Final 20% of Dead Sea Scrolls to Be Published : Religion: Photos of the parts of the documents that have remained uncirculated will be offered in a two-volume set by two Southland scholars. The action is a final blow to a 40-year monopoly of the writings.

Two Southern California scholars on Tuesday dealt the final blow to a decades-long monopoly over control of the Dead Sea Scrolls by announcing the publication of photographs of all of the previously unpublished portions of the ancient documents.

The unauthorized two-volume set, prepared by Robert Eisenman of Cal State Long Beach and James M. Robinson of the Claremont Graduate School, is being published by Hershel Shanks of the Biblical Archeology Society in Washington. The pictures contain text from the approximately 20% of the scrolls that have never been circulated outside a designated group of scholar-translators known within the scholarly community as the “cartel.”

Eisenman, a professor of Middle East Studies and chairman of the religious studies department, said he had received the bootlegged photos through an anonymous source over a two-year period.

“The minute I began receiving material I knew what to do with it,” he said Tuesday. “There had to be a facsimile edition so all scholars could have equal access and the playing field would be leveled. . . . The monopoly had to be broken once and for all. I believe this will be the last step in the long struggle to allow public access.”

The announcement about publishing photos of the precious texts was thus as much a political statement as it was a literary event.

About 80% of the contents of the 800 known Dead Sea Scrolls, first discovered in 1947 in caves near the Dead Sea, have already been translated and published. But the remaining portions--mostly in tattered fragments--have been withheld for more than 40 years from all but a select coterie of aging scholars and their proteges.

The scrolls contain the oldest known copies of the Old Testament and numerous other writings from about 200 BC to AD 50. They are regarded as crucial to a broader understanding of modern Judaism and early Christianity.

The newly published set of photos, titled “A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” includes an introduction and an index of 1,787 photographic plates that show the fragments as they were arranged and mounted by the original scrolls committee.

The facsimile edition, which will be available beginning Dec. 4 at a cost of $210 per set, was on display Tuesday at a New York news conference convened by Shanks, Eisenman and Robinson.

Their announcement came two months after the Huntington Library in San Marino disclosed that it was making its previously secret set of scrolls photographs available on microfilm to all qualified scholars, a move that outraged the official scrolls translators who have been accused of monopolizing the project and delaying publication of their work.

Shanks said many of the texts “are remarkably clear considering these fragments are over 2,000 or more years old. They jump out of the page at you, and I suspect if you look at them, you will share some of the mystery and some of the excitement we have experienced producing them.

“What you find in these two volumes,” he added, “is scholarly raw material. Now, for the first time, it is open to all scholars to transcribe, to print, to edit. . . .”

William A. Moffett, director of the Huntington Library, said the publication of the scrolls photographs may intensify the debate over who holds the right to publish the material.

The Huntington decided that while “we had the right to show the photos and provide access, we would not publish scrolls photos,” Moffett said, because “we didn’t have the copyright.”

Amir Drori, head of the Israel Antiquities Authority, which is the custodian of the original scrolls in Jerusalem and is in charge of the official international translation project, said that he believes his agency holds the copyright to the photos. The decision to publish the photo book is not only “breaking the law but a breach of scientific ethics,” he charged.

“The 57 scholars (officially) working on translating these very difficult little pieces will now be under great pressure to publish them, even before they are sure their work is correct,” Drori said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “Suddenly, someone is publishing photos of fragments these scholars have worked years to combine” into a meaningful pattern. “Of course our lawyers think we have a case. But, you know, it’s a free world. They (Eisenman and Robinson) want to sell their book. What else can I say?”

Robinson, professor of religion at the Claremont Graduate School and director of its Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, said that any royalties he and Eisenman might receive from the project would amount to “less than minimum wage, considering the hours we put into it.”

Eisenman said that he received the photos from a client of Long Beach investigative attorney William J. Cox, who would not disclose the client’s identity. According to Eisenman, the photos did not come from either the Huntington or the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center in Claremont, which also has a complete set of scrolls photos.

Cox said his client stipulated that the photos must be published and maintained that their publication “doesn’t infringe (upon) any copyright that I know of nor violate anyone’s rights.” The volumes are being published through a $25,000 grant from the Irving I. Moskowitz Foundation of Hawaiian Gardens.

Eugene Ulrich, a Notre Dame University theologian and U.S. editor of the official scrolls project, acknowledged that the new publication will be “handy and useful” but warned that the data “is chaos--fragments as they were poured out on the table at the museum” and then photographed. Thus, publication of the facsimiles “could be both illegal and a disservice to scholars,” Ulrich added.

Marilyn Lundberg, associate director of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center in Claremont, which plans to publish a complete and revised index of the unpublished portions of the scrolls early next year, said such an index would “complement” the new facsimile edition.

At the news conference, Shanks announced the establishment of an Institute for Dead Sea Scroll Studies to coordinate research and to provide free exchange of information among scroll scholars.

Chandler reported from Los Angeles and Goldman from New York.