TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/081489/08148900.064

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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unpublished.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