Forbidden History - The Dead Sea Scrolls Mystery

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast, we investigate the Dead Sea Scrolls and examine the Qumran Caves where they were discovered to find out who wrote them and why they were hidden away�� Cast List:  Jamie Theakston: Investigative Journalist  Dominic Selwood: Historian, barrister, bestselling author, novelist and frequent contributor to national newspapers including The Independent, The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph Lynn Picknett: Historian and researcher specialising in exposing historical conspiracies. She is also the co-author of several notable works Andrew Gough: Writer, presenter and editor of The Heretic Magazine  Danny Herman: Historian & Archaeologist Tony McMahon: Former BBC news producer, author, print journalist and historian  Khader Baidun: Antiques Dealer Pnina Shor: Head of Dead Sea Scrolls Project Oren Gutfeld: Archaeologist Noam Mizrahi: Dead Sea Scroll Specialist David Elkington: Author & Historian  Roger Webb: Professor at University of Surrey Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. The Dead Sea Scrolls were one of the most important archaeological finds of the time. They are also one of the world's greatest conspiracies. They were discovered in the caves of Kumran near the Dead Sea. But what was written on them?

What secrets about Jesus do they reveal? Why did the Roman Catholic Church keep them out of the public domain for nearly 30 years? And why were they considered so controversial? To modern Israel, the Dead Sea Scrolls are of immense significance, and they're treated with enormous respect and reverence. They bridge a gap in knowledge about Jewish history. The most fascinating document that came out of Qumran was undoubtedly the copper scroll. The records that it kept were about treasure.

I have no doubt that there's really sexy, really heretical information in the Dead Sea Scrolls that we may never see. Scrolls were not published for 40, 50 years. When they were asked repeatedly, when are you going to publish the Scrolls? I kept saying it's on a need to know basis. I mean, can you imagine any historical discovery where that will be tolerated today? The Dead Sea Scrolls are made up of thousands of of written fragments, remains of larger manuscripts damaged by natural causes, or perhaps human interference. However, there are fewer than a dozen well-preserved, almost intact manuscripts that have survived.

And using radiocarbon tests, scholars have dated them from about three centuries BC to around the first century AD. They were all discovered in just 11 caves in Qumran. about a mile from the Dead Sea. Some big questions remain. Why were they kept secret by the Vatican? And what else is buried out here? One of the reasons for the great mystery about the Dead Sea Scrolls

is the fact that after they were found, they were kept secret for decades, and it wasn't a very long time until they were released to scholars. In that atmosphere, particularly of biblical research, where there's very little new material for people to look at, This became explosive. People were wondering, what is in them. The texts have great historical, religious and linguistic significance, because they are some of the oldest written works about the Jewish people ever found.

They are primarily written on parchment and papyrus, with one even on copper, some in Hebrew, some in Aramaic, and some in Greek. Some archaeologists have associated the scrolls with the ancient Jewish sect, called the Essines, although recent interpretations have challenged this, while scholars argue that priests in Jerusalem or other Jewish groups actually wrote the scrolls. A number of authorities had control over them at different times. The Jordanians, the Israelis, the Vatican,

and of course in an environment when these weren't being released, there was suspicion that they weren't being released for a reason. The Vatican wasn't letting people know what was in them was in them because there might be something there that didn't suit the Vatican. People think the conspiracy around the Dead Sea Scrolls is because the Catholic Church didn't want us to find out some really juicy stuff about Jesus that would alter our perception of the church. So what if they had the truth about the nature of Jesus and Mary Magdalene?

All sorts of things that are just completely opposed to what's been taught ever since. Now that's a lot to fear. Because of the poor condition of some of the scrolls, scholars have not been able to identify all of them. But here's what is known. Some 40% are made up of copies of texts from the Hebrew Scriptures. About another 30% are from the second temple period. And the remainder, roughly 30%,

are non-religious manuscripts that shed light on the rules and beliefs of a particular Jewish group, believed to be the Ascenes. But can cutting-edge science reveal any new information? This area of Qumran is remote, arid, and not lived in today. But it is a hotbed for archaeological digs searching for the scrolls. Historian and archaeologist, Danny Herman, has been involved in a number of them and has a particular interest in the Copper Scroll, a treasure map of sorts.

investigative reporter Jamie Thiexton has joined Danny in his trip to Qumran. The Copper Scroll is really a big mystery on so many levels. If this group was living in the middle of nowhere, how could it have so much wealth, the wealth that is described in the Copper School? I personally believe that the Copper Scroll is a league of itself. It's not part of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was created by the priest in Jerusalem and taken to... to be hidden with the Dead Sea Scrolls as the Romans were advancing.

And that would explain why the other scrolls are all on papyrus or parchment, and this one was on copper, right? That they were actually different origin. That could also explain how could someone both mention such treasures and also afford such expensive material to ride on or incise the letters on. That's a copper sheet. It's way more expensive than the papyrus or parchment. The copper scroll is so enticing because it details treasure, gold, silver, coins that would be worth billions today.

Why would you go to all the trouble to make this really difficult copper scroll and then hide it if it never existed in the first place? It just makes no sense. In 1956, English archaeologist John Allegro was the first to transcribe the copper scroll and identified possible locations where temple treasures were hidden around Qumran. Danny was part of an archaeological team that went to one of the locations listed as a potential hiding place for some of the treasures. But the question remains whether this man-made tunnel is indeed the one mentioned in the scroll. So here we are in an area of the valley that becomes a canyon, but it's all natural.

And yet, on the left side of this canyon, in the 1960s, Allegro publishes the existence of a man-made tunnel. And the reason he got so interested in this tunnel is because he argued that it could be the tunnel mentioned in section A of the Copper Scroll. And if it is indeed the one, it could be containing huge amounts of treasures, of silver. of temple tools, who knows what could be hidden in there. The Copper Scroll lists 60 hiding locations and containing maybe 100 or 200 tons of gold and silver.

That by himself sounds like an hallucination. Who could have so much wealth? But let's remember up in Jerusalem, the priests were collecting huge amounts of wealth from the temple tax and from donations of Jews from all around the world. So such quantities of wealth are possible. But why would they be hidden and why would they be documented on a copper scroll and why would that copper scroll be hidden with the Dead Sea Scrolls next to the Dead Sea?

If we were to find at least one of their treasures, we could at least tell that Copper Scroll is a real documentation of real treasures. I don't think it's a hoax because you've got the Romans bearing down on you. You know, they're coming for you. What are you going to do? Sit there and write a huge lengthy hoax on a copper scroll. Doesn't seem like a good idea. Probably better to run, actually, at that point. So these are people desperately writing this stuff down in the hope it will be found.

I don't think it's a hoax. I think it's somewhere out there. Although archaeologists never found treasures in the first tunnel, Danny takes Jamie and the team to a second location nearby that fits the description as a possible hiding place for treasure. It's just down the stream. Another tunnel similarly designed, on the left side of the drive river bed, going in a very sharp angle. Maybe this one will contain the treasures.

Can we go in there? Can we climb in? We can, but it's a bit dangerous. You could be running out of air at a certain depth. Archaeologists cleared a massive amount of rock and debris, which exposed this 130-foot-long tunnel. This is not an aqueduct or a system. It's just a man-made tunnel that goes to nowhere.

Okay, but we were excited. Sure. Because the potential was huge. You know, such a tunnel could be hiding the treasures of the Copper Scroll, or at least some of it. That was the hope. And that's what kept you going. That's what kept you digging. That was, for me personally, big motivation.

And finding nothing at the end, that was quite disappointing. Inevitably, when there is wealth of that magnitude hidden around somewhere, this gets the attention of archaeologists and of treasure hunters. And since the release of the Copper Scrolls, details, people have tried very hard to locate these places, not with great success, but it hasn't stopped armies of them trying. It wasn't until 1991, a full 44 years after they were first discovered, that photographs of the scrolls were made available to the public. In November of that year, the Biblical Archaeological Society and the Huntington Library promised

to open all the microfilm files of every scroll photograph. I don't think people immediately realized how important this discovery was. Bits went in different directions. The Hebrew University ended up with some and Syrian Archbishop ran off to New York with another bit of it. But I think as it became evident what this was, then the excitement rose hugely. The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in Qumran, about an hour and a half car ride from Jerusalem. But the city itself is literally alive with historic treasure. Khadr Bedun is one of Jerusalem's most famous antique dealers.

His shop is here in the old city. It really is a treasure trove of artifacts that cover the last 6,000 years. Historic relics are big business in Jerusalem. It's not only relics that Khadr is an expert on. Forty years after the discovery of the first scrolls, he says he actually met the Bedouin shepherd who found them. So, Khadah, tell me how the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.

It was by accident when he lost one of his goat. He was looking to find it. And it was in a cave, that cave. When he went down to see, to look after his goat, he found the jars around the cave. And it was full of scroll, each jar with one scroll. And then he found it, and he picked one or... two of them in that time, just for curiosity, he don't know what's...

Sure. What is this? And then he was walking in Bethlehem, where he met a sandalah, a guy who fixed the sandals. Yeah. And then he said, I found this thing here. Do you know what it is? What is it? If it was money or whatever. Then he said to him, okay, you know how or what? We can sweep it just give you one sandal. So one of the most important discoveries of all time he swapped for a pair of sandals? Yes, he swip it to them.

And then he had no idea how much it was. The story of what happens to the scrolls is really interesting because at first they're completely invalidated. The boys take them back to the village, the village elders, elders take them to various places. In Bethlehem, they're told, no, these are fakes, they're worthless, they're probably stolen from some synagogue. But eventually, you know, shortly thereafter, in 1947, someone who understands what they really are buys their first few of them in Jerusalem. And then before you know it, there's advertisements in the Wall Street Journal for these scrolls,

and they've been trying to sell them to universities for large sums of money. So, I mean, how much would they be worth the Dead Sea? scrolls if someone was to find them today. In that time, it wasn't, I mean, in that time, there was not much of money in the hand of the people. Sure. When you talk about in that time, one million, like you are saying now, 900 million. Wow.

It's worth a lot of money. Yeah. And so could there be more scrolls hidden in caves around Qumran now? Certainly there is more. Because what I believe that there is the big possibility because of this 2000 year, raining and the weather, and there was an earthquake and it covered one of these caves. And that's the possibility that's still in one of these caves. It might come as some surprise, but the black market for the Dead Sea Scrolls is still a lot.

and well and has been since 1947 when they first were kind of discovered and acknowledged as existing in the first place and and they trade because there's always going to be interest from wealthy patrons who want to get their hands on these and it's also reflective of the fact that while we have an official Israeli organization that that holds the known Dead Sea Scrolls there are many others that are not part of that library even though there could be some fragments of the scrolls in private collections today The vast majority can be found at the Dead Sea Scrolls Laboratory,

at the Israeli Antiquities Authority. The preservation and research on the scrolls by the Israelis is led by the head of the Dead Sea Scrolls project, Panina Shore, who has given Jamie Thexton special permission to see some real pieces of the actual Dead Sea Scrolls. The big scroll is as important or might be as important as this minute, fragment because it can be the missing link in the dixo puzzle and therefore every single fragment is being treated but how is there writing on these tiny fragments yes yes there's

writing on these fragments but because it has been taped their residues of the tape enter or they penetrate the parchment or the virus and they cause their disintegration the work being done is painstaking beyond belief we say scrolls but actually many of them are fragments no bigger than your fingernail. This is like putting together a jigsaw of the Mona Lisa that's the size of four football pitches. But the reason it's being done is because the information in those scrolls about that crucial period of Judaism

as they're moving from temple Judaism through to the more synagogue-based version that we would recognize today. And the evolution in that time of sects and cults, like Christianity, is fascinating to the history of Judaism. and there are no other sources for it. This is unique and therefore is very important to those who specialize in this area. What do the remains of the Dead Sea Scrolls reveal?

How important are the writings that have been deciphered? And what else is still buried out in Qumran? Fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls have been unearthed from caves located around Qumran. These discoveries have found their way into private. collections around the world. But a large number have been painstakingly restored at the Israeli antiquities authority. Today, the Jewish people hold the Desi Scrolls as sacred and as they should, because they represent the earliest sort of full description of their religious origins. The preservation of the scrolls is clearly a massive task, with thousands of fragments still to be

cataloged and archived. Although some of the processed scrolls are even on display and museums around the world for the public to see, some archaeologists believe there is still more to be found. A team of archaeologists in Kumran, known as Operation Scroll, excavated a 12th cave, known as Cave 53, early in 2017. Despite the cave having been looted, the experts conferred that it did once hold scrolls. One of the men in charge of the team is Dr. Orrin Goodfeld. Now I've spoken to several experts who say that the whole area around Qumran has been surveyed once, twice, three times, and there's nothing more to be found.

Do you agree? Well, that's not true. In the last five to seven years, more and more small pieces of fragments, or perchments, of scrolls arrived to the market here in the old city of Jerusalem. So you're telling me that fragments of scrolls are traded by dealers here in the old city? That's correct. That's correct. Of course people are still looking for this treasure and why wouldn't they? There's a Jewish archaeologist by name of Dr. Orrin Goodfield who is doing a lot of work in this area

and he's finding things in caves around Kumran that are suggesting that there were scrolls there, there's fragments of papyrus, there's shards of pottery. So it's really quite encouraging that we might be beginning to decipher this copper scroll after all these years. Today the state of Israel established a new survey program Operation Scroll 2 sponsored by the government with teams that now this minute are serving on the cliffs and working in the caves. So I don't know from that that got the idea that there's nothing more to look over there. And look, my cave, Cave 53, is the proof that there's more over there.

We have found a new scroll cave. The Dead Sea Scrolls are considered reliable historic discoveries concerning the Jewish people. But how much do we actually learn about them from these scrolls? Dr. Noam Mizrahi is a celebrated academic who agreed to meet with Jamie Thiexton and deliver the unvarnished truth. So, no, tell me what actually is contained in the manuscripts. What can they, what do they tell us? What is actually written down on the scrolls?

It's a bit of a bewildering collection of text, to be honest. We can divide the scrolls into three or four major groups of texts. One group of text, which is about 25% of the material, so about, let's say, 250 scrolls, is, what we call biblical scrolls, the earliest copies of books that we know as parts of the Hebrew Bible. Right, but the kind of stuff that we knew anyway, stuff we've read, absolutely, right. However, it's very important for me to emphasize that almost none of these copies is identical

to the text of the Bible as we know it. Okay. Sometimes the differences are very slight, there are matters of spelling, of orthography, of language. Sometimes, however, these are major differences. The text, it's like that you read a different edition of the same text. So should we be updating the Bible? Should we be updating the Old Testament with these discoveries? Well, we should definitely know that even the Old Testament had a history. So before the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest version of the New Testament we had was from about the 400s.

But the oldest version of the Old Testament was actually a lot more recent. It was only a thousand years old. So this meant we now had a 2,000 year old. of the Old Testament, everything except the Book of Esther. So that in itself obviously was fascinating to both Jews and Christians. But also, we learned a lot about this strange community out there in Qumran, who were a kind of mix of radical Jews and proto-Christians. You know, I think you have to see this very fluid environment.

It tells us a lot about the sort of people who invented modern Judaism and modern Christianity. Do you think that there are still secrets here? secrets hidden within the scrolls, within the documents that we are yet to find out? The scrolls have disintegrated to so many small fragments and the assortment of these fragments, it's like a huge number of jigs or puzzles that we're still playing with. So every year there's a new publication, more than one publication, which offers a new identification of fragments, a new assortment, new joining of fragments and then this in turn recolors our understanding of the text.

Do you think it's possible that there are more scrolls hidden in Qumran or in the mountains nearby? Personally I very much hope that there are. It would be wonderful of course if we get other scrolls. Even if we get other copies of the same text that we have in Qumran, even that would be a major help because so many of the texts are so hopelessly fragmentary that every new bit of information would be crucial. It's possible there's a lot more to find at Cumbron because we don't know the extent of the cave network.

People did bury stuff and certainly around the time of the Roman suppression in about 130 AD. A lot of those documents have gone missing, something of a dark age in historical knowledge. And yes, there probably is a lot more stuff, but whether it's going to be explosive and sensational, you know, to outsiders or just some more academic stuff, stuff is absolutely open to question. But there is another equally fascinating story related to the Dead Sea Scrolls. An Englishman came forward in March 2011, claiming that he had found a small leather codex in a cave in Jordan. His name is David Elkington. According to the story,

these ring-bound lead and copper codices were in the possession of an Israeli Bedouin veteran named Hassan Seda, who claimed that they'd been found by his great-grandfather in a cave a century ago. Elkington believes the codices could contain the earliest historical evidence of Jesus' existence, and was quoted in the press that they might be as important as the Dead Sea Scrolls. But could the codices really contain genuine information on the formation of Christianity in Qumran over 2,000 years ago? The group at Qumran were obviously Nasorians,

called in Greek Ascines. There's obviously a lot of evidence of connections between Jesus and this group, although he perhaps wasn't specifically a member of that group. My personal theory is that he wasn't a member of that group because he superseded them. In other words, they were kind of

on a kind of a program to bring about the, the real, the true king of Israel, in the proper Hebrew-Jewish, messianic sense of the word. And I think that when it came to Jesus, they had succeeded. So therefore, he's not a-Nazorean. As the Gospels refer to him, he is the Nazarean. He's the A-1, number one, that's it, we've done it. I think that gives us quite a few pointers as to the connection between the teacher of righteousness

and Jesus, the codices and the Dead Sea Scrolls. because the codices share much with the skulls. And I believe that the codices will show the skulls to be proto-Christian documents. I think that's why they've caused such an enormous amount of controversy. The David Elkinton codices are probably the best example of the fact that the world wants to maintain the status quo. Nothing new, don't rock the boat. Immediately everyone jumps on them and says, no, they're fake.

They're frauds. So the Israelis, every institution in the world say, no, no, don't believe anything they say because they're frauds. And it makes you wonder if a real discovery, and maybe this is one, comes out, will anyone believe it? Is everyone that intent on maintaining the status quo? We had no other option than to pursue it in order to quell the verification. It was the only way we could go about this. Otherwise, we would have to run hide and be forever scarred by this appalling campaign. So I called Roger Webb. We looked him up online and I called him and we had a chat.

And he was very jolly about the whole thing. He said, well, he said, yeah, they said they might well be fakes. He said, let's prove it. All the official channels have written off the codices as fake. But Elkington decided to have the age of the lead tested by Professor Roger Webb of Surrey University in England, England, a leading expert on ion beam physics. His first test on the front cover found radioactive isotopes still active in the lead, meaning

they are less than 150 years old. Not satisfied with the results, he ran some more tests on the inside pages. So the second test showed no activity for the inner pages of the lead, of the book, demonstrating that the lead now was genuinely old, at least over 150 years old, compared quite favourably to both a 400-year-old sample we had from a sash window, and also a sample we had that was an example of Roman lead, been in the ground for 2,000 years. So this was quite favourable and suggested that we had actually real old lead

greater than 150 years. There are aspects to the codices that could not have been faked. I mean, one of them being that over the course of 2,000 years, the metal matrix has disturbed. So what's happened is that impurities in the metal have gradually leached out of the metal and they've appeared on the surface where they've taken crystalline form

and then fallen out. And you can see on some of the codices there are holes in the pages. And if you look on others, you can see the crystalline growth. Now, according to our expert, he said, well, you're looking here at a process that takes 16, 1,800 years? 2,000 years, easily.

These are old. I mean, I certainly believe they are more than 150 years, that I don't have a problem with. Going back 2,000 years, I don't know. I can't put an age on that at all. There are other evidences that it is actually quite old. The patina on them does actually indicate that these have been around and in contact with the ground

for a long period time. They look very similar to lead that we've dug up out of the ground from 2,000 years ago, so it's been in contact with the ground in the same way, and they look look very similar to that. So in terms of the way they look, they look very authentic. I've never believed in them to be fake. The, the, if you follow a logical progression of why and how they exist and the circumstances in which we found them, it simply does not tell it that they are fake. And furthermore, nobody has yet convinced us of how they were faked.

We've seen fakes, we've seen modern ones, and they are remarkably different. I mean, so remarkably different that you want to fall about laughing at how crude they are because when you're using lead it can only be crude when you're using it in a modern circumstance. It seems that experts are saying there are multiple dates ascribed to various bits of the codices so it looks like it's been a bit of a mishmash put together at some point not necessarily very recently. There is still a wall of silence. There is still a wall of dogma, preservation that I don't care what you've discovered or how accurately it dates or how authentic the non-biased laboratories say it is. It's not going to be

accepted. It's really quite worrying. The Jordan Codacy's legitimacy is inconclusive at best, but the mystery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is very much alive. In the vast open space, of Qumran, there may well be fragments waiting to be discovered by archaeologists still digging the site today. I think what's more fascinating about the Dead Sea Scrolls and what's in them is actually why they were written, why they were hidden. You know, this was a community that was about to be slaughtered basically by the Romans. You know, they were on their way out.

And we learned more about, you know, the desperate measures they took to hide the knowledge they had, how much importance they put on this knowledge. And then of course the Copper Scroll, you know, the treasure map, you know, which is fascinating. Indications are that we may have in the Dead Sea Scrolls the tip of the iceberg. There's probably a lot more. And local and recent excavations are validating that there's signs of shards of pottery and little fragments of papyrus that indicate that even more of the Dead Sea Scrolls are on the black market. And there's probably all sorts of caves and hideaways around the Dead Sea that we've yet to find.

They are, without a doubt, a significant historical and biblical discovery. But how many other texts and scrolls still lie buried at Qumran and other sites in Israel and Jordan? Importantly, how different are there facts from what we know from the Bible? Is this difference, or perhaps a fear of it? The reason why the authorities covered up the release of the Dead Sea Scrolls for over 40 years. And how much else is buried out here in the caves and the deserts that would challenge the church's view of events of 2,000 years ago?