Overview
A Bedouin herder threw a stone into a cave above the Dead Sea in 1947 and heard pottery break. What came out of Qumran over the following decade — some nine hundred manuscripts, in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, a thousand years older than the oldest previously known Hebrew biblical texts — was the most important manuscript discovery of the century.
And then, for forty years, most of it sat unpublished in a room in Jerusalem, visible only to a handful of men.
The Arrangement
The material from Cave 4 was the problem. Where some caves yielded intact scrolls, Cave 4 produced tens of thousands of fragments, many no larger than a fingernail — an enormous jigsaw requiring years of patient work. Editorial rights were assigned in the 1950s to a small international team based at the Palestine Archaeological Museum, later the Rockefeller. The team was almost entirely Christian and heavily Catholic, a detail that would matter greatly later, though at the time it reflected who was doing the field's work and who was funding it.
The arrangement gave each editor exclusive rights to his assigned texts until he published them. There was no deadline. Editors aged, and passed their allocations to students, who inherited both the material and the exclusivity. By the late 1980s roughly a fifth of the corpus had appeared in print. The rest existed as photographs and transcriptions that no outside scholar could consult.
Academics who asked were refused, sometimes curtly. One editor was widely quoted describing the assembled outsiders as a fringe. The effect was that a body of evidence bearing on the origins of Judaism and Christianity was, in practice, the private property of a dozen people.
What the Delay Was Said to Mean
Into a forty-year silence, explanations flowed. The most durable held that the scrolls contained material fatal to orthodox Christianity — that Jesus or the early church appeared in them in some unacceptable form — and that the delay was concealment.
The Vatican was the usual agent, on the reasoning that the editorial team's Catholic composition was not a coincidence. Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, who had earlier written on the Jesus bloodline, put this case at book length in 1991, arguing that a Catholic establishment had captured the material to protect doctrine. Other versions pointed at the Israeli authorities, or at academic careerism.
The scholarly counter-explanation was much duller and, its proponents argued, sufficient: the fragments were genuinely difficult, the team was tiny and unpaid, the work was slow, and exclusive publication rights were then normal in the discipline. Duller did not mean persuasive. Every year of continued silence made the mundane account harder to sustain in public.
1991
The monopoly did not end by agreement. It was broken, in a matter of weeks, from three directions.
A Polish-American team led by Ben-Zion Wacholder and Martin Abegg reconstructed unpublished texts from a privately circulated concordance and began issuing them. Hershel Shanks and the Biblical Archaeology Society prepared a facsimile edition of the photographs. And on 22 September 1991 the Huntington Library in San Marino, California — which held a complete set of security negatives, deposited years earlier against the possibility of war in the Middle East — announced it would open them to any qualified scholar, without conditions.
The Israel Antiquities Authority accused the Huntington of unethical conduct and threatened legal action. It did not prevail. Within weeks the argument was over: once the photographs were loose, exclusivity was unenforceable. Shanks put the position plainly, saying it was now open to all scholars to transcribe, print, edit, publish or republish. By November the remaining publication programme had been reorganised, expanded to dozens of editors, and put on a schedule.
What the Scrolls Turned Out to Contain
The released material did not contain the thing the strong theory required. There is no mention of Jesus, no gospel, no account of the early church. The texts are Jewish, and they end before Christianity begins: biblical manuscripts, commentaries, psalms, community rules, calendrical and legal works, apocalyptic writings.
Their actual significance is substantial but different in kind from what had been predicted. They show a Judaism far more varied than had been supposed, they establish how stable the biblical text remained across a thousand years of copying while documenting real variants, and they illuminate the sectarian world in which Christianity emerged rather than the movement itself.
The full corpus is now online. The Israel Antiquities Authority's digital library puts high-resolution images of the manuscripts in front of anyone with a browser, which is the most complete answer available to a theory about concealment.
The Part That Was True
The episode is usually filed away as a theory that came to nothing, but the shape of what happened is worth stating precisely, because the critics were right about the mechanism and wrong only about the motive.
There was a monopoly. It did last forty years. Access was denied to qualified scholars who asked for it, on the authority of an editorial committee accountable to nobody in particular. It ended only when a library in California decided unilaterally to ignore it, and it ended within weeks of that decision — which suggests it could have ended at almost any point in the preceding four decades.
What the record does not support is the reason. The delay concealed no gospel. It concealed the fact that the work was going slowly, and that the people responsible had no intention of letting anyone else help.