In 1947, Bedouin shepherds found seven scrolls in a cave above the Dead Sea. For the next four decades, scholars, dealers, and governments fought over what the texts revealed about the origins of Christianity.
On June 1, 1954, a classified advertisement ran in The Wall Street Journal under the heading “Miscellaneous For Sale.” The items on offer were four ancient manuscripts. “Biblical Manuscripts dating back to at least 200 BC are for sale,” the notice read, adding that they “would be an ideal gift to an educational or religious institution by an individual or group.”
The seller was Metropolitan Athanasius Yeshue Samuel of the Syrian Orthodox Monastery of St. Mark in Jerusalem. He had carried the scrolls to the United States in 1949, and for five years nobody had wanted them.
Within a month the four sat in a room at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Then they were gone, bought for $250,000 by intermediaries working for the six-year-old State of Israel. Part of the price came from the American philanthropist Samuel Gottesman, and the archaeologist who arranged the deal, Yigael Yadin, was the son of the professor who had bought the first three scrolls in 1947.
By then the find had a reputation far outside the antiquities trade. Roughly 900 manuscripts would come out of eleven caves near Qumran, most of them in fragments, and among them sat the oldest copies of the Hebrew Bible anyone had ever seen. Scholars said the texts would settle how Christianity began.
They did not settle it. They complicated it, and the fight over who was allowed to read them ran on for more than forty years.
The Bedouin Shepherd Who Found The Dead Sea Scrolls
Sometime between November 1946 and February 1947, a young Ta’amireh Bedouin named Muhammed Ahmed el-Hamed, known as edh-Dhib, climbed into a cave in the cliffs above the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. Inside stood tall clay jars, and seven scrolls came out of them.
The scrolls moved through dealers in Bethlehem, among them Khalil Iskander Shahin, the cobbler and antiquities man everyone called Kando. Four of them reached Metropolitan Samuel, and three reached Eleazar Lipa Sukenik of Hebrew University.
An account cited by the scholar Edward Cook has one of the Bedouin describing what became of the pieces they kept at home. “We kept them lying around the tent, and the children played with them. One of them broke in pieces and we threw the pieces on the garbage pile. Later we came back and found that the wind had blown all the pieces away,” he said.
Sukenik bought his three in late November 1947, the week of the United Nations partition vote. “My hands shook as I started to unwrap one of them,” he wrote in his diary.
“The Greatest Manuscript Discovery Of Modern Times”
In February 1948, John Trever of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem was handed one of Metropolitan Samuel’s scrolls. “Laying the heavy document on my bed, slowly I began to open it,” he wrote. The writing threw him, being “puzzling to eyes more accustomed to Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica in modern printed Hebrew.”
“My heart began to pound,” Trever recalled. “It was a scroll of Isaiah, without a doubt!” he wrote of the moment the Hebrew in front of him came clear.
He photographed the scroll and mailed prints to William Foxwell Albright at Johns Hopkins, then the leading American authority on ancient Semitic script. Albright answered on March 8, 1948. “I repeat that in my opinion you have made the greatest MS discovery of modern times—certainly the greatest biblical manuscript find,” he told Trever.
The manuscript Trever had unrolled, now called the Great Isaiah Scroll, runs 734 centimeters across 54 columns and carries all 66 chapters of Isaiah. It was copied around 125 B.C. That put it a thousand years earlier than the oldest Hebrew Bible manuscripts known in 1947.
Its contents held few surprises for anyone expecting a different Bible. The scroll “is generally in agreement with the Masoretic or traditional version codified in medieval codices, such as the Aleppo Codex, but it contains many variant readings, alternative spellings, scribal errors, and corrections,” according to the Israel Museum.
What The Dead Sea Scrolls Actually Say About Jesus
Nothing. No scroll mentions Jesus, and none mentions John the Baptist, Peter, Paul, or James. Not one line of Christian scripture appears in the collection, which was copied and hidden before the first Gospel was written.
What the caves produced instead was the world those men came out of. The Community Rule, the sect’s handbook, tells members to “separate from the habitation of ungodly men” and to “go into the wilderness to prepare the way of Him.” The verse it quotes is Isaiah 40:3, the one the Gospels apply to John the Baptist.
A fragment catalogued as 4Q521 describes a messianic age in words the Gospel of Luke would echo. “He will heal the wounded, and revive the dead and bring good news to the poor,” it says in Michael Wise’s translation. Another fragment, 4Q246, calls a coming figure “the son of God” and “the son of the Most High.”
Parallel is not necessarily descent. The literature of Qumran and early Christian teaching “stem from a common stream within Judaism and do not reflect a direct link between the Qumran community and the early Christians,” the Library of Congress stated in its own exhibition of the scrolls.
That verdict settled nothing in public. In 1956 John Marco Allegro told BBC listeners that the sect’s Teacher of Righteousness had been crucified, and on March 16 his own colleagues wrote to The Times of London to disown him. “It is our conviction that either he has misread the texts or he has built up a chain of conjectures which the materials do not support,” their letter read.
Later claims fared worse still. The Spanish papyrologist Jose O’Callaghan identified a Greek scrap from Cave 7 as a piece of Mark 6:52-53, a reading almost universally rejected today. Of Barbara Thiering’s rewriting of the Gospels, the British scholar Tom Wright observed that “no serious scholar has given this elaborate and fantastic theory any credence whatsoever,” and there the matter rests.
The “Academic Scandal Par Excellence Of The Twentieth Century”
The real scandal was access. A small team held the unpublished fragments for decades, and in 1977 Geza Vermes warned that unless “drastic measures are taken at once,” the discovery was “likely to become the academic scandal par excellence of the twentieth century,” a phrase that followed the project for the next twenty years.
Publication crawled, and Hershel Shanks turned Biblical Archaeology Review into a campaign against the delay, and scholars shut out of the material began calling the editorial team a cartel. In November 1990 the chief editor, John Strugnell, gave an interview to Ha’aretz in which he called Judaism “a horrible religion” and “a Christian heresy.” He was removed, and Emanuel Tov took over.
Then, on Sept. 22, 1991, the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, announced that its complete microfilm of the scrolls was open to any qualified scholar who asked. Its director, William Moffett, was blunt about the choice in front of him. “If we surrender the collection to the cartel, that would be immoral,” he said. “And to sit on it would be immoral,” he added.
Amir Drori, head of the Israel Antiquities Authority, had called such a move “a clear legal and ethical transgression.” His agency would “weigh action,” he warned, though no legal action followed. “At one stroke, we liberate the scholars as well as the Scrolls,” Moffett said.
The monopoly was over. The official edition, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, ran to 40 volumes and was not finished until 2010, sixty-three years after edh-Dhib climbed into the cave. “This episode has reaffirmed what libraries are all about, unfettered access to ideas,” Moffett told the Christian Science Monitor.
What The Dead Sea Scrolls Changed
They changed the history of the book itself. Before 1947 the oldest complete Hebrew Bible manuscripts came from around A.D. 1000. The caves yielded copies of Isaiah and Psalms a thousand years older than that, some 235 biblical texts in all.
And they changed the question worth asking about Christian origins. The old question was whether Jesus had said anything new. The better one, available since 1947, is harder. What kind of Judaism produced a movement that talked about preparation in the wilderness, a coming son of God, the dead raised, and good news for the poor?
Yadin got his answer to a smaller question in the summer of 1954. Once the four scrolls bought at the Waldorf were on their way to Jerusalem, a coded cable reached him, and it read, “All family here now.”
Sources
- Israel Museum, “The Dead Sea Scrolls: Discovery and Publication”
- Israel Museum, “The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls: The Great Isaiah Scroll”
- Christianity Today, “The Dead Sea Scrolls Unrolled”
- Biblical Archaeology Society, “Cast of Characters”
- NPR, excerpt from Weston Fields, The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Biography
- Time, “Religion: Home for the Scrolls,” Aug. 12, 1957
- The Community Rule (1QS), Vermes translation
- James Tabor, 4Q521 in Michael Wise’s translation
- Library of Congress, “Scrolls From the Dead Sea”
- Geza Vermes, “The War Over the Scrolls,” The New York Review of Books, Aug. 11, 1994
- UPI, “Library opens access to Dead Sea Scrolls,” Sept. 22, 1991
- Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Library provides access to photos of Dead Sea Scrolls despite threat”
- Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 8, 1991
- UPI, “Chief editor of Dead Sea Scrolls removed,” Dec. 13, 1990
- Orion Center, Hebrew University, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert volume list