Book

The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, turn from the Grail to the caves of Qumran. Their subject is the half-century during which the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947, remained largely unpublished in the hands of a small international team, and the 1991 Huntington Library release that finally broke the monopoly. The first part of the book reconstructs the discovery and the closed editorial regime around it, following the academic politics, the opposition figures who forced the scrolls into the open, and the peculiar fact that several of the custodians answered to ecclesiastical authorities, including the Vatican's own congregation that descends from the Inquisition. The second part asks why the delay mattered: reading the scrolls against the New Testament, the authors follow Robert Eisenman and other scholars toward a picture of the Essene community, James the Righteous, zealot nationalism and a first-century Judaism from which emergent Christianity cannot be neatly separated. Chapters on Paul as a possible Roman informer show how far the argument is willing to go. Controversial when published and still bracing, it is archaeology as a story of institutional power.

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