What We Should Do Next Time Great Manuscripts Are Discovered

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The mismanagement that has characterized the official publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls raises the question of how future manuscript discoveries should be handled—for future discoveries there surely will be.

What can be done to assure that any new discoveries are not processed with the same chaotic and unsuccessful procedures that have marred the editorial efforts of the Dead Sea Scrolls team?

I should say at the outset that my recommendations are based not only on having followed the situation with respect to the Dead Sea Scrolls, but also from having been intimately involved in setting straight the situation with regard to the very mismanaged Nag Hammadi codices. That Gnostic library,^a discovered in Upper Egypt in 1945, was initially assigned as a monopoly to a team of French scholars, until an international committee under the auspices of UNESCO (which I headed) promptly produced a facsimile edition. Having been involved in this from the inside has alerted me to possibilities not always noticed from the outside.

The most important thing that needs to change is the scholarly ethos—or in plain talk, the scholarly attitude. A new ethos, a new consensus, is not impossible, especially given the widespread protest against the monopoly of the unpublished Dead Sea Scroll fragments.

We have seen other changes in the past in what were regarded as fundamental attitudes. During the Renaissance and the Reformation, there was a lively debate as to whether the Bible should be kept in Latin only—and thus under the control of scholars and the church—or whether it should be translated into the vulgar tongues—and thus be laid open to unscholarly distortion and the creation of unwanted sects. Although these undesirable consequences did follow the Bible translations, no one today, not even those in the same tradition that sought to block translations 500 years ago, would regret that the Bible was translated into all modern languages. The Dead Sea Scroll monopoly makes one think also of another medieval book policy, the Index of forbidden books,^b except that the Dead Sea Scroll policy has been to ban even the publication of texts not authorized by the monopolists. The Index, so embarrassing that it came to be regarded as counterproductive, has in our time been quietly inactivated.

I predict that manuscript monopolies will soon be universally recognized as too high a price to pay for the superior quality of the exclusive scholarship that the monopolists promise us.

In short, we must abandon the ethos of monopoly. The person who accepts an assignment for a prestigious first edition, which we still honor with its Latin designation editio princeps, does so on behalf of and for the benefit of all the academic community, not to the exclusion of and the detriment of most of the present generation of scholars.

The Dead Sea Scrolls scholars agreed around 1950 to publish those texts for us all. Yet we have waited all our professional careers for access to some of them.

In fact, any first translation, no matter how qualified the scholar, is also the first mistranslation. Over the years ongoing scholarly discussion corrects and improves the editiones principes until we have achieved standard editions that can stand the test of time. Just as is the case of the rest of our scholarship, in the case of critical editions we have to put our trust in the ongoing free debate within the scholarly community to weed out untenable positions and to foster views that can last.

It is a matter of collective guilt as a scholarly community that we have tolerated what we, as individuals, could hardly justify. We have left it to the most directly victimized scholars to lodge their protests, and we have usually not hearkened to their cries for support. The monopolists have known that they could get by, and if they finally succeeded in producing their magnum opus, everything would be forgiven and forgotten; they would go down in history as great scholars. But we are a transition generation. This truism of the past is no longer fully valid today, and will increasingly cease to be acceptable in respectable academic circles. Already senior scholars locked into monopolies are suffering the anguish of humiliation at precisely the moment when their otherwise distinguished careers should be earning them the laurels of scholarly distinction. In a sense they are more to be pitied than censured.

But young scholars, be on guard—do not be tarred all your professional careers with a stain that you can never erase or outlive. You are the generation where inheriting the monopoly will ruin you; you have witnessed the ruin of the careers of your mentors, and hence should be forewarned and forearmed.

Before the next discovery is made and mismanaged, a commission should be appointed to establish policies for the appropriate handling of future manuscripts. There is already an Ancient Manuscripts Committee of the American Schools of Oriental Research. But it has been composed of the sluggish editors themselves and their supporters, and hence has played no 068constructive role in breaking the monopoly over the Dead Sea Scrolls and advancing their publication. That committee has served to sanction the status quo and is only now making sounds of being on the side of the angels, once the monopoly has been broken without their assistance. Foxes are notoriously inept custodians of chicken coops.

The Commission on Future Manuscript Discoveries would be entrusted with establishing policies and procedures.

There is nothing wrong with careful scholars preparing careful editions, even if that takes a generation. What is wrong, however, is forcing the rest of the scholarly community to wait for access until the lucky few have demonstrated their scholarly excellence to the last detail before publishing the editio princeps.

Modern technology makes this monopolistic procedure obsolete, quite unnecessary and, hence, perverse.

The first condition to any new arrangement in the future must be a healthy distance between the administration of the edition (by the owner of the manuscript or a representative) and the scholar(s) involved as editors. During most of the years that the Dead Sea Scrolls have been (or have not been) published, the editors themselves were for all practical purposes their own supervisors. Since all were behind in their work, none could insist on deadlines being kept. The administrator in any new arrangement should be aware of his or her own responsibility to the all-too-anonymous academic community at large and not just to the familiar few who have the assignments.

The agreement should clearly state that the editio princeps is not to include any of the editor’s own scholarship beyond the minimum needed for the edition itself. In short, no learned history-of-religion parallels, no commentaries or notes on the meaning of the text. These should be reserved for a separate follow-up volume, rather than holding up the critical edition itself. The editio princeps should be confined principally to a transcription and translation of the text and technical notes. Monopolistic scholars justify the long-drawn-out procedures—the collection of the parallels and the interpretation of the text—on the grounds that they are thereby able to fill lacunae in the transcription, and the translation itself is improved. But meanwhile the filling in of the lacunae and the improvement of the translation by the rest of the scholarly community is completely blocked.

The editio princeps must be accepted for what it is or should be—a first transcription and translation intended to put the text promptly before the scholarly community so that it can be followed up by the whole community’s conjectural restorations, translation efforts and interpretations. Only then can a definitive edition be created.

Obviously, even with this limited assignment, a time limit must be imposed with a mechanism for releasing the text to the community of scholars if that limit is not met.

I suggest the following two-step procedure: The first time limit should be one year. Within that time the scholar assigned the editio princeps must make available to the scholarly community photographs of the text and a preliminary transcription. This could be done at an affordable price by publishing the photographs either on regular paper in book form or on microfiche, and by publishing the transcription on a computer disk that could be copied and acquired by any scholar to be read on one’s own word processor.

Then the scholar would have an additional four years to complete his assignment. During that four-year period, other scholars would be expected to refrain from publishing a critical edition. But they would be encouraged to publish studies of the text and to prepare their own critical edition to appear after the four-year time period had elapsed.

If the scholar failed to meet the first deadline—the one-year deadline—the material would be reassigned.

If the scholar failed to meet the second deadline, other scholars would be free—and indeed encouraged—to publish their own critical editions.

In this way, two competing interests would be satisfied. One is that of the scholar; the other is that of the public whom we serve. I recognize the moral right of a conscientious and careful scholar who year after year works on a critical edition of a previously unpublished text to publish the editio princeps. Clearly, it would be unfair for some facile, fast-moving colleague to look briefly over his shoulder and get into print first with a half-baked edition.

But this moral claim cannot justify the very immoral outcome that the recent past has provided. The scholar assigned to prepare an editio princeps does have a moral claim (met by a five-year period of exclusivity). But such a scholar also assumes a moral obligation that includes giving priority to this editing assignment, rather than suspending that work from time to time to do other scholarly tasks that might arise in one’s career, not to speak of the diversions that can distract one from scholarship as a whole.

If the scholar has not published within the allotted time, the scholarly community has nonetheless fulfilled its moral obligation; it is the scholar who has not met the editor’s part of the bargain.

Finally, the size of a scholar’s assignment should be limited to what that scholar could be expected to publish in the allotted time. If the new manuscript discovery is too extensive for one person to publish in five years, the material should be divided among a number of scholars sufficient to complete the assignment within the time frame envisaged; or not all the material should be assigned in the first round.

One of the problems with the editing of the Dead Sea Scrolls was that the very extensive fragmentary discoveries from Cave 4 simply swamped the few editors who controlled the material. The material should have been assigned seriatim, with additional units of material assigned only when the previous assignment was completed, and a much larger team should have been trained that could have had a reasonable expectation of completing the publication within a limited time. The small group that assigned everything to themselves reasoned that there were no qualified scholars other than themselves. In the Nag Hammadi case, this argument was used by the French to maintain their monopoly in the hands of a few, with the actual result that this prevented even younger French scholars outside the charmed circle from equipping themselves to edit the texts. The French have now been surpassed, in the number of Coptologists qualified to work on these texts, by the Americans, who broke that monopoly, and by the East Germans and the French Canadians, to whom we gave free access to produce their own critical editions.

Regulations like these should be worked out in detail and adopted by representative scholarly bodies to be in place before new manuscript discoveries emerge to be mismanaged as they have been in the past. There is no reason why the processing of manuscript discoveries need remain a jungle.

An expanded version of this article is available for $5 from the Institute of Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, CA 91711. Please request Occasional Paper Number 23, “Manuscript Discoveries of the Future.”

The mismanagement that has characterized the official publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls raises the question of how future manuscript discoveries should be handled—for future discoveries there surely will be.