TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081489/08148900.064

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.9 KB | 136 lines

                                                                                RELIGION, Page 71

Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls


A scholarly squabble over an archaeological treasure

By Richard N. Ostling


    Oxford scholar Geza Vermes calls it "the academic scandal
par excellence of the 20th century." Columbia University's
Morton Smith protests that there is "no justification" for it.
Fumes California State's Robert Eisenman: "We are tired of being
treated contemptuously." Behind the scenes, scholars are
exchanging bitter private letters and passing around bootlegged
photos. What is all the fuss about? The protesters are referring
to the long delay in making public many of the Dead Sea Scrolls,
those mysterious documents discovered between 1947 and 1956 in
caves 20 miles east of Jerusalem. As they see it, the world has
long been unnecessarily deprived of data vital to understanding
Jewish and Christian history.

    The discovery of the scrolls -- 800 ancient Jewish
manuscripts that had been hidden from the world for 19 centuries
-- was unexpected and dazzling. The Hebrew and Aramaic
documents, written mostly on leather, were found in eleven caves
along the northwest rim of the Dead Sea. Because of popular
fascination over possible connections with Jesus, the Dead Sea
Scrolls became the century's most fabled archaeological find.

    That makes it even harder to accept that more than three
decades later, roughly one-fourth of the material remains
unpublished. Originally the informal target date for publishing
transcriptions of all the scrolls was 1970. Now, responding to
mounting pressures, the 18 scholars on the official scrolls
team have given the Israeli government a timetable calling for
publication of the remaining materials by 1997. This year
Israel's antiquities department set up a committee to monitor
progress. The new timetable, however, has only inflamed the
critics.

    Chief among them is the Biblical Archaeology Review of
Washington, a well-regarded layman's magazine, which has long
berated the team for unconscionable foot dragging. In the
latest issue, editor Herschel Shanks brands the new timetable
"a hoax and a fraud." Shanks insists that "the scrolls will
never be published by the current team" because the task is too
huge. The squabbling should make for heated talk at a conference
of scrolls experts later this month in the Netherlands.

    The team members, twelve of whom are laboring in Jerusalem,
point out that their task is difficult and must be done with
precision. For example, one of the caves contained 15,000
fragments that had to be pieced together like jigsaw puzzles
into 516 scrolls. Harvard University's John Strugnell, head of
the group since 1987, says fund-raising difficulties and the
Arab-Israeli wars slowed progress. He admits that his deadline
of 1997 is only an "intelligent guess," not a "promise," and
that work could stretch years beyond that.

    In the eyes of many experts, the No. 1 foot dragger is the
elusive J.T. Milik of the National Center for Scientific
Research in Paris. He is a former Roman Catholic priest who has
been assigned to prepare 50 or more photographic plates of the
documents. Says Milik unrepentantly: "The world will see the
manuscripts when I have done the necessary work." Castigating
the "unhealthy curiosity" of complaining historians, he
nonetheless says he has assigned two U.S. colleagues to help
with some of his scrolls.

    In its next issue, the Review will demand not only that
more of the texts be farmed out but also that Israel produce a
list of all unpublished texts and who has them. In addition, the
magazine will call for access to photographs of all scrolls for
interested researchers, who have been kept waiting for decades.
Team members contend that this would violate their scholarly
rights and that without the analysis of seasoned experts,
outsiders would misunderstand what they read.

    Says New York University's Lawrence Schiffman: "The
material could be published in a very short time if the circle
of scholars were enlarged." That is prevented by a system of
control that dates from the early discoveries in what was then
part of Jordan. After rapid publication of the first finds by
Israelis, Jordan authorized creation of a select group of
antiquities experts, all Christians, with exclusive rights to
study and publish the rest of the manuscripts. The favored
scholars assigned the various texts among themselves. As for the
scrolls, some eventually went on display at West Jerusalem's
Shrine of the Book, but most ended up in the Rockefeller Museum
in East Jerusalem. When Israel gained jurisdiction over the
museum in the 1967 Six-Day War, it left the existing team in
place. Recently the members have consigned some scrolls to
graduate assistants, cutting out better-known experts.

    The scrolls that have appeared so far are important to both
specialists and ordinary believers. Previously unknown texts
like the Manual of Discipline (which listed commune-like rules
of an ancient Jewish sect) and the Psalms of Thanksgiving (a
devotional collection) have given historians new insight into
ancient Jewish life. The scrolls have also affected Bible
translations read by millions of Jews and Christians. The caves
contained portions of all books of the Old Testament except
Esther, including a remarkably complete scroll of Isaiah that
is 1,000 years older than any other surviving manuscript.
Besides clearing up anomalies in several verses, the scrolls
have demonstrated the remarkable accuracy with which Jewish
scribes preserved the text of the Bible.


    Within a year, Strugnell and Israel's Elisha Qimron plan to
publish one of the most important scrolls, known as the "MMT
Letter." The oldest of the nonbiblical scrolls, dating from the
mid-2nd century B.C., it spells out disagreements over Jewish
law, showing the thinking of the Dead Sea sect at an early stage
before it broke with officialdom in Jerusalem. The author might
have been the shadowy "Teacher of Righteousness," the sect's
presumed founder.

    Years ago writers speculated that New Testament accounts of
Jesus Christ could have been patterned after this earlier
teacher. But such theories lack textual support and have died
out. Columbia University's Theodor Gaster thinks that the
teacher was not even a specific person and that the title was
used by a succession of leaders. Despite lack of evidence for
a direct link between Jesus and the Dead Sea sect, the scrolls
show that many of the concepts contained in the Gospels, as well
as the fervent expectation of an imminent kingdom of God, were
commonplace in Jewish culture just at the time when Christianity
arose. With further texts to come, there is always the
tantalizing prospect that important and long-kept secrets of the
scrolls remain to be revealed.


-- Michael P. Harris/New York and Robert Slater/Jerusalem