Michael Baigent - The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

Cover design by Francine Kass

Cover photograph courtesy of APA Videworld Photos

A Touchstone Book

Published by Simon & Schuster

New York

THE HOLY BLOOD AND THE HOLY GRAIL

(with Henry Lincoln)

THE MESSIANIC LEGACY

(with Henry Lincoln)

THE TEMPLE AND THE LODGE

Rockefeller Center 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, New York 10020

Copyright © 1991 by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

First Touchstone Edition 1993

TOUCHSTONE and colophon are registered trademarks

of Simon & Schuster Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America

9 10 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Baigent, Michael.

The Dead Sea scrolls deception / by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Dead Sea scrolls—Criticism, interpretation, etc.—History. 2. Dead Sea scrolls—Relation to the New Testament. I. Leigh, Richard. II. Title.

BM487.B26 1991

296.1’55—dc20 91-41879

CIP

ISBN: 0-671-73454-7

ISBN: 0-671-79797-2 (pbk)

‘Scrollery’ was a large room containing some twenty trestle tables where scroll fragments were pressed under sheets of glass. Photographs dating from the 1950s show a complete and appalling lack of any environmental control for the material, much of which was already deteriorating. Windows are open, for example, curtains blowing in the breeze. No attempt has been made to exclude heat, humidity, wind, dust or direct sunlight. It is all a far cry from the conditions in which the scrolls are housed today. They are now in a basement room, under a special amber light. Temperature and humidity are rigorously controlled. Each fragment is held between sheets of thin silk stretched in perspex frames.

For an outline of Eisenman’s remarks, see Chapter 10, Science in the Service of Faith .

The paper has since been published. See Eisenman, ‘Interpreting “Abeit-Galuto in the Habakkuk Pesher’, Folia orientalia, vol. xxvii (1990).