His Dead Sea Scrolls Victory Gives New Life to Research : Religion: But CSULB Prof. Robert Eisenman remains a maverick with his theories about the documents’ link to early Christianity.

Like a feisty David, Cal State Long Beach Religious Studies professor Robert Eisenman took on an academic Goliath and won.

One result is that the Dead Sea Scrolls, long an inaccessible subject of academic curiosity, are now open to all, and Israeli officials who control the documents give Eisenman much of the credit.

Another is that the professor, chairman of the university’s Department of Religious Studies, has become a darling of the media--a position from which he can disseminate his controversial views on the scrolls.

“It’s just been endless,” sighed the 54-year-old professor who in recent weeks has been interviewed by German and Canadian television crews, writers from Japan and Italy and an American radio talk show host. “It’s been overwhelming,” he says.

For years, the opinionated, bespectacled professor of Middle Eastern religions has been obsessed with his controversial interpretation of the scrolls, a collection of 2,000-year-old Jewish documents discovered 40 years ago that chronicle much of the background of Judaism and Christianity.

Most scholars believe that the documents were written by Jewish scribes with little connection to the early Christian church, but Eisenman contends that they were created by a group of religious zealots who adhered closely to Jewish law and who can be linked directly to early Christianity. If true, that would indicate much closer historical ties between Christianity and Judaism than previously thought--a development that could alter historians’ understanding of the church and its roots.

“It raises the question of what is Christian,” he said. “People think it came down from heaven all intact, but actually it didn’t.”

Few scholars share Eisenman’s views on the origins of Christianity. According to Stephen A. Reed, a research scholar at the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center in Claremont, the Long Beach professor is a maverick of sorts. “I think he’s fairly isolated,” Reed said. “He’s not really mainstream; I don’t know that he has a lot of followers at this point.”

In attempting to prove his theories, however, Eisenman kept running up against a roadblock, namely the inaccessibility of the many Dead Sea documents that had yet to be published. The documents, now held by Israel’s Department of Antiquities, had been tightly controlled since 1947 by an international committee of scholars based at Harvard, which Eisenman characterizes as a cartel bent on denying access to anyone who does not share its views.

“There seemed to have developed a management policy,” he said. “There was a small group of people controlling everything--a small, exclusive club. It was a very strange cartel.”

Members of the committee have repeatedly denied Eisenman’s charges.

Nonetheless, in 1986 the Cal State Long Beach professor began spearheading a drive for access to the closely guarded scrolls. Among other things, he wrote letters, personally argued with Israeli officials and threatened legal action.

Nothing worked.

Then three months ago, the Huntington Library in San Marino, which had obtained photographs of many of the unpublished scrolls from private sources, announced that it would open the prized collection to all scholars. Israeli officials protested, threatening to legally block the move. And Eisenman--who is Jewish--went into action, penning a letter eventually signed by dozens of influential Jewish scholars urging Israel to reconsider.

Expressing the fear that any litigation would “further erode Israel’s position in the public opinion, and in particular, the U.S.A.,” the letter urged free access to the scrolls. “We know that when Israel seriously considers this matter, (it) will not come down on the side of parochialism, but on the side of free scholarship for all,” the letter said.

Israeli officials later credited Eisenman’s letter with persuading them to reverse their decision.

Then a month later, he went a step further by publishing, with another professor at The Claremont Graduate School, a set of 1,787 photographic plates of the remaining unpublished portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Eisenman said the photographs were provided to him over the past two years by an anonymous benefactor who had read newspaper accounts of his efforts to gain access to the scrolls. Titled “A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” the two-volume set provided the general public its first glimpse of the historic material.

“It was exhausting,” he said of the process, “but I’ll do anything to open this up.” Eisenman first became acquainted with the Dead Sea Scrolls as a graduate student in 1965. The son of a chemist from South Orange, N. J., he made his first trip to Israel after graduating from Cornell University in 1958 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. “I was at loose ends,” he recalls. “Then I discovered my roots--I had a whole family there.”

After spending some time on a kibbutz writing poetry and teaching math and English, he returned to the United States and earned a doctorate in Mideast studies, eventually specializing in Middle Eastern religions, including early Christianity in Palestine.

He came to Cal State Long Beach 17 years ago, Eisenman said, to help create a new religious studies department. He decided to stay because the campus afforded him the flexibility to broaden his studies into areas outside the narrow focus of his specialty.

“It gave me the freedom to move out into many other areas,” said Eisenman, who still teaches upper-division courses on the Middle East roots of Christianity and other subjects. “The students here are very invigorating in their freshness.”

In class, the professor--whose hair and mustache are speckled with gray--is direct, authoritative and forceful. Even while relaxing at the Fountain Valley home he shares with his wife, four children and occasional visiting professors, he talks in machine gun fashion about the subject of his passion, spewing ideas with barely a pause or digression.

“People want to feel that they live in exciting times,” said Eisenman, glancing about his den peppered with clay pots, books, artifacts, and boxes of photographs and documents collected during his many trips to the Middle East. “They want to be challenged to think for themselves and draw their own conclusions.”

The professor is proud of his role in promoting that.

“We’re entering a new era in our understanding of both Judaism and Christianity,” he said. “We succeeded far more than anything I could have imagined; that it came crashing down before our eyes was like the walls of Jericho. We kicked and kicked until the doors came tumbling down.”

Yet, much remains to be done, he says. Eisenman recently left for a three-week trip to the Dead Sea caves in Israel, where the original scrolls were found. His purpose: to conduct a thorough radar ground scan of the area in the hopes of discovering any overlooked caverns or caves. “You never know,” he said. “There might be something that was missed.”

Profile: Robert Eisenman

Robert Eisenman, head of the religious studies department at Cal State Long Beach, is an expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and was recently instrumental in broadening public access to the once-guarded documents. Born: South Orange, N.J., in 1937.

Education: B.A. from Cornell University in philosophy, M.A. from New York University in Hebrew and Near Eastern Studies, Ph.D. from Columbia University in Middle Eastern languages and cultures.

Background: Lived on a kibbutz in Israel after college, writing poetry and teaching math and English. In 1973 joined the faculty at Cal State Long Beach. Is considered an expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls; he frequently lectures about them and travels to the Mideast to research the documents.

Career Highlights: Helped create CSULB’s religious studies department in 1973. Launched a movement in 1986 to urge greater public access to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Published in 1991 a collection of photographs of the scrolls, providing the general public with its first glimpse of the documents. He is also one of the most outspoken proponents of a controversial theory, shared by a minority of colleagues, regarding the origin of the scrolls.

Interests: Travel, literature, archeology, roots of Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

Personal: Married, four children.