Religion: Secrets of The Dead Sea Scrolls

Oxford scholar Geza Vermes calls it "the academic scandal par excellence of the 20th century." Columbia University's Morton Smith protests that there is "no justification" for it. Fumes California State's Robert Eisenman: "We are tired of being treated contemptuously." Behind the scenes, scholars are exchanging bitter private letters and passing around bootlegged photos. What is all the fuss about? The protesters are referring to the long delay in making public many of the Dead Sea Scrolls, those mysterious documents discovered between 1947 and 1956 in caves 20 miles east of Jerusalem. As they see it, the world has long been unnecessarily deprived of data vital to understanding Jewish and Christian history.

The discovery of the scrolls -- 800 ancient Jewish manuscripts that had been hidden from the world for 19 centuries -- was unexpected and dazzling. The Hebrew and Aramaic documents, written mostly on leather, were found in eleven caves along the northwest rim of the Dead Sea. Because of popular fascination over possible connections with Jesus, the Dead Sea Scrolls became the century's most fabled archaeological find.

That makes it even harder to accept that more than three decades later, roughly one-fourth of the material remains unpublished. Originally the informal target date for publishing transcriptions of all the scrolls was 1970. Now, responding to mounting pressures, the 18 scholars on the official scrolls team have given the Israeli government a timetable calling for publication of the remaining materials by 1997. This year Israel's antiquities department set up a committee to monitor progress. The new timetable, however, has only inflamed the critics.

Chief among them is the Biblical Archaeology Review of Washington, a well- regarded layman's magazine, which has long berated the team for unconscionable foot dragging. In the latest issue, editor Herschel Shanks brands the new timetable "a hoax and a fraud." Shanks insists that "the scrolls will never be published by the current team" because the task is too huge. The squabbling should make for heated talk at a conference of scrolls experts later this month in the Netherlands.

The team members, twelve of whom are laboring in Jerusalem, point out that their task is difficult and must be done with precision. For example, one of the caves contained 15,000 fragments that had to be pieced together like jigsaw puzzles into 516 scrolls. Harvard University's John Strugnell, head of the group since 1987, says fund-raising difficulties and the Arab-Israeli wars slowed progress. He admits that his deadline of 1997 is only an "intelligent guess," not a "promise," and that work could stretch years beyond that.

In the eyes of many experts, the No. 1 foot dragger is the elusive J.T. Milik of the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. He is a former Roman Catholic priest who has been assigned to prepare 50 or more photographic plates of the documents. Says Milik unrepentantly: "The world will see the manuscripts when I have done the necessary work." Castigating the "unhealthy curiosity" of complaining historians, he nonetheless says he has assigned two U.S. colleagues to help with some of his scrolls.