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prevent the Scrolls from being linked to Christianity, John Allegro was a guest on a series of
three radio shows in northern England. The third interview resulted in a New York Times article
which said: “The origins of some Christian ritual and doctrines can be seen in the documents of
an extremist Jewish sect that existed for more than 100 years before the birth of Jesus Christ.
This is the interpretation placed on the ‘fabulous’ collection of Dead Sea Scrolls by one of an
international team of seven scholars ... John Allegro ... (who) said last night in a broadcast that
the historical basis of the Lord’s Supper and part at least of the Lord’s prayer and the New
Testament teaching of Jesus were attributable to the Qumranians.”
In 1987, he quit, calling the team’s delays “inexcusable,” saying that for years they had been
“sitting on material which is not only of outstanding importance, but also quite the most
religiously sensitive.” He died in 1988.
Robert Eisenman, a former Research Fellow at the Albright Institute, who was a Professor of
Middle East Religions and Chairman of Religious Studies at California State University at Long
Beach, was denied access to photographs of the Scroll fragments by Strugnell. In 1989, he said
publicly, that during the last 40 years, all of the research on the Dead Sea Scrolls was controlled
by a handful of scholars who had revealed only a small portion. He called for access to the
Scrolls by qualified scholars, and for AMS (Accelerator Mass Spectroscopy) Carbon-14 dating
to be performed on the documents to verify the dating, which up to that point had been relying
on the original, obsolete form of dating, which had been done shortly after their discovery.
In April, 1989, the Israeli Archaeological Council created a Scroll Oversight Committee to
oversee the publication of all Qumran texts, and to make sure the international team completed
their assignments, and in July, 1989, Amir Drori, Director of the Israeli Department of
Antiquities, a member of that Committee, told the Los Angeles Times, that “if someone does not
complete his work on time we have the right to deliver the scrolls to someone else.”
After the Israeli government took full possession of Jerusalem in June of 1967, many were
surprised that de Vaux was allowed to continue in his capacity as the leader of the team of
scholars, even though it was a known fact that he was anti-Semitic, which was why he would not
allow any Jewish scholars into the project. In the mid-1980’s, Strugnell brought in Israeli scholar
Elisha Qimron; Talmud scholar Jacob Sussman; Devorah Dimant of Haifa University; and
Emmanuel Tov, Shemaryahu Talmon, Joseph Baumgarten, and Jonas Greenfield, of Baltimore’s
Hebrew University, to work on some unpublished text.
In November, 1990, without informing Strugnell, the Israeli government assigned Emmanuel
Tov to become the ‘joint editor-in-chief’ of the project to finish the translation and publication of
the Scrolls. Then, in December, 1990, the New York Times quoted from an October 28, 1990
interview Strugnell had with the Israeli paper Ha-Aretz, where he said that Judaism was a
“horrible religion,” a “racist” religion, and that Israel was “founded on a lie.” Magen Broshi,
curator of Jerusalem’s Shrine of the Book, said: “We’ve known for twenty years that he was an
anti-Semite.” On another occasion, he referred to Strugnell’s “rabid anti-Semitism.” These anti-
Semitic comments resulted in him being dismissed from the project as editor-in-chief, even
though he still controlled his portion of the texts. Tov became chief editor, along with Professor
Eugene Ulrich and Emile Puech.
In September, 1991, Professor Ben-Zion Wacholder, and one of his doctoral students, Martin
G. Abegg, from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, released their compilation of the
Qumran texts, which was published by the Biblical Archaeological Society. In 1988, Strugnell
had printed 30 copies of a 52,000 word concordance of words found in the scroll, which had
been created by de Vaux’s team in the 1950’s, so it could be used by the team. Wacholder and