Or: how you hide a truth for forty years without lighting a single fire
I told you about the jar found in 1945 at Nag Hammadi: people who hid in the sand texts that an order wanted burned. Two years later, in 1947, a few hundred kilometres away, in the Judaean desert, a second jar appears. But this second jar got something the first one did not: a second lid. Not made of sand. Made of people.
1. The stone that sounded like a pot
In the winter of 1947 a Bedouin shepherd looking for a lost goat climbs a cliff, throws a stone into a hole and hears pottery break. He climbs in and finds jars. Inside the jars, leather scrolls. In the days that follow, more scrolls come out. Some reach a cobbler-dealer in Bethlehem, some a bishop in Jerusalem, some a university professor.
Four of them are eventually sold through a classified advertisement in the Wall Street Journal: “Biblical manuscripts dating back to at least 200 BC for sale.” The ad sat next to one for steel tanks. Treasure sometimes goes to auction beside scrap metal, until somebody recognises it.
2. What was in the jar
Around 900 scrolls. The oldest copies of the biblical texts known at the time — a thousand years older than anything we had. And alongside them, something nobody had seen before: the writings of an unknown community. Rules of life, hymns, commentaries, calendars, war plans. People who called themselves “keepers of the covenant”, “the sons of light”, “the poor”.
3. The lid
Who do the scrolls reach? A small team: some eight men, almost all Catholic priests, attached to a biblical school in Jerusalem, the École Biblique. No Israeli scholar was admitted — the scrolls were then on territory controlled by Jordan. The promise: we will publish them quickly.
The promise even had a name and a publisher — a series with Oxford University Press. The first volume came out obediently, in 1955. The second only in 1961, six years later, and it did not even contain Qumran texts, but material from other caves.
The result, after forty years: less than a quarter published. The rest, in drawers.
Compare with the other jar, the Egyptian one. The same thing was attempted there — a group of French scholars wanted the monopoly, and the work stood still until 1956. Only there the lock gave way. In 1966 the texts passed to an international team led by James Robinson: within three years the first working translations were circulating, by 1973 the whole library was in English, by 1977 it was all in print. Eleven years from handover to press.
The other team had forty and had not finished. The same kind of texts, two fates. The difference is not the text. The difference is who holds the key — and how fast you take it from them.
Robinson, the man who brought the Egyptian jar into the light, also has the best sentence about the whole business: “Manuscript discoveries bring out the worst instincts in otherwise normal scholars.”
And the key was attached to a chain. The biblical school answers to a commission at the Vatican; that commission is tied to the old Inquisition, only the name has changed. The name of the team’s head appears on the commission’s list of consultants from 1956 — that is, in exactly the years when his men were getting their hands on the most sensitive material. He stayed there until his death, in 1971.
And when he died, he did something hard to believe: he left the scrolls by will to a colleague, another Dominican, who succeeded him both as head of the team and as head of the school. Rights of access over a heritage that was not his, inherited like a house. The academic world did not contest it.
And on 21 April 1964 the commission writes it down in black and white, in a decree on the “historical truth of the Gospels”: at all times the interpreter must cherish a spirit of ready obedience to the authority of the Church. In plain speech: if what you find contradicts the doctrine, you do not publish.
You do not need a fire. You need a drawer.
4. Whoever spoke was taken out
One man on the team belonged to nobody: John Allegro, an agnostic. He published everything he was given. And he said out loud that texts were being hidden.
The answer came on 16 March 1956, in The Times: a letter signed by five of the team’s big guns, saying in essence that Allegro was misreading and that they saw in the texts none of what he claimed. Five signatures against one. He was writing in those days that he was at the end of his tether.
Later, when he brought out a strange book about mushrooms, they buried him under laughter: “the man who blamed Christianity on a mushroom”. A man who had been right about the delay was made to look mad.
Two major professors, Roth and Driver, said the scrolls were not pre-Christian but came from the time of the revolt against Rome. They too were laughed at and withdrew.
And seventy years before the team, an antiquities dealer in Jerusalem, Moses Shapira, had taken to London fifteen strips of parchment bought near the Dead Sea: another book of the law, different from the official one. He was declared a forger, without serious examination. The man shot himself in a hotel room. Today some specialists believe the fragments were genuine — found near the Dead Sea, sixty-nine years before the shepherd.
The pattern is the same every time: whoever brings the inconvenient text is not refuted. He is removed.
5. The coin that does not exist
The whole dating — that the texts are pre-Christian and were certainly hidden in the year 68 — rested on a coin that the head of the team said he had found, stamped with the Roman Tenth Legion.
Years later he admitted it. Not at a conference, not in a public correction: in a footnote, in a book published in French in 1961 and translated into English only in 1973. It says there, drily: “Mention of this was unfortunate, for this coin does not exist.”
And when he found coins that did exist but did not suit him — one from AD 138–161, far too late — he dismissed it with the explanation that it “must have been lost by a passer-by”.
Science changes its conclusion when a new coin turns up. Guard duty changes the coin.
6. The insider who named the crime
In 1977, thirty years after the discovery, a man from inside the profession — Geza Vermes of Oxford, one of the most respected specialists in the field — wrote down what he could see. Not some crank on the sidelines: the man who translated the scrolls into English for the general public.
He said the world was entitled to ask those responsible what they intended to do about this “lamentable state of affairs”, and warned that unless drastic measures were taken at once, the greatest and most valuable discovery of Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts risked becoming “the academic scandal par excellence of the twentieth century”.
The team did not deign to reply. Eight years later, in 1985, Vermes repeated the warning, adding drily that regrettably nothing had happened.
A man from the middle of the field, saying publicly exactly what was going on, twice, eight years apart. And still another six years passed before anything moved. That should tell you how little it counts to be right, if you do not also hold the key.
7. The network opened the jar
In September 1991 a library in California — the Huntington — says: we have photographs of everything; anyone who wants to see them, sees them. Microfilm: ten dollars. The team screamed “theft of scholarly work”, the authorities threatened lawsuits. The library answered briefly: “It’s too late. It’s done.” On 25 September, the government gave way.
A few days earlier, two researchers in Cincinnati — Ben-Zion Wacholder and his doctoral student Martin Abegg — had reconstructed the texts by computer, starting from the concordance the team itself had compiled in the 1950s and that had “escaped” into circulation. The reconstruction was about 80% accurate.
The library’s director said a sentence I do not forget: “When you free the scrolls, you free the scholars.”
The jar did not open by decree. It opened through a network. What one institution closes, a network leaks. I write this and think of my own deleted articles: the pattern is old, only the screens are new.
8. Why I am telling you this
Because I have written about an Apparatus that does not burn, but archives. This story is its perfect proof. No fire was lit, no order of destruction was given. A drawer was enough, a list of consultants, and a rule about obedience.
And a question remains, which is in fact the subject of the next article: what were they afraid of? What was in the scrolls that had to be kept under lock and key for forty years?
We go inside the jar in Chapter 48.
