Back of the Book : Religion: The little-known Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center in Claremont is getting attention for its plan to publish an index to the Dead Sea Scrolls next year.

The little-known Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center in Claremont may make the next significant breakthrough in deciphering the still-unpublished portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls when it releases a complete index of the ancient documents next year.

Without an accurate index, looking at the documents is a little like digging for treasure without a map.

The recent international sensation over the decision by the Huntington Library to give scholars unlimited access to photographic copies of the scrolls has suddenly thrust the small, inconspicuous manuscript center--it is entered through the back door of the Claremont Graduate School library--into the limelight.

The center has kept its own set of photographic copies of the scrolls under wraps in an air-conditioned vault since 1983. Under a contract with the Israel Antiquities Authority, the reproductions have been restricted to only a handful of authorized scholars.

That policy won’t be changed immediately, center President James A. Sanders said. But the forthcoming index will greatly enhance the ability of Dead Sea scholars to study, translate and interpret the photographs available at the Huntington and on loan at other libraries.

“It’s our intention that this information be made accessible to all researchers as quickly as possible,” said Stephen Reed, the cataloguer who has been working on the Claremont project for two years both in Israel and Southern California.

But he added that many of the older photographs “contain fragments from several different manuscripts and these . . . take some time to inventory.”

In the last week or so calls--mostly from the media but a few from scholars--have interrupted the normally serene and academic atmosphere where Reed, Sanders, associate director Marilyn Lundberg and one other full-time worker spend much of their time.

On a recent day, Reed was hunched over scroll photo negatives placed on a light tray, much the way a philatelist studies and classifies rare stamps.

Although the Dead Sea materials command the spotlight at the moment, the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center for Preservation and Research--its full name and a description of its twofold purpose--is the repository for about 2,500 manuscripts of Old and New Testament texts and related biblical materials.

Reproductions and microfilm copies include texts in Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Latin, Aramaic and other ancient languages, according to Lundberg, an Old Testament Ph.D. candidate at Claremont.

Center scholars have published their findings about such esoteric subjects as the development of the Syriac alphabet, and Gospel manuscripts written in Latin that circulated in Ireland between AD 600 and 1200. Next month, Lundberg and Reed will present a scholarly paper examining variations in the wording of the Psalms.

Among other tasks, the center administers the microfilm collection of the International Greek New Testament Project, the largest collection of films of Greek New Testament manuscripts in the United States. The goal is to produce an exhaustive list of all the variant readings contained in several thousand New Testament manuscripts.

In 1990, center staff traveled to the Soviet Union to photograph the Leningrad Codex, the world’s oldest known complete copy of the Hebrew Bible.

Sanders has written several books on biblical themes and was a member of the committee that recently produced the new Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

Although the center has received several grants recently in connection with the Dead Sea Scrolls and Leningrad Codex projects, it survives mainly on contributions from individuals and operates on a budget of less than $100,000 a year, Lundberg said.

The center also publishes a newsletter and produces erudite staff-written reports, mostly to aid scholars in their research.

When the new scrolls index is published, scholars can more easily find what they are looking for in photographed copies of the 2,000-year-old manuscripts. Both the actual scrolls--housed in Jerusalem museums--and photos of them kept in several libraries in the United States and overseas have been closely guarded for 40 years by a small group of scholars and their proteges who gained control of the texts. At least 20% of the scroll material remains unpublished.

The set of scroll photographs at the Huntington Library in San Marino had been sequestered for 10 years. Most scholars have applauded the decision to make them available to all bona fide researchers, saying that will break the long scrolls monopoly.

Reed, 37, who holds a Ph.D. in Old Testament studies from the Claremont Graduate School, is correlating his work on the index with a computer database, which will provide a complete listing of all Dead Sea Scrolls fragments, photographs and museum plates.

“Our eventual dream,” says Sanders, who came to the Claremont center from Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1977, “will be to have digitized photographs of the fragments on computer as well as a computerized scripture index.”

The center’s policy regarding already-published materials is that anyone who can read the original language of an ancient document may see it.

“Any Jewish grandfather who can read Hebrew on a microfilm screen is welcome to come in (here) and read a Hebrew text,” said Sanders, who in 1961 was the first person in modern times to gingerly unroll the original Psalms Scroll--part of the Dead Sea collection--in Jerusalem. He then transcribed and translated the text.

The manuscript center was founded in 1978 by Elizabeth Hay Bechtel, the late Southern California philanthropist who began talks in Jerusalem in 1967 to secure permission and financing for the center’s Dead Sea Scrolls photography project. The center’s first president, she also endowed a faculty chair at the Claremont School of Theology.

Bechtel had a falling-out with Sanders, who was one of her proteges, and she withdrew her support of the center in 1981. She then quietly deposited a master set of the scroll photos at the Huntington Library.

Now, says Sanders--seizing the manuscript center’s media moment--the controversy surrounding the Dead Sea Scrolls has made it imperative for scholars to prevent any future manuscript monopoly.

To that end, he will present to the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Schools of Oriental Research at their annual meeting next month a proposal regarding preservation, distribution and publication of future discoveries.

“A major feature,” Sanders said, “is that all funding institutions be asked to agree to fund only those individuals or organizations that promise to carefully preserve documents, provide fair and open access, and put reasonable time limits on publication rights.”