecture on the Scrolls I give, the same old question pops up: is it true that the Church is scared… and can we be sure that everything will be published. That may sound silly to you and me, but it is a serious doubt in the minds of ordinary folk… I need hardly add what effect the signatures of three Roman priests on the bottom of this proposed letter will have.19
It seems clear that, by this time, Allegro was becoming nervous. On 6 March, he wrote to another member of the international team, Frank Cross, who had just been offered an appointment at Harvard University: ‘I am awfully pleased about Harvard. Not only because this Christianity business is played out. ‘20 But in the same letter, he admitted that the barrage of criticism was wearing him down and that he was feeling, both physically and mentally, ‘at the end of my tether’. Certainly he had no desire to see the publication of a letter which alienated him publicly from the other members of the team and, by so doing, impugned his credibility.
By now, of course, it was too late. On 16 March 1956, the letter duly appeared in The Times, signed by Strugnell as well as by Fathers de Vaux, Milik, Skehan and Starcky, most of the team’s ‘big guns’:
There are no unpublished texts at the disposal of Mr Allegro other than those of which the originals are at present in the Palestine Archaeological Museum where we are working. Upon the appearance in the press of citations from Mr Allegro’s broadcasts we are unable to see in the texts the ‘findings’ of Mr Allegro.
We find no crucifixion of the ‘teacher’, no deposition from the cross, and no ‘broken body of their Master’ to be stood guard over until Judgment Day. Therefore there is no ‘well-defined Essenic pattern into which Jesus of Nazareth fits’, as Mr Allegro is alleged in one report to have said. It is our conviction that either he has misread the texts or he has built up a chain of conjectures which the materials do not support.21
To publish this sort of accusation — especially in a letter to The Times — is remarkable behaviour. It patently reflects a conclave of academics ‘ganging up’ on one of their own members. Forced on to the defensive, Allegro replied with a letter to The Times of his own, which explained and justified his position:
In the phraseology of the New Testament in this connection we find many points of resemblance to Qumran literature, since the sect also were looking for the coming of a Davidic Messiah who would arise with the priest in the last days. It is in this sense that Jesus ‘fits into a well-defined messianic (not “Essenic” as I was wrongly quoted…) pattern’. There is nothing particularly new or striking in the idea.22
It is a reasonable enough statement, a legitimate correction of an important misquotation. It also indicates how eager Allegro’s colleagues were to ‘jump on him’, to find an excuse for discrediting him. In any case, Allegro added, ‘It is true that unpublished material in my care made me more willing to accept certain suggestions made previously by other scholars on what have appeared… to be insufficient grounds.’23
The bickering and ill-feeling continued until finally, on 8 March 1957, Allegro wrote angrily to Strugnell:
You still do not seem to understand what you did in writing a letter to a newspaper in an attempt to smear the words of your own colleague. It was quite unheard of before, an unprecedented case of scholarly stabbing in the back. And, laddie, don’t accuse me of over-dramatising the business. I was here in England… Reuters’ man that morning on the ‘phone to me was classic: ‘But I thought you scholars stuck together!…’ And when it was realised that in fact you were quoting things I never even said, the inference was plain. This letter was not in the interests of scholarly science at all, but to calm the fears of the Roman Catholics of America… And what it all boiled down to was that you guys did not agree with the interpretation I put on certain texts — where I have quite as much chance of being right as you. Rather than argue it out in the journals and scholarly works, you thought it easier to influence public opinion by a scurrilous letter to a newspaper. And you have the neck to call it scholarship. Dear boy, you are very young yet, and have much to learn.24
As we have already noted, Allegro was the first of the international team to publish all the material entrusted to his charge. He remains the only one to have done so. John Strugnell, on the other hand, in accordance with the ‘go-slow’ policy of the team, has published virtually nothing of the substantial materials at his disposal. The only major work to which he did address himself, entitled ‘Notes in the Margin’, comprises 113 pages of criticism of Allegro, which Eisenman labels a ‘hatchet-job’.
In the meantime, the damage had been done. The letter to The Times signed by de Vaux and three other ecclesiastics effectively gave free rein to the Catholic propaganda machine. Opprobrium and vilification intensified. In June 1956, for example, a Jesuit commentator published in the Irish Digest an article entitled ‘The Truth about the Dead Sea Scrolls’. He attacked Wilson, Dupont-Sommer and, especially, Allegro. He then went on to make the extraordinary statement that the ‘Scrolls add surprisingly little to our knowledge of the doctrines current among the Jews from, say, 200 bc to the Christian era’.25 He concluded in positively inflammatory fashion: ‘It was not from such a sect that “Jesus learned how to be Messiah”… Rather, it was from soil such as this that sprang the thorns which tried to choke the seed of the Gospel.’26 Allegro was now being portrayed not merely as an erring scholar, but as a veritable Antichrist.
While this controversy was still raging around him, Allegro was already becoming involved in another. The new bone of contention was to be the so-called ‘Copper Scroll’, found in Cave 3 at Qumran in 1952. As we have noted, the two fragments that made up the ‘Copper Scroll’ remained unopened for three and a half years. Speculation was rife about their contents. One researcher attempted to read the indentations showing through the copper and visible on the outside of the roll. It seemed to say, he suggested, something about treasure. This suggestion elicited a salvo of derision from the
international team. It proved, however, to be quite correct.
In 1955, a year before his public dispute with his colleagues on the international team, Allegro had discussed the problem of the ‘Copper Scroll’ with Professor H. Wright-Baker of Manchester College of Technology. Wright-Baker devised a machine that could slice the thin copper into strips, thus rendering the text legible. The first of the two fragments was accordingly sent to Manchester, in Allegro’s care, in the summer of 1955. Wright-Baker’s machine performed its task, and Allegro quickly embarked on a translation of what had been revealed. The contents of the fragment proved so extraordinary that he kept them initially wholly to himself, not even divulging them to Cross or Strugnell, both of whom wrote to beg for details. His reticence cannot have improved his relations with them, but Allegro was in fact waiting for the second fragment of the scroll to arrive in Manchester. Any partial or premature disclosure, he felt, might jeopardise everything. For what the ‘Copper Scroll’ contained was a list of secret sites where the treasure of the Temple of Jerusalem was alleged to have been buried.
The second fragment was received in Manchester in January 1956. It was quickly sliced open and translated. Both fragments, along with accompanying translations, were then returned to Jerusalem. Only then did the real delays begin. De Vaux and the international team were worried about three things.
Their first concern was valid enough. If the contents of the scroll were made public and stories of buried treasure began to circulate, the Bedouin would be digging up the entire Judaean desert, and much of what they found might disappear for ever or elude scholarly hands and slip into the black market. Something of this sort was, in fact, already occurring. On discovering or learning of a potentially productive site, the Bedouin would set up a large black tent over it, loot it, pick it clean and sell their plunder privately to antique dealers.
The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception Page 7
