The Scrolls from the Dead Sea was first published by Oxford University Press in 1955, based on Wilson’s long article in The New Yorker earlier that year. A substantially expanded edition appeared in 1969 as The Dead Sea Scrolls 1947-1969, incorporating fourteen years of additional scholarship, controversy, and Wilson’s own continuing research into the material. The book demonstrates Wilson’s extraordinary range: here was a literary critic venturing into biblical archaeology, ancient languages, and sectarian theology, and producing a work that both specialists and general readers took seriously.
The Dead Sea Scrolls had been discovered in 1947 by a Bedouin shepherd in caves near the ruins of Qumran, on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. The manuscripts — written between the third century BCE and the first century CE — included the oldest known copies of the Hebrew Bible, along with texts of a Jewish sectarian community (generally identified as the Essenes) whose beliefs and practices showed striking parallels with early Christianity: communal meals, baptism, the expectation of a coming messiah, and an apocalyptic worldview.
Wilson’s argument was straightforward and deliberately provocative: the scrolls showed that Christianity was not a miraculous irruption into history but an outgrowth of existing Jewish sectarian tradition. The Teacher of Righteousness — the unnamed founder of the Qumran community — had preached many of the doctrines later attributed to Jesus, and the community’s practices anticipated Christian sacraments. Wilson was not arguing that Jesus did not exist or that Christianity was a fraud, but that the neat separation between Judaism and Christianity that the Church had maintained for two thousand years was historically untenable.
The religious establishment responded with a mixture of outrage and evasion. Catholic scholars, in particular, were slow to publish the scrolls and reluctant to engage with Wilson’s arguments. Wilson interpreted this reluctance as evidence of a cover-up — an accusation that later events (the long delays in publishing the full corpus of scrolls, the domination of the publication team by Catholic scholars) seemed to support. By the time the expanded 1969 edition appeared, Wilson’s suspicions had hardened into a sustained critique of scholarly politics and institutional obstruction.
The book’s value lies not in its archaeological or theological arguments — which specialists have refined and in some cases superseded — but in Wilson’s ability to make an immensely complex subject accessible and exciting. He writes about ancient Hebrew paleography with the same clarity he brought to Proust and Marx, and his portrait of the scholarly world surrounding the scrolls — the rivalries, the jealousies, the national and religious politics — is as vivid as anything in his literary criticism.
First edition (Oxford University Press, New York, 1955): The Scrolls from the Dead Sea. Cloth, dust jacket.
Expanded edition (Oxford University Press, 1969): The Dead Sea Scrolls 1947-1969. Cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- 1955 first edition in dust jacket: $20–$60
- 1969 expanded edition in jacket: $15–$35
- Later editions: $5–$10