Controversy Surrounding the Scrolls

In a new book to be published this month, Rachel Elior of Jerusalem's Hebrew University claims that the authors, the Essenes, a religious group, who wrote the dead sea scrolls did not exist, and that the scrolls are fiction .

Many scholars claim that the Essenes were the first Christians, or were related to John the Baptist and to Jesus Christ. Prof. James Charlesworth, a senior Bible scholar who also specializes in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus and the Gospel of John, believes John the Baptist lived among the Essenes for at least a year and drew some of his central ideas from them. While mainstream scholarship maintains the Essenes or the Qumran sect that lived near the Dead Sea wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, a few scholars believe the scrolls had been written in Jerusalem or elsewhere and were brought to the Dead Sea at a later stage. Last month the controversy over the identity of the scrolls' authors was thrust into the headlines with the arrest of Raphael Golb, son of Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Prof. Norman Golb of the University of Chicago, on suspicion of impersonating a rival scholar. Norman Golb has claimed the Dead Sea Scrolls had not been written by the Essenes and that scholars who oppose him are trying to silence him. He described the senior scrolls' scholars as a united sect or guild, no less fanatic that the Qumran sect they claim has written the scrolls.

"I don't believe they ever existed," Elior told ABC News in a telephone interview last month. "They are not mentioned anywhere in any Jewish texts written at the time. There is absolutely no historic evidence to support their existence."
The Essenes are only mentioned by the ancient writers Pliny the Elder, Philo of Alexandria and the early Jewish historian Josephus -- and then only briefly. The accounts of all three writers differ in significant details.
Elior, a professor of Jewish philosophy and mysticism, says that shortly after the scrolls were discovered, an Israeli academic was given brief access to them. The writings reminded him of the Essenes mentioned by Josephus and so, according to Elior, the academic world set off down the wrong track and has been on it ever since.

Published initially in Hebrew only, Elior's work,"Memory and Oblivion" will likely further inflame the argument. She vehemently denies she is trying to add fuel to the fire and claims her theory is based on nothing more than common sense.