Bible Expert Criticizes Delay in Scrolls’ Release

The delay by scholars in bringing out final versions of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the 2,000-year-old manuscripts first unearthed more than 40 years ago in what is now modern Israel, is “the academic scandal par excellence of the 20th Century,” a noted biblical expert says.

The Rev. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, delivering the 1989 Samuel Iwry Lecture at Johns Hopkins University this week, blamed the delay on interference by the two nations that hold the scrolls, Israel and Jordan. He also faulted “academic procrastination” by the international team of six scholars who have been reconstructing and translating the ancient documents in the Middle East.

“The biggest difficulty is the concern of so many of these scholars that they have to have the last word on the scrolls,” Fitzmyer said in attempting to explain why large sections of the scrolls have yet to be published.

The controversy surrounding the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls attracted attention after a recent article in Biblical Archaeology Review accused the scholars of engaging in “a conspiracy of silence and obstruction.”

Found by shepherds in caves near the western shore of the Dead Sea, about 10 miles east of Jerusalem, the scrolls date from the end of the third century before Christ to A.D. 70. They are believed to be the remnants of a library belonging to a Jewish religious sect known as the Essenes.

Comprising mostly papyrus and leather manuscripts, the scrolls are deemed significant for verifying biblical history and also for shedding light on the origins of Christianity, particularly its Jewish roots.

Fitzmyer, a Jesuit priest and a professor emeritus at the Catholic University of America in Washington, worked a year on the scrolls after earning his doctorate from Johns Hopkins in 1956. He assisted the original six-man team that had been appointed in the late 1940s.

“But time has taken its toll,” he said. “Resignation, death and sickness” have altered the cast of scholars over the years, causing inconsistencies in how the scrolls are handled.

But P. Kyle McCarter, the Albright Professor of Biblical and Near Eastern Studies at Hopkins, said that there are “some valid reasons for the holdup in bringing out the scrolls.”