COMMENTARY : Avoiding Another Scrolls Access Furor : Antiquities: A scholar offers his proposals on how to handle future manuscript discoveries.

The Huntington Library in San Marino has just broken the monopoly on the Dead Sea Scrolls. How should the academic community at large handle the next major manuscript discovery to prevent such a problem from arising again?

I would like to make six proposals, based in large part on my having been deeply involved in setting straight the situation with regard to a similar manuscript monopoly on the 13 Coptic Gnostic codices discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. Seen from the inside, there are problems but also possibilities not always noticed from the outside.

1. A new ethic for first-edition translations: The person who accepts an assignment for a prestigious first edition must agree that it is for the benefit of all the academic community and not for the exclusion or detriment of their peers.

Whatever moral justification and appropriateness may have been in the arrangements of 40 years ago for publishing the Dead Sea Scrolls have long since ceased to be applicable. If the question had been posed to the scholars then as to whether the arrangements made should still be enforced 40 years later if they had not completed their assignments, they all would have agreed that they should not be.

A new ethic is not impossible, especially given the widespread protest against the monopoly on the scrolls. The time may soon come when we will look back in amazement at how we showered our highest academic honors on those publishing the Dead Sea Scrolls--or, more exactly, those not publishing many of them, but withholding them from us all, throughout their and our professional lifetimes.

Scholarly monopolies of our cultural heritage will probably soon come to be simply beyond the pale of respectability, a price too high to pay for the superior quality of the exclusive scholarship the monopolists promise us.

In fact any first translation, no matter how qualified the scholar, is also the first mistranslation.

Over the years ongoing scholarly discussion corrects and improves the first translation until we have achieved editions that can stand the test of time.

It is a matter of collective guilt that we have tolerated as a group what we as individuals could hardly justify. We have left it to the most directly victimized to lodge their protests, and we have usually not hearkened to their calls for support. Monopolists have known that they could get by, and that if they ever succeeded finally in producing their masterpiece, everything would be forgiven and forgotten, and they would go down in history as great scholars.

But we are a transition generation. Already senior scholars locked into monopolies are suffering the anguish of humiliation at precisely the moment when their otherwise distinguished careers should be earning them the laurels of scholarly distinction. The ethic has in fact already changed.

2. Create a policy commission on future manuscript discoveries: Before the next discovery is made and mismanaged, a commission to set up policies for the correct handling of manuscripts should be in place. It should be disinterested and functional.

Of course we are talking about international scholarship. Hence one thinks of organizations such as the United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organization. It was the International Committee for the Nag Hammadi Codices, formed and partially funded by UNESCO, that broke the monopoly on that manuscript discovery. But that was only after I pressured UNESCO to form such a committee.

Scholarly societies both at the international and national levels might take the initiative. Once a commission is formed, membership might be broadened to include a variety of scholarly organizations to avoid the appearance that one group wanted to control future discoveries and exclude others. Such a commission, planning in the abstract, would thus not be competing with anybody for anything, nor criticizing anyone for what they are doing or not doing. Rather it would seek to serve the worldwide academic and cultural community impartially.

3. On-call teams of technicians and diplomats: Much of the physical damage to manuscripts is not due to the ravages of time, rats, mildew, and the like. It is due to peasants with clumsy hands trying to turn fragile pages, or even using manuscripts to light water pipes or cook tea; antiquities dealers throwing away dirty fragments to make the rest look cleaner, and keeping the leaves from breaking apart with the help of hard-to-remove Scotch tape; conservators at museums cutting out the leaves one by one with their pocket knives, all without photographic records of how things were before inflicting such damage--to mention only instances from the Nag Hammadi story. The greatest damage is at the very beginning, both in terms of conservation and in terms of persons getting monopolistic control.

There are medical teams that are on call for first aid in worldwide emergencies. In our case too, there could be expert technicians identified in advance, such as manuscript photographers Bruce and Kenneth Zuckerman of USC and the papyrus conservator Steve Emmel of Yale, who would be ready on a moment’s notice to fly to the repository of the next manuscript discovery.

An authorized spokesperson for such policies should go promptly to the repository to negotiate compliance with the approved procedures. For one can count on there being already on hand persons eager to make their own fortune and/or reputation by such self-serving procedures as have characterized previous discoveries.

4. Policies for pre-publication accessibility: There is nothing wrong with careful scholars preparing editions at a slow pace. But it is basically wrong when the rest of the scholarly community has had to wait for access until the lucky few have demonstrated their scholarly excellence to the last detail before finally publishing. Part of the agreement would require that the scholar conform to established non-monopolistic procedures.

Reproductions of photographs in books have now become quite common. Even a microfiche edition of facsimiles of a rather large discovery could be studied on a microfiche reader, or, more practically, one could print from a microfiche reader at a dime a page Xerox-quality hard copy in one-to-one size.

Massive computerized databases of ancient texts are already in existence for ancient Greek literature at UC Irvine, for Latin literature at the Humanities Institute of Silicon Valley, and for the Nag Hammadi codices at the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity in Claremont. Access to new manuscript discoveries does not have to be held up pending the completion of the first translation, so long as the editors do not wish access to be held up.

5. Practical policies for preparing translations: We all recognize the moral right of a conscientious and careful scholar who year after year works on a critical edition of a previously unpublished text. It is the truth of this insight that has established the standard ethic in place now. This moral position, however, should not be permitted to justify the very immoral outcome where we find ourselves today. Exclusive publication rights without time limits have clearly not proven successful.

The ethic we should seek to cultivate would impose the following conditions:

The editor and publisher would agree that the first tasks, to be achieved in a specified time, such as a year, would be in the nature of first aid, to preserve the material from loss or damage and to give prompt preliminary access to the academic community.

Conservation should come first, with photographic documentation. One should then prepare a photographic file of the pages, to be published promptly and inexpensively, and a preliminary transcription, to be published promptly on computer. Only if the preliminary work were completed on schedule would the original scholar be allowed to prepare the first translation in hard copy.

If the first phase is completed successfully, the scholar would be given a specific time, such as four years, to publish a translation without interpretations. During that time users of the microfiche and computerized materials might be requested to refrain from scooping the original scholars. They would be encouraged to publish studies of the texts and to prepare their own transcription and translation to appear after the designated time period had elapsed for the original scholar.

Other scholars would be encouraged to publish at the end of the five-year period their own editions as they see fit, irrespective of whether the “first edition” had appeared or not.

The agreement should limit the size of the assignment to what a scholar could be expected to publish during that time. If the new manuscript discovery is too extensive for one person to publish in five years, the material should be divided among a sufficient number of scholars. If the scholarly resources are too limited, not all the material should be assigned during this first round. The first edition should be clearly defined as not to include the editor’s own interpretations.

Perhaps foundations and other funding bodies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities could be enlisted, to see to it that the lucrative grants, no doubt an important if unmentioned fringe benefit of being part of a monoply, are restricted to those who conform to the new standards.

6. Elimination of the conflict of interest inherent when the same people both administer and edit: All discussions of new procedure presuppose one basic change: Scholars who do the editing should not be the administrators who assign and monitor the editing procedure.

In the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls, there was about a generation during which there was no effective administrative control other than that by the scholars themselves. How could they enforce deadlines on each other when they had not met their own deadlines? How could one pressure the others to divide up their all-too-massive assignments, without raising the question as to whether one’s own all-too-massive assignment should not be broken up and reassigned to several persons? No one was in a position to stand up to the others.

When one considers the massive efforts undertaken to rationalize the scholarly enterprise, there is no reason why the processing of manuscript discoveries need remain a jungle. Ultimately, it is our responsibility, and we should individually and collectively assume responsibility for such a better future.