Dead Sea Capers (cont'd)

Dead Sea Capers (cont'd)

These--the scrolls, that is--were to be kept out of reach of all scholars and also out of the public eye. Nothing was to escape the vigilance of the repressors of information.  No communication of any sort was to be allowed about them. No publications in journals. No newspaper accounts of how Malek the Shepherd found them when he threw a stone into a cave and heard pots breaking. Imagine! Two thousand years after they had been put there they had not been discovered! Nor robbed! Nor any piracy whatsoever done to them! Astonishing! Why astonishing? Because the Bedouins, who share that particular desert around Kumran where the Essenes made their last stand against the Romans in 70 AD on the top of not Mount Oreb but that fascinating mesa that the Middle East has come to call Masada, have for centuries done a flourishing trade in and made a passible living from the sale of codices such as the Dead Sea scrolls. The only difference is that they get big dollars for these texts and I mean big dollars! So, guess what. They break--yes! Can you believe it! Literally break, and it breaks my heart to even say it, I cannot bear to--these old, old scrolls into fragments that they sell to buyers with the promise of providing more of the same if the buyers come up with another half million denarii. God! God in Heaven! How can such a travesty be let to exist? No appeals to the divine. It will help you nothing, let me tell you.

       Back to the story. Now, having found these scrolls, this shepherd, not learned in the nasty art of scroll profiteering, actually went to a local scholar, not a man of any renown, but still someone who understood the seriousness of the find and himself longed not for money but for the joy of historical fulfillments of various sorts. This reminds me of The Pardoner's Tale. The maligned Pardoner, the hero of that tale, decides to confide in his fellow travellers--these men and women are on a pilgrimage to Canterbury in spring time and each agree to tell a story or two--confide to them that he is a cheat and a liar. Now, imagine that! A seller of relics and religious artifacts no more holy than the baubles the Germans sell in their Haupmarts to "seely" tourists in May and June, say around the Porte Negra, he agrees to come clean. Why? Why, really? Ask yourselves. He has nothing to gain from doing so. Oh, scholars have argued that he does it to pinch and piss off the other less pecuniary companions, but I have another theory, one imminently and eminently more intelligent than anything I have read in Modern Languages Quarterly. or the Journal of British Literature. He does it to illustrate the fallenness of all people. No one can hide behind his goodness, no one can pretend by being shy or quiet or nice or gentle to a goodness that saves him (or her, in the case of the Wife of Bath). No, we all are saved only by grace. by Grace! Think of it. Not a one of us will ever make it to any happy eternity one wit sooner by giving money to the poor. No, we will not. Anyway, what I began to say was that Chaucer understood as few have done that few earn the right to respect. The Pardoner was one. This scholar Sharbek was another. He still lives in the same village and has been essentially forgotten. Of course. Who reveres human goodness? The scrolls made their way quickly, and this time in their entirety, to some government office where they were kept for a few days until archivists familiar with the preservation of valuable codices arrived and in a rude fashion for the time being caused them to be protected against the elements.

       Soon they were housed more permanently. When word leaked out that Gnostic texts of biblical significance and old as Christ had been discovered, scholars around the world wished to see and study them. Guess what? No one--not a soul, including myself--has been let to see a word of these documents. Not the Nag Hamadi library, at least. Oh, one or two fragments were photographed and given out as a sort of plastic prize to appease who I don't know. But all the hundreds, nay, thousands of important fragments, words that might change how we receive the gospels and the message of salvation and even the historical figure of Jesus himself, all this has been repressed and scrupulously kept from the eyes of the general scholar. Why? I think it is to keep the news from leaking out that Jesus was a Sadduccee. He was one of those fighters who carried a long dagger under his cloak. Did you know that, you who paid twenty dollars to come hear me speak on these matters, that he was a militant? Yes, he carried a dagger and likely killed for the Essene cause. He may, too, have died on Masada. Way up there from where you can see Golgotha on a clear day. One of the suicides.