Jericho,
No offense, but ever since you posted the “the Church forbade publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls” or “the Church kept medieval people stupid and ignorant”, I just found it hard to take you seriously. Precisely because I’ve never heard of your theories from more reputable sources - including non-Catholic ones.
I’ll admit that if there’s anything I ever hate, it’s the perpetuation of the lie cooked up during the ‘Enlightenment’ that the Middle Ages are dark and that medieval folk are dirty, stupid hillbillies. Interestingly, the old red herring that the Church oppressed people during this time period is exactly a by-product of this misconception - some thinkers during this so-called ‘Age of Reason’ had a distrust of religion, considering it antithetical to reason, and spread this little story which became accepted as fact, even unto the present day (seriously, how many people still think that
all medievals thought the earth was flat?)
Finally, know what the funny thing is? Many conspiracy theories involving Christians/the Catholic Church usually follow the following elements:
1.) The masses are so gullible and stupid enough to be deceived for millenia.
2.) Christianity is evil.
3.) The masses are a bunch of dumb folk.
4) Christianity hides the truth, which are a direct threat to them.
5.) The very evil Christians - more specifically, the Catholics in the form of the Vatican - hides some potential threat to the faith to (1) keep the masses dumb and gullible and (2) so the reality that they are a bunch of evil liars will never ever be discovered.
6.) Those who ‘know the truth’ are obviously smarter than the brainwashed common man.
7.) Did I mention that the masses are so stupid and gullible?
The Church also controlled access to the Dead Sea Scrolls. It wasn’t until some people figured a way around the road block and published the work. Now us plain stupid folks can read it too.
First of all, let’s apply common sense here. Why would the Catholic Church forbid the publication of some bunch of ancient texts, some of which have no relation to Christianity at all (but is of interest to those researching the religious and political climate around the time of Jesus)?
Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls were published in a prompt manner: all of the writing found in Cave 1 appeared in print between 1950 and 1956; the finds from 8 different caves were released in a single volume in 1963; and 1965 saw the publication of the Psalms Scroll from Cave 11. Translation of these materials quickly followed. The exception to this speed was the documents from Cave 4, which represented 40% of the total material. So, even before the material was completely published, we had
60% of it in public access!
The publication was indeed entrusted to an international team led by
Fr. Roland de Vaux O.P., archeologist, director of the
École Biblique in Jerusalem, a French Dominican-run establishment which specialises in archaeology and Biblical exegesis, and author of the classic work
Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions. However, a single priest and his personal decisions is hardly ‘the Catholic Church’. We might as well say that
one Lutheran pastor is say, the ‘Missouri Synod’!
The
story continues:
This group published the first volume of the materials entrusted to them in 1968, but spent much of their energies defending their theories of the material instead of publishing it.
Geza Vermes, who had been involved from the start in the editing and publication of these materials, blamed the delay - and eventual failure - on de Vaux’s selection of a team unsuited to the quality of work he had planned, as well as relying “on his personal, quasi-patriarchal authority” to control the completion of the work.
As a result, the finds from Cave 4 were not made public for many years. Access to the scrolls was governed by a “secrecy rule” that allowed only the original International Team or their designates to view the original materials.
After de Vaux’s death in 1971, his successors repeatedly refused to even allow the publication of photographs of these materials so that other scholars could at least make their judgments.
This rule was eventually broken: first by the publication in the fall of 1991 of 17 documents reconstructed from a concordance that had been made in 1988 and had come into the hands of scholars outside of the International Team; next, that same month, by the discovery and publication of a complete set of photographs of the Cave 4 materials at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, that were not covered by the “secrecy rule”.
After some delays these photographs were published by Robert Eisenman and James Robinson (A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, two volumes, Washington, D.C., 1991). As a result, the “secrecy rule” was lifted, and publication of the Cave 4 documents soon commenced, with five volumes in print by 1995.
Sorry about that.
