055
BAR has repeatedly urged that photographs of all unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls be published immediately so that—after 35 years—these texts will be available to all scholars. An American foundation has offered $100,000 to undertake this project. The scholars who control the texts, however, have firmly rejected this proposal. They argue that if these photographs were made available to everyone, no one would undertake the time-consuming, often tedious work of preparing a comprehensive editio princeps with full notes and commentary. The work that would be done, they say, would be inferior, containing errors that would go uncorrected for centuries, thereby misleading endless numbers of scholars who would use these second-rate editions. Better to wait, they tell us, even if it takes two or three generations, for first-class editions with full apparatus.
It is difficult to test this argument. Presumably, even though this is not the view of most scholars outside the Dead Sea Scroll team of editors, we are supposed to accept the father-knows-best judgment of the team “experts.”
Yet there is a comparison. Something like this has happened before. It is instructive to look at another very similar case.
In 1945, two years before the first Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, another hoard of manuscripts was discovered in another desert—the Nag Hammadi codices in Upper Egypt, 70 miles downstream from Luxor. The 52 tractates in this collection are of extraordinary importance for the history of early Christianity. One of these texts was the Gospel of Thomas, which had previously been known only from a few short fragments.
Like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi codices were eventually assigned for publication to a team of scholars who had exclusive control of the texts. It was their intention to publish a comprehensive edition with full notes and commentary, just like the Dead Sea Scroll team of editors wants to do. The Nag Hammadi team was headed by a French scholar, Henri-Charles Puech. The Nag Hammadi team received its assignment in 1956.
In that same year, however, a man named Pahor Labib, then director of the Coptic Museum in Cairo, decided to publish photographs of the Nag Hammadi manuscript of the Gospel of Thomas that had been deposited in the Coptic Museum. Labib’s publication was an inadequate edition with difficult-to-read photographs. But it did make the Gospel of Thomas available to scholars all over the world.
Soon thereafter a number of translations of the Gospel of Thomas appeared—in Latin, German, French, Danish, English and Swedish.1
Faced with this barrage, Puech was finally persuaded to publish his team’s translation of the Gospel of Thomas without waiting for the completion of his commentary. The Puech team’s translation came out in 1959, without the commentary. The latter was expected to follow.
Once these translations were available, a veritable library of articles and books appeared analyzing and interpreting the Gospel of Thomas.
Now, 30 years later, a new and still better translation of the Gospel of Thomas has been published by Professor Thomas O. Lambdin of Harvard University.2
Two final notes: In 1986, Puech died—without ever completing his commentary on the Gospel of Thomas.
The French team of scholars that had intended to publish the Nag Hammadi texts only after completing their comprehensive study of the texts so that notes and commentary could be included in their edition never completed their work. In the end, they were re placed by a team headed by James M. Robinson, of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity of the Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, California. Robinson quickly decided that the only sensible thing to do was to publish translations as quickly as possible, without notes or commentary. Robinson’s team completed its work in five years, publishing 11 volumes of texts in that period.3
BAR has repeatedly urged that photographs of all unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls be published immediately so that—after 35 years—these texts will be available to all scholars.a An American foundation has offered $100,000 to undertake this project.b The scholars who control the texts, however, have firmly rejected this proposal. They argue that if these photographs were made available to everyone, no one would undertake the time-consuming, often tedious work of preparing a comprehensive editio princeps with full notes and commentary. The work that would be done, they say, would be inferior, containing errors that would go uncorrected for centuries, thereby […]
