There is virtually unanimous agreement among all the concerned parties – apart, of course, from the international team themselves and the Ecole Biblique – that the history of Dead Sea Scroll scholarship does constitute a ’scandal’. And there would seem to be little doubt that something irregular – licit, perhaps, but without moral or academic sanction – lurks behind the delays, the procrastinations, the equivocation, the restrictions on material. To some extent, of course, this irregularity may indeed stem simply from venal motives – from academic jealousy and rivalry, and from the protection of vested interests. Reputations do, after all, stand to be made or broken, and there is no higher currency in the academic world than reputation. The stakes, therefore, at least for those ‘on the inside’, are high. They would be high, however, in any sphere where a lack of reliable first-hand testimony had to be redressed by historical and archaeological research. They would be high if, for example, a corpus of documents pertaining to Arthurian Britain were suddenly to come to light. 1) But would there be the same suppression of material as there is in connection with the Dead Sea Scrolls? 2) And would one find, looming as a supreme arbiter in the background, the shadowy presence of an ecclesiastical institution such as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith? The Nag Hammadi Scrolls are a case in point. Certainly, they afforded ample opportunity for venal motives to come …

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