At the same time, of course, Rome was being buffeted from other quarters as well. Four years before The Life of Jesus, Charles Darwin had published The Origin of Species, and followed it in 1871 with The Descent of Man, a more theologically oriented work which questioned scriptural accounts of the creation. In Darwin’s wake, there followed the great age of English agnosticism, exemplified by Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer. Influential and widely read philosophers — Schopenhauer, for example, and particularly Nietzsche — were also challenging, even blasphemously demolishing, conventional Christian ethical and theological assumptions. Under the doctrine of ‘l’art pour l’art’, the arts were becoming established as a self-contained religion of their own, moving into sacred territory which organised religion seemed increasingly to have abdicated. Bayreuth became, in effect, the temple of a new cult, a new creed; and well-educated Europeans deemed it quite as acceptable to be ‘a Wagnerian’ as to be a Christian.
The Church was under sustained political attack as well. In 1870-72, Prussia’s shattering victory in her war with France, and the creation of the new German Empire, produced, for the first time in modern history, a supreme military power in Europe which owed no allegiance whatever to Rome. To the extent that the new empire was Christian at all, it was Lutheran; but the Lutheran Church, to all intents and purposes, was little more than an adjunct of the War Office. Most traumatic of all, Garibaldi’s partisan army, by 1870, had finally effected the unification of Italy — had captured Rome, had wrested the Papal States and all other territory from the Church, and reduced Catholicism to the status of a non-secular power.
16. Father Jean Starcky celebrating Mass at the ruins of Qumran prior to the day’s archaeological excavations.
17. Members of the international team at the Rockefeller Museum, Jerusalem, working on the scrolls from Cave 4. Centre, bearded, is Fathc de Vaux, with Father Milik to his right and Father Starcky to his left. John Allegro is seated to the right of the illustration.
18. Members of the international team working on scroll fragments in the ‘Scrollery’: (left to right) Father Patrick Skehan, John Strugnell, John Allegro.
19. (left to right) John Strugnell, Frank Cross, Father Milik, John Allegro and Father Starcky.
20. John Allegro and John Strugnell working in the ‘Scrollery’.
21. (left to right) John Strugnell, John Allegro, Father Skehan, Dr Claus-Hunno Hunzinger and Father Milik.
22. John Allegro working on the ‘Nahum Commentary’ in the ‘Scrollery’.
23. Father Milik, flanked by Dr Hunzinger and Father Benoit, studying some newly purchased scroll fragments in January 1956. The fragments probably came from Cave II.
24. Dr Hunzinger in January 1956 holding the ‘Psalms Scroll’ from Qumran, Cave II. This scroll was not to be published until 1965.
25. Scroll fragments as they were brought in by the Bedouin who discovered them in January 1956.
26. The ‘Psalms Scroll’ from Cave II before it was unrolled.
27. A seal found at the Qumran ruins with, curiously, the owner’s name, ‘Josephus’, written in Greek rather than Hebrew or Aramaic.
Beleaguered by onslaughts from science, from philosophy, from the arts and from secular political powers, Rome was more shaken than she had been at any time since the beginning of the Lutheran Reformation three and a half centuries before. She responded with a number of desperate defensive measures. She sought — vainly, it anspired — political allegiances with Catholic, or nominally Catho-ic, powers, such as the Habsburg Empire. On 18 July 1870, after a vote by the First Vatican Council, Pope Pius IX — characterised by Metternich as ‘warm of heart, weak of head and lacking utterly in common sense’9 — promulgated the dogma of Papal Infallibility.10 And to counter the depredations being wrought on scripture by Renan and German biblical scholarship, the Church began equipping her own cadres of meticulous scholars — elite intellectual ‘shock troops’ who were supposed to confront Catholicism’s adversaries on their own ground. Thus arose the Catholic Modernist Movement.
The Modernists were originally intended to deploy the rigour and precision of Germanic methodology not to challenge scripture, but to support it. A generation of clerical scholars was painstakingly trained and groomed to provide the Church with a kind of academic strike force, a corps specifically formed to defend the literal truth of scripture with all the heavy ordnance of the most up-to-date critical scholarship. To Rome’s chagrin and mortification, however, the programme backfired. The more it sought to arm younger clerics with the requisite tools for combat in the modern polemical arena, the more those same clerics began to desert the cause for which they had been recruited. Critical scrutiny of the Bible revealed a multitude of inconsistencies, discrepancies and implications that were positively inimical to Roman dogma. The Modernists themselves quickly began to question and subvert what they were supposed to be defending.
Thus, for example, Alfred Loisy, one of the most prominent and prestigious Modernists, wondered publicly how, in the light of recent biblical history and archaeology, many of the Church’s doctrines could still be justified. ‘Jesus proclaimed the coming of the Kingdom’, Loisy declared, ‘but what came was the Church.’11 Loisy argued that many points of dogma had crystallised as historically conditioned reactions to specific events, at specific places and times. In consequence, they were not to be regarded as fixed and immutable truths, but as — at best — symbols. According to Loisy, such basic tenets of Christian teaching as the Virgin Birth and Jesus’ divinity were no longer tenable.
Rome, in trying to play Frankenstein, had created a monster in her own laboratory. In 1902, shortly before his death, Pope Leo XIII created the Pontifical Biblical Commission, to supervise and monitor the work of Catholic scriptural scholarship. Later that year, Leo’s successor, Pius X, placed Loisy’s works on the Inquisition’s Index of forbidden books. In 1904, the new Pope issued two encyclicals opposing all scholarship which questioned the origins and early history of Christianity. All Catholic teachers suspected of ‘Modernist tendencies’ were summarily dismissed from their posts.
The Modernists, of course, comprising the best-educated, most erudite and articulate enclave in the Church, did not hesitate to fight back. They were supported by prominent thinkers, by distinguished cultural and literary figures. In Italy, one such was Antonio Fogazzaro. In 1896, Fogazzaro had become a senator. He was also regarded as ‘the leading Catholic layman of his day’ and, by his contemporaries at least, as the greatest novelist Italy had produced since Manzoni. In The Saint, published in 1905, Fogazzaro wrote: ‘The Catholic Church, calling herself the fountain of truth, today opposes the search after truth when her foundations, the sacred books, the formulae of her dogmas, her alleged infallibility, become objects of research. To us, this signifies that she no longer has faith in herself.’12
Fogazzaro’s work, needless to say, was itself promptly placed on the Index. And the Church’s campaign against the movement it had fostered and nurtured proceeded to intensify. In July 1907, the Holy Office published a decree officially condemning Modernist attempts to question Church doctrine, papal authority and the historical veracity of biblical texts. Less than two months later, in September, Modernism was effectively declared to be a heresy and the entire movement was formally banned. The number of books on the Index suddenly and dramatically increased. A new, much more stringent censorship was instituted. Clerical commissars monitored teaching with a doctrinal rigidity unknown since the Middle Ages. At last, in 1910, a decree was issued requiring all Catholics involved in teaching or preaching to take an oath renouncing ‘all the errors of Modernism’. A number of Modernist writers were excommunicated. Students at seminaries and theological colleges were even forbidden to read newspapers.
In the 1880s, however, all of this still lay in the future. Among the young Modernist clerics of the 1880s, there was a naive credulity and optimism, a fervent conviction that methodical historical and archaeological research would confirm, rat
her than contradict, the literal truth of scripture. The Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Franchise de Jerusalem — which subsequently came to dominate Dead Sea Scroll scholarship — was rooted in the first generation of Modernism, before the Church realised how close it had come to subverting itself. It originated in 1882, when a French Dominican monk on pilgrimage in Jerusalem resolved to establish a Dominican house there, consisting of a church and a monastery. He chose a site on the Nablus Road, where excavations had revealed the remains of an earlier church. According to tradition, it was precisely here that St Stephen, supposedly the first Christian martyr, had been stoned to death.
Rome not only approved the idea, but embellished and expanded it. Pope Leo XIII suggested that a biblical school also be established. This school was founded in 1890 by Father Albert Lagrange and opened in 1892, with living quarters for fifteen resident students. The installation was one of a number of institutions created at the time, to equip Catholic scholars with the academic expertise necessary to defend their faith against the threat posed by developments in historical and archaeological research.
Father Lagrange had been born in 1855. After studying law, he had gained his doctorate in 1878, then entered the seminary of St Sulpice, the centre of Modernist studies at the time. In 1879, he had become a Dominican. On 6 October 1880, however, under the Third French Republic, all religious orders were banished from France. The 25-year-old Lagrange had accordingly gone to Salamanca, in Spain, where he studied Hebrew and taught Church history and philosophy. It was at Salamanca that he was ordained a priest, on St Dagobert’s Day (23 December), 1883. In 1888, he was sent to the University of Vienna to study Oriental languages. Two years later, on 10 March 1890, at the age of thirty-five, he arrived at the fledgling Dominican house of St Stephen in Jerusalem, and there, on 15 November, established a biblical school. The school was called initially the ‘Ecole Practique d’Etudes Bibliques’. Lagrange created for it its own journal, Revue biblique, which began publication in 1892 and continues today. Through this organ, as well, of course, as through the programme of studies, he sought to imbue the new institution with an attitude towards historical and archaeological research which can best be summed up in his own words. According to Father Lagrange, ‘the various stages in the religious history of mankind form a recit, a history that is directly and supernaturally guided by God to lead to the ultimate and definitive stage — the messianic age inaugurated by Jesus Christ’.13 The Old Testament was ‘a group of books indicating a register of the various stages of an oral tradition that God used and guided… in the preparation for the definitive New Testament era’.14 The orientation was clear enough. To the extent that Lagrange employed modern methodology at all, he would employ it to ‘prove’ what he had already, a priori, decided to be true — that is, the literal veracity of scripture. And the ‘definitive’ nature of the New Testament and the events it chronicled rendered it effectively off limits to scholarly scrutiny.
In 1890, when Lagrange established the Ecole Biblique, Modernism had not yet come under a cloud. By 1902, however, it had fallen into serious official disrepute. In that year, as we have noted, Pope Leo XIII created the Pontifical Biblical Commission, to supervise and monitor the work of Catholic scriptural scholarship. In the same year, Lagrange returned to France to lecture at Toulouse — where he was accused of being a Modernist, and met with furious opposition. By that time, the mere suggestion of historical and archaeological research was sufficient to get one stigmatised.
The Pope himself, however, recognised that Lagrange’s faith was still intact, and that his heart, so far as the Church was concerned, was in the right place. And indeed, much of Lagrange’s work comprised a systematic rebuttal of Alfred Loisy and other Modernists. Lagrange was accordingly made a member, or ‘consultant’, of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, and his journal, Revue biblique, became the Commission’s official organ. This arrangement obtained until 1908, when the Commission launched a journal of its own, the Ada apostolicae sedis.
From lower down in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, accusations of Modernism continued. So demoralising were these accusations that Lagrange, in 1907, temporarily renounced his work in Old Testament studies. In 1912, he resolved to abandon biblical studies altogether and leave Jerusalem. He was duly recalled to France. But the Pope again rallied to his support, dispatched him back to his post in Jerusalem and ordered him to continue his work. The Ecole Biblique, originally created as a forum for Modernism, had now become a bulwark against it.
Among the original team of international scholars assembled by Father de Vaux in 1953 was the late Monsignor Patrick Skehan. Father Skehan was head of the Department of Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures at the Catholic University in Washington. He was also, later, a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. And in 1955, he was director of the Albright Institute in Jerusalem. In this capacity, he was instrumental in the political manoeuvrings which established the Ecole Biblique’s dominance of Dead Sea Scroll research. In 1956, he played a key role in organising the letter to The Times that was intended to isolate and discredit John Allegro. 15
Father Skehan was among the few scholars to be entrusted with access to the scrolls themselves. His attitudes offer some indication of the orientation of the Catholic scholars associated with the Ecole Biblique. Writing in 1966, Father Skehan declared that the Old Testament was not ‘a thumbnail sketch of the history and prehistory of the human race… In the fullness of time, Our Lord came; and a proper part of the duty of every Old Testament scholar is to trace in sacred history the development of the readiness to be aware of Christ when he would come…’16 In other words, the primary responsibility of every biblical scholar is to ferret out from the Old Testament supposed anticipations of
accepted Christian doctrine. Viewed any other way, the Old Testament presumably has scant value and relevance. This is a curious definition of ‘dispassionate scholarship’. But Father Skehan was even more explicit:
it would seem that in our day it is incumbent upon biblical scholars… to indicate… as best they can the general lines of the progress by which God steadily led, as he surely did, stone age, Chalcolithic, and ancient pagan man to the capability of measuring up, in some degree, to the social fact which is the Christian Church.17
Father Skehan, of course, made no real pretence to ‘dispassionate scholarship’. In fact, he regarded it as positively dangerous — considering that ‘studies carried out from a perspective that puts literary and historico-critical considerations in the foreground can, usually in the hands of popularizers, result in oversimplification, exaggeration, or neglect of more profound matters’.18 Ultimately, the biblical scholar’s work should be guided and determined by Church doctrine and ‘be subject always to the sovereign right of Holy Mother Church to witness definitively what is in fact concordant with the teaching she has received from Christ’.19
The implications of all this are staggering. All enquiry and investigation, regardless of what it might turn up or reveal, must be subordinated and accommodated to the existing corpus of official Catholic teaching. In other words, it must be edited or adjusted or distorted until it conforms to the requisite criteria. And what if something comes to light which can’t be made thus to conform? From Father Skehan’s statements, the answer to that question would seem clear. Anything that can’t be subordinated or accommodated to existing doctrine must, of necessity, be suppressed.
Father Skehan’s position, of course, was not unique. It was effectively echoed by Pope Pius XII himself, who maintained ‘that the biblical exegete has a function and a responsibility to perform in matters of importance to the church’.20 As for the Ecole Biblique and its research on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Skehan says:
Are there not… providential elements also in the curious fact that the Holy Land is the place on earth best suited to be a kind of laboratory for the study of human life continuously, with no major periods missing… I believe that there are…
…Therefore
, it seems to me that there is an ultimate religious value which we cannot yet measure, but which has Providence behind it, in the fact that Pere Lagrange established upon Palestinian soil an institute…21
The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception Page 14
