The Dead Sea Scrolls controversy is not—as some have argued—about Christianity fearing for its life in the face of new and dreadful facts. The claim that the Scrolls contain information that calls into question Christian verities is pure poppycock. So is the spurious charge of some British mountebanks that the Vatican tried to suppress the Scrolls. Vatican-bashing carries remarkably slight conviction, which is surprising when one considers that Roman Catholic scholars did more to publish the Scrolls than any other religious group. No, the suppression of the Dead Sea Scrolls had nothing to do with protecting Christianity.

Christianity, like every other great religion, rests not on historical facts but supernatural revelation, and those who believe the Scrolls constitute a missing link between Judaism and Christianity (post facto categories) that calls into question the originality of Christianity profoundly misunderstand the character of religion in general, Christianity in particular. Christianity was born on the first Easter; it arose from the grave of Jesus Christ, rewriting the entire past of Israel and humanity alike. No fragment from a long-lost cave has any bearing at all on that simple fact of faith—or ever will.

The suppression of the Scrolls had everything to do with the pretensions of a self-important cabal of arrogant nonentities. The scandal involving the suppression of the Scrolls until the noble decision of the Huntington Library board and director—heroes of academic freedom in our time—derives from the self-importance of some not-very-accomplished scholars who were determined to “set standards” and to dictate who was worthy and who was unworthy of publishing the evidence. That’s all there was to it: us against them. And the “us” was very few, and the “them” was nearly the whole scholarly world.

To understand the venality to which, for close to a half-century, the academic world has been exposed, it is necessary to know that to “publish” an ancient document means anything from simply printing a photograph of it to supplying a full account of its contents, setting, meaning, relationship to other documents, and all the rest— scholarship. Now, when a vast trove turns up, there are two ways to go. One, as taken by the honorable scholars responsible for the Christian Gnostic library discovered in Egypt at Nag Hammadi, is to publish the facsimiles of the documents and to encourage translations, which in this specific case came about in a decade or so. The other way was taken by those entrusted with the Dead Sea Scrolls. As everyone now knows, from the late 1940’s to 1967, the Scrolls were controlled in “Jerusalem, Jordan”; no Jews were allowed to work on them, and many of those who dictated access to the Scrolls were notorious anti-Semites, chief among them the head of the project for the past several decades, Harvard Divinity School Professor John Strugnell. Even when the Israelis unified Jerusalem and regained access to the Judaic holy places in 1967, the Scrolls continued under the same anti-Semitic auspices as before. So we had the spectacle of a virulently anti-Semitic outfit controlling access to the spiritual treasures of Judaism—and no Jews need apply.

Well, not exactly. As time passed, a few Israelis gained admission to the charmed circle. Under Strugnell’s chairmanship, the controlling body continued the established policy of restricting access to the Scrolls to its own members and their students. Only they were “competent.”

If you are going to tell the world you alone are qualified to do the work, you would be wise to do the work. But not much work was done, and the work that was done was not particularly impressive. Scraps of information came out, with broad hints of what was to come, but the I-can-see-it-and-you-can’t school of scholarly discourse continued to rule. For lesser folk, of course, might ruin these priceless documents by making mistakes in publishing them. Included in the lesser folk were most of the first-rate and productive scholars in the study of ancient Judaism and Christianity. Rarely have we seen so comic a parody of academic egoism.

No one who has dealt with Jerusalem-based scholarship in ancient Judaism and Christianity—Jewish and Christian alike—was surprised that these unabashed allegations of self-importance came from what were, in the aggregate, remarkably lazy and unproductive scholars. It is an old story. In the study of ancient Judaism everybody in the business knows that Jerusalem is a wasteland, an intellectual desert. The ideas that dictate terms of debate and engage scholars throughout the world do not originate from Jerusalem. Derivative, repetitive, trivial, self-serving exercises in arid erudition take the place of the world-class scholarship of an earlier better day at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The great generation of the founders is now dead, and those surviving are third-rate, sterile erudites who know everything and understand nothing. No wonder they raised the stakes so high in trying to keep control of these important documents: it gave them power.

But the sad denouement tells the whole tale. When the Huntington Library announced its decision to circulate photographs of the documents for everyone to see, the archaeological authorities in Jerusalem exploded, then fumed and sputtered about “a lawsuit.” They weren’t sure what they would sue for or how or why, but they blustered all the same. They even talked airily about “immorality,” though by this time everybody knew the difference between hot air and the cool breath of moral authority. The New York Times headline that week had “Israel” ready to sue, but for once private enterprise could not manipulate public interest: the Prime Minister’s office, no less, said “no.” The scholars in Jerusalem ate crow, and it will be their breakfast, lunch, and supper for a long time to come. Plenty of scholars throughout the world think they deserve to choke on it.