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Michael
Baigent and Richard Leigh's
The
Dead Sea Scrolls
Deception
Simon & Schuster, 1993
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
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This
publication in paperback represents an updating of the 1991 hardcover edition.
It takes account of the furor over the scholarly monopoly of the Scrolls and
how it was finally broken,
essentially
adding a final chapter to the investigative history of the Scrolls and Scrolls
research provided by the original book. This revisionist history takes up the
bulk of the book. Baigent and Leigh provide a clear and fast-paced account of
the discovery of the Scrolls and the establishment of the International Team,
as well as that body's scholarly consensus on the Scrolls, the origins,
provenance and meaning, opinions and conjectures which rapidly became critical
orthodoxy. We have heard this story too often in nearly every book devoted to
the Scrolls, but this time around the tale is anything but stale. The
authors/reporters have gone behind the scenes in order to show in fulsome
detail how the shocking arrogance and dog-in-the-manger stubbornness of
Strugnell and his cohorts during the ruckus immediately preceding the release
of the Scrolls had been standard operating procedure all along.
Most scholarly and journalistic
commentators, in wake of the final "War of the Sons of Light Against the
Sons of Darkness" that issued in the Scrolls going public, chalked up the
four-decade
delay to scholarly pomposity and vanity, assuming that Strugnell and the rest
had simply wanted to have the last word before anyone else could put in their
first word on the texts. This would have been scandal enough. But Baigent and
Leigh go on to do a disconcertingly plausible job of reviving the old village atheist
suspicions that the real reason for the delay was ecclesiastical/theological
suppression of evidence deemed dangerous for the credibility of Christian
orthodoxy. In an age of ecumenical sensitivity, this is a charge that many will
not even wish to
entertain.
But the fact remains that the International Team that so long sequestered the
Scrolls and controlled their interpretation were all Roman Catholics, most on
the payroll of the Ecole Biblique. Was it an accident that this tight-knit
group propagated a reading of the Scrolls in convenient accord with the "maximal
conservative" (James Barr), not to say apologetical, stance of the Ecole?
We might dismiss such a charge as an instance of
the circumstantial ad hominem fallacy except that the Maccabean Sitz-im-Leben posited for the Scrolls,
making them and their authors definitely pre-Christian, is now seen to have
been the flimsiest house of numismatic, archaeological, and paleographical
cards. G.R. Driver and Cecil Roth had long since pointed out sufficient internal
evidence to overturn the Maccabean-era dating, but Roland de Vaux and his team
were always able to hide behind their supposedly secure paleographical and
numismatic evidence. Now all that has been exposed by Norman Golb, Robert
Eisenman and others.
And as Baigent and Leigh tell it, it is a tale
of academic high adventure. Were Father de Vaux and his brethren simply
unwilling to lose face by backing away from early and ill-considered
theories?
Or were they engaged in apologetics? Did they fear that placing the
Qumran materials in close
proximity to the New Testament period would lead to a dangerous intertextual
infection?
Would
early Christianity and the Scrolls sect be seen to be too similar, Christianity
revealed as what Renan made it, a successful Essenism? Or something still
closer, too close for comfort?
Yet even this exercise of the hermeneutic of
suspicion will strike many readers as tame compared with the concluding third
of the book in which the authors seek to popularize the controversial theories
of Eisenman on the origin and character of the Scrolls, as well as the
principal players in the drama for which they are the fragmentary script.
Baigent and Leigh are not aliens to the far regions of Christian Origins
theorizing. In earlier books including
Holy Blood, Holy Grail (a book saluted, though rejected, by Schonfield in The Essene Odyssey), Baigent and Leigh
argue that Jesus not only survived the cross but married Mary Magdalene and
begat a line of descent traceable through the order of the Knights Templar and
surviving in
France to this day. No
mention
of these views is made in the present book, something for which Eisenman is no
doubt grateful. But his own reconstruction of Christian Origins, as well as of
the Dead Sea Scrolls, is
scarcely
less controversial. It is to be hoped that scholars will form their opinions of
the Eisenman hypothesis from a careful reading of his own important books Maccabees, Zadokites, Christians and
Qumran (Leiden: Brill, 1983) and James the Just in the Habakkuk Pesher (Leiden: Brill, 1986).
Briefly, Eisenman argues that the Dead Sea
Scrolls are the literary product of Jewish Torah-Christianity led by James the
Just. His theory proposes a radical Tübingen-style opposition between
this
faction and a syncretistic Hellenized Christianity with Paul in the role of the
Second Founder of Christianity. (Baur's thesis is currently receiving
long-overdue reconsideration by Gerd Lüdemann and others, so readers inured to
the apologetical dismissals of Ward Gasque and other strange bedfellows of
Harnack should not be too quick to write off Eisenman for this alone.) Like
Schonfield and other scholars, Eisenman notes the fact that the Scrolls sect
and the church chronicled by Luke both regard themselves as "followers of
the Way." Both are said to have practiced some form of community of goods.
Both were governed by a group of twelve and an inner group of three. Schonfield
reasoned that these similarities implied the outgrowth of Christianity from
Essenism as a mutation of the latter, since otherwise it would be difficult to
account for the mushroom-like growth of the institutional framework of the
early church. Instead, the Christians simply continued sectarian patterns to
which they had been long accustomed. But Eisenman's inference is a bit
different: the Christian church was not just the same sort of thing as the Scrolls
sect, it was precisely the same thing. The Teacher of Righteousness was none
other than James the Righteous.
Two questions arise at this point. If the Qumran
Scrolls were written by some species of Christians, why is there no mention of Jesus
anywhere in the published material (even in that recently published and edited
by Eisenman himself)? One may counter that it is precisely that Epistle
attributed to James in the New Testament canon which makes the most glancing
and marginal references to Jesus. And suppose it is Jesus who is intended under
the rubric "the Messiah of Israel" in the Scrolls. The other question
raised and implicitly answered by Eisenman's
theory
is one that scholars should have asked more frequently before now: given the
apparent importance of Essenes for the New Testament context, a basic postulate
of post-Qumran scholarship, why is this sect never mentioned in the New
Testament? The implied answer: "they" are never mentioned simply
because "they" are in fact "we," the writers of the New
Testament! And one only employs categories for those who are not among one's
group.
Eisenman shrewdly points out that the two
Scrolls villains, the Liar and the Wicked Priest, are never identified with
each other, and indeed they cannot be references to the same person, since
the
Liar is said to be a betrayer and defector from within the group, while the
Wicked Priest is the enemy without. Eisenman's candidate for the Liar is Paul
who repudiated the Law for which
James
and his Covenanters were zealots. Like the
Tübingen
School, Eisenman sees the Pseudo-Clementine
literature as the refuge of important stray traditions which furnish clues to
the relations
between
the parties of the early Christian movement. And there the James-Paul enmity,
which Luke papers over but which peeps out between the paragraphs in Galatians,
is on plain display.
The Wicked Priest is Annas, he who authorized
his minion Saul to seek out Christians in "Damascus." Noting that the
High Priest's authority would not have reached so far as the literal
Damascus, Eisenman's theory
makes Saul's destination the cipher-Damascus of
Qumran itself. (By contrast,
Schonfield takes Saul's
Damascus literally but still
makes it an Essene refuge. And this enables him to clear up a different
problem, namely how the city of
Damascus could already have a
functioning Christian congregation so early? The answer is that it was already
an Essene outpost and that the Christian group was simply an outgrowth of it.) One
naturally fears the force of scholarly inertia that has so much in common with
the ecclesiastical dictum that novelty is the
mark
of falsehood. For many no doubt the very comprehensiveness and boldness of
Eisenman's thesis will disqualify it. There is always resistance to new
paradigms. We have all painstakingly put
together
our own cherished packages of theories and critical opinions, and we do not
relish having to shake loose all the evidence and start all over again. It
remains to be seen whether Eisenman's proposed reconstruction will prompt such
dreaded expenditures, and whether Baigent and Leigh's particular representation
of his theory will help or hinder the process.
CopyrightŠ2007 by
Robert M Price
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