The Dead Sea Scroll Cover Up Continues to Unfold

The Dead Sea Scrolls are making news again. As it turns out, the original dealer, Kando, had a secret stash that he never revealed to authorities, and they are now being sold – one by one – for millions of dollars to collectors. The 1947 discovery of the oldest Biblical texts in caves by the Dead Sea is a story worthy of a Hollywood thriller. But more thrilling than the discovery, smuggling, sales etc. is the content itself. And that’s the part of the story you will rarely hear about.

The fact is that the minute the scrolls were discovered they sent certain Christian theologians into a theological panic. After all, scrolls were hidden during the Jewish rebellion against Roman rule in 66 CE (AD) and 132 CE. If they were hidden in 66, that’s less than 50 years after the crucifixion of Jesus. What if they said something that contradicted Christian theology? So…the minute they were discovered, a team of theologian scholars declared them to be a forgery. When it was clear that they were the real thing, the theologian scholars descended on the scrolls and kept them out of the public eye for 43 years!

The team was headed by Father Roland Guerin de Vaux and included at least one other priest, Father Jozef Milik. Besides translating some Biblical texts, their main accomplishment was to date the scrolls earlier than Jesus, and allow no public access to them. This was very important for the Church. Why? Because the scrolls talked about a “Teacher of Righteousness” who suffered at the hands of a “wicked priest” and a “spouter of lies”. You can see the problem; what if the “Teacher of Righteousness” is somehow related to Jesus? Professor Robert Eisenman has always maintained that “Teacher of Righteousness” is a Dead Sea Scroll code for “James, the Brother of Jesus”, known as James the “Righteous”. If the teacher is James, maybe Paul – James’ competitor and the founder of Christianity – is “the spouter of lies”, that the scrolls talk about. You can see the problem. If Eisenman is right, then the people who knew Jesus rejected what came to be defined as Christianity.

So Fathers de Vaux, Milik and company kept the scrolls under lock and key. After de Vaux finished his tenure, his job was taken over by Professor John Strugnell. Strugnell did not have a Ph.D., was a drunk and an open anti-Semite. But he did have one great asset – he was a born again Catholic. He made it very clear, on many occasions, that if he discovered something that didn’t fit his theology, he would destroy it. So much for objective scholarship.

For 43 years these guys were able to keep the Dead Sea Scrolls as their own private domain. Then in 1991, Professor Robert Eisenman and Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR) editor Hershel Shanks and their colleagues published the scrolls “illegally” and made it available to the world. But the armies of theological sleeper agents didn’t go to sleep. Now that the scrolls were public, it was very important to stress that they had nothing to do with Jesus. So first you declare them a forgery, then you keep them under lock and key, and finally you turn them into museum icons that have nothing to do with anything controversial.

Every once in a while someone raised his head and challenged the mainstream. The first was Professor John Allegro who was a member of the original team. Right away, he was declared by his colleagues to be a marginal figure. Then came people like Robert Eisenman, Cecil Roth, Jose O’Callaghan and Carsten Thiede. What all these scholars have in common is that they say that the scrolls belong to the 1st century i.e., Jesus’ time. More than this, O’Callaghan and Thiede say that they have identified a fragment of the Gospel of Mark among the scrolls. This is not good for the keepers of Christian theology. If there were Christians among the people who buried the scrolls, maybe some of the texts are “Judeo-Christian” i.e., belonging to Jesus’ first followers, and maybe they contradict present day Christian theology. Maybe the writers of the scrolls thought of Jesus as a “teacher” of righteousness, and not a god. So the new game is to make the scrolls irrelevant to anything to do with the start of Christianity.

How is this accomplished? First, you convince everyone that a little known group named the “Essenes” wrote the scrolls. Nevermind that the word “Essene” doesn’t appear even once in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Then, date the scrolls to the Maccabean period i.e., about 160 years prior to Jesus. If Christians had nothing to do with the scrolls, and if they were written over a hundred years before Jesus was born, then all is well as far as the sleeper agents of Christian theology are concerned. You can put them on display, President Obama can have his picture taken with them, and no one will be upset. After all, they have nothing to do with anything that matters – at least nothing to do with anything controversial.

As for modern Israeli scholars, the Christian spin has served their purpose. After all, which Israeli would want the earliest discovered Biblical texts to be somehow associated with the start of Christianity? By making the Dead Sea Scrolls irrelevant, Christian theologians and Israeli scholars have been kept happy. Everyone else followed the gamebook.

But truth has a way of rearing its noble head. Just when the theologians with Ph.D.’s thought that they had shoved the Dead Sea Scrolls genie back into the bottle, new fragments come to light. Right now the media emphasis is on how they were hidden and how they are being sold. They are fetching millions of dollars! But when that story dies down, the real story will emerge. The new fragments will give us new insights. The content will be front and center. And when that happens….hold on to your theological hats!

Click here to read about the recent development of the new found fragments.