Chapter VI - Action and Reaction: Inquisition Then and Now

 

The Catholic Church. calling herself the fountain of

truth, today opposes the search after truth when her

foundations, the sacred books, the formulae of her

dogmas, her alleged infallibility, become objects of

research. To us, this signifies that she no longer has

faith in herself.

                       Antonio Fogazzaro, Italian novelist.

 

1. Doctrine of the Faith and the Holy Inquisition

 

We may now pause to take stock of one of the central messages of the Dead Sea Scrolls: the so-called Doctrine of the Faith, the bedrock upon which Christianity rests, was appropriated by St Paul from a Qumran text known as the Habakkuk Commentary; not only was it appropriated, the priesthood of Christianity was released from any accountability by cutting it free from the Law which was binding on every Jew - from the highest to the lowest. And there is a high probability that the life of Jesus of the Gospels was created, modeled along the lines of the Teachers of Righteousness that was also part of the messianic Qumran tradition. This is what scholars like Dupont-Sommer concluded when the contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls first became available. Let us review the situation as summarised by John Allegro:

 

My own opinion is that the scrolls prompt us increasingly to seek an eschatological meaning for most of Jesus' reported sayings: more and more become intelligible when viewed in the light of the imminent cataclysms of Qumran expectations, and the inner conflicts in men's hearts as the time grew near.

 

As far as details in the New Testament record of Jesus' life is concerned, I would suggest that the scrolls give added ground for believing that many incidents are merely projections into Jesus' own history of what was expected of the Messiah.

(Allegro 1990, p.175)

 

To state in brief what was discussed in the two previous chapters: the new light cast by the Dead Sea Scrolls shows that the history of early Christianity and the evolution of its doctrine are nothing like what the Church has been proclaiming. But all this history is of little direct concern to the authorities of the Church except for the threat which it may pose to its survival. The Church today lives not by its history, but its doctrine; and considering its blood-soaked history over the past two thousand years, it can hardly do otherwise. The Church, however, has also been teIling us that its doctrine is historical, its scripture is history, while at the same time demanding unquestioning faith in both. In fact, its whole history has been dominated by the ferocious violence of its efforts to enforce this Doctrine of the Faith in the manner it saw fit - which, in reality, meant in the manner most advantageous to the positions of the Pope and the Church bureaucracy. And this convoluted semantic exercise has landed the Church in an intellectual and historical muddle from which there appears to be no escape: without its Doctrine of the Faith, there can be no Church and no Christianity.

The enforcement of this Doctrine of the Faith is the official responsibility of the office known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Prior to 1965, it was known as the Holy Office; and until 1542, the Holy Office was known as the Holy Inquisition - a name that is still synonymous with terror and torture in the name of God. The executive head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is known as its secretary, though, in former times, he was known as The Grand Inquisitor. The present holder of the office is the Bavarian Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. According to the old designation he should be called The Grand Inquisitor.

Speaking of Cardinal Ratzinger, Baigent and Leigh observe:

 

Of all the departments of the Curia [Vatican administration], that of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is the most powerful. Ratlinger is perhaps the closest to the Pope of all the Curia cardinals. ...A deeply pessimistic man, he [Ratlinger] feels that the Church is 'collapsing', and only the suppression of all dissent can ensure its survival as a unified faith. He regards those who do not share his pessimism as 'blind or deluded'.

(op. cit., p. 121)

 

He is of course fully justified in his fears, for, he surely knows that his vaunted Doctrine of the Faith is a borrowing from the Qumranian Habakkuk Commentary, which seriously undermines any claim of originality on the behalf of the Church. The Church lives in daily fear that this may become public knowledge. In his vision of gloom, Ratlinger is not alone - either now or in the past; the difference today is that there is now a sense of desperation born out of the revelations of the Dead Sea Scrolls, especially after their release to the public by the Huntington Library, not to speak of their publication led by Eisenman.

What is remarkable is that this 'deeply pessimistic' view of Ratlinger - of the Church in crisis - which must be close to the present Pope's, should now be more or less publicly voiced; they may not tell the world that the foundation of their faith has collapsed, but make no secret of their concern about the state of the Church. This also helps explain the truly radical measures taken by John Paul I during his very short tenure. It suggests that he too felt the Church collapsing.

Cardinal Ratlinger's proposed remedy of suppressing all dissent too is nothing new, for the Church has always lived in fear of rational enquiry which it knows it cannot withstand. Remember Thomas Aquinas' philosophia ancilla theolgiae - rational inquiry must be subordinate to theology. As a result, throughout its chequered history, Church officials have also been deeply superstitious men: surely those who believe in the Gospels, and feel threatened by the incoherent predictions of Nostradamus cannot but be superstitious. It was fear born of superstition that led them to ban his works, no matter how ridiculous it may seem to outsiders.

Ratlinger wears another hat, for he is also the head of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, which, directly or indirectly, oversees all research activities at institutions associated with the Catholic Church. Among them is none other than the famous Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem - the very institution charged with the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Shorn of all the religious mumbo-jumbo, what this means is the following: Cardinal Ratlinger, the modern day Grand Inquisitor, the 'deeply pessimistic man' who feels that the Church is collapsing, and believes that only suppression of all dissent can save it - is also the man having the final say over what is to be done with the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is too bad that things now are out of his control.

Suppression and subversion have been among the time-honoured methods used by the Church to sustain itself - now made all the more urgent by the revelations of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Having been all but uprooted in Europe, the Church urgently needs new pastures to grow and even survive. As we already saw, it now sees India with its vast population as its best hope, especially since most Indians are unaware of the crisis of Christianity in Europe, and know even less about the impact of the Scrolls on Christianity. As the present Pope proclaimed at the Asian Bishops' Conference in Manila: "A new harvest of faith will be reaped in this vast and vital continent." He did not of course tell his audience that without this 'harvest' their Church is all but doomed. With this goal in mind, new weapons are being forged to bring India into the Christian fold - a mission of long standing as we shall soon see. A panicularly interesting example of it can be seen in the activities of the Indian-Spanish theologian Raimundo Panikkar and the work he calls The Unknown Christ of Hinduism. It is more appropriately called The Hidden Hope of Panikkar and the Opus Dei.

 

 

2. The Unknown Christ of Opus Dei

 

Before examining the theology, or rather, the strategy of Panikkar, it is useful to compare the present state and the recent history of Christianity with that of Hinduism - the main target of Catholic theologians like him (not to speak of Protestant politico-religious entrepreneurs like Pat Robenson). The basic problem for the Church today is its exposure as a secular political and economic institution; the public, at least in the West, is no longer buying its claim to being an institution concerned with spiritual upliftment. People know that most of its efforts have gone towards maintaining its secular wealth and power in the guise of religious activity. The history of Christianity as mainly a record of power struggles and publicity postures is there for everyone to see.

When we compare this with the history of Hinduism over the same period the contrasts are indeed striking. If we take 1846 as a benchmark - the year in which Pius IX, the first 'modern' Pope, ascended to the Holy See - over the succeeding century Hinduism gave the world Dayananada Saraswati, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Ramana Maharshi and others, though not perhaps of the same stature, who delved deeply into the problems of the human spirit; none of them held or sought any political or economic power. The record of Christianity over the same period presents a barren landscape. Even Mother Teresa, undoubtedly the most admired Christian in the world today, is known more for her social work than anything within the realm of the spirit.

(A closer examination however, shows her work to be little more than a largely secular, fund-raising and publicity campaign. The cloak of religion and social work have allowed her to accept money and honours from the most unsavoury quarters - including mass murderers like Baby Doc Duvalier of Haiti - with no questions asked. Articles in the authoritative British medical journal Lancet have shown her health care programs to be dismal, lacking in basic hygiene. It is not widely known that one cannot adopt children from her orphanages unless the parents are Catholics, or convert to Catholicism. She also helps recruit Indian priests and nuns for the rapidly emptying churches and seminaries of Europe and America. Even the United States Army has need of her recruits to serve as chaplains. More recently she has also been involved in an unseemly political campaign by Indian Bishops to give special job preferences to 'low caste' Christians. This is partly the result of the declining fortunes of the Church in Europe leading to reduced contributions flowing into the missions in India.)

Furthermore, the Church is entirely a communal organization, and the clergy are its officials. No member of the clergy performs a spiritual function such as providing guidance to a troubled soul. Once he is removed from his affiliated church, a member of the clergy loses his standing. He is then not much different from a government official or a business executive out of office. He owes his position as a man of God only as an official in the organized church - not as a man who has realized any higher truth. In Ram Swarup's piquant phrase, he is a God-substitute appointed by the Church hierarchy - as a bureaucrat who knows the 'book'. There are no equivalent spiritual leaders in Christianity who stand apart from the 'organization' - as there are any number in Hinduism and Buddhism - men and women who are respected purely for their spirituality and not because of their official position in the religious hierarchy. Even a highly visible man like Reverend Billy Graham will be remembered as the friend of many presidents, and not for any spiritual message; contrast this with Mahatma Gandhi who for all his many follies will be remembered as the apostle of non-violence and tolerance.

The most spiritual figure produced by the West in recent history was undoubtedly Abraham Lincoln - the apostle of freedom and equality. It is illuminating to learn that Lincoln belonged to no church denomination and rejected the notion of revelation. This of course would have made him a non-believer in the eyes of devout Christians. So too was Thomas Jefferson - an active critic of Christianity. But Jefferson saw himself more as a Greek than a Christian.[1]

In light of this background, it should come as no surprise that the methods and activities of even the best-intentioned men of the Church have tended to be political and economic rather than spiritual. Even Albino Luciani (John Paul I), the most honourable man to assume the holy office in recent history, was preoccupied entirely with secular affairs during his short tenure. This being the case, the history of Christianity as a record of power struggles becomes fully understandable; the history of Hinduism on the other hand is essentially a history of different schools of thought. In Christianity, inflexible dogma, and, until recently, blasphemy laws have ensured that no new light can be shed on fundamental problems afflicting the spirit. (In Islam - its sister faith - such questions cannot even be raised.)

For these reasons, the Church's concern, as always, is to come up with new tactical moves to help in its expansion, and now its survival. And to achieve these goals, the Church finds it necessary to adopt surreptitious methods - something that it has always done. This brings us back to Raimundo Panikkar whose The Unknown Christ of Hinduism was hailed as a new synthesis of Christianity and Hinduism. It is nothing of the sort; it is a less than forthright tactical ploy to be used in undermining Hinduism in the name of 'synthesis'. It also goes to show how an exclusivist theology cannot view a pluralistic system with anything but predatory eyes. This was the case when Christianity encountered Greece two thousand years ago, and the Americas five hundred years ago. This is still the case in India with the present Pope and the American evangelist Pat Robertson admonishing the Hindus to:[2]

 

...confess their faith in Christ and receive a touch from heaven, and set free from a lifetime of bondage and demonic oppression.

 

In reality this means accepting as spiritual guide Pat Robertson - a man who with the help of dictator Mobutu has looted the rainforests of Zaire! The Pope has said much the same thing to Hindus and Buddhists - in more civil language of course. He also told his followers to look for a "new harvest" for their faith in Asia. In the circumstances intolerance is only to be expected.

Panikkar, however, cannot be accused of such crudities; for whatever his theology, he is a scholar of Indian origin who has studied Hindu scriptures. His method is not so much to denounce Hindu scriptures as to 'complete' them by submerging them within Christianity. This is not the place to go into the 'philosophy' propounded by Panikkar in his work beyond noting the fact that it claims to be a new synthesis of Hindu thought and Christianity - comparable in scope to the fusion of Christianity and Platonic thought sought by some early Christian philosophers. The blurb on the jacket of his book The Unknown Christ of Hinduism asserts:

 

Dr Panikkar's great concern is that Hindu philosophy should find its place in the Christian tradition in the sort of way that Platonic and Aristotelian found its place during the Middle Ages and late antiquity.

...He [Panikkar] will not dismiss Hinduism as wrong, or doomed to disappear. On the contrary, he sees Christ already at work in Hinduism, and declares that the good Hindu is saved by the sacraments of Hinduism.

 

The condescension displayed by Panikkar is breathtaking - allowing a 'good Hindu' to be saved by the unknown Christ of Hinduism! It is not his goodness that saves the heathen Hindu but the Christ hidden in Hindu sacraments. There is actually more to what Panikkar writes than meets the eye. It is not Christ that is hidden, but the real wish of Panikkar and his organization Opus Dei - the wish that Hinduism should meet with the same fate at the hands of Christianity as the Greek civilization of Plato and Aristotle.

The same wish was expressed in less subtle form by one Father J. Monchanin:[3]

 

India has received from the Almighty an uncommon gift, an unquenchable thirst for whatever spiritual. From the Vedic and Upanishadic times, a countless host of her sons [sic. and her daughters] have been great seekers of God...

Communion with Him and liberation from whatever hinders that realization, was for them the unique goal.

... Unfortunately, Indian wisdom is tainted with erroneous tendencies and looks as if it has not yet found its own equilibrium. So was Greek wisdom before Greece humbly received its Paschal message of the Risen Christ...

 

But once Christianised, Greece rejected her ancestral errors;.. .

Is not the message she [India] had to deliver to the world similar to the message of the ancient Greece? Therefore the Christianization of Indian civilization is to all intents and purposes an historical undertaking comparable to the Christianization of Greece.

(Emphasis added.)

 

So, according to Father Monchanin, all India has to do is allow her civilization to be destroyed by marauders in the name of Christ - like the classical Greek civilization at the hands of vandals like 'Saint' Cyril of Alexandria and his hooligans. Only then will she find fulfillment having 'received its Paschal message of the Risen Christ' - a euphemism for allowing her ancient pluralistic civilization to be uprooted. Methods might have changed, but not the goals of Christianity - subvert, destroy and expand.

This is still not the whole story. It should be noted that the English edition of the book by which Panikkar is mainly known is a greatly sanitized version that gives a misleading picture of his real aims. K.D. Prithipaul who has looked at the original Spanish work had this to say:[4]

 

One can see evidence of this desire to convert a still incomplete Hinduism to its fulfilled stage, by the adoption of Christ as its essence, in Panikkar's early book entitled La India (1960). The original Spanish text was followed by an Italian version with the same title, and by its French version with the title Lettre sur l'lnde (1963). Largely because of the language barrier, most Hindu scholars have not read these books in which Panikkar refers to Hinduism as a lie, 'una mentira'. Shortly after the publication of La India appeared The Unknown Christ of Hinduism (1964)...

 

This book is actually the collection of the first chapters of Panikkar's doctoral thesis submitted at the Pontifical University in Rome, which explains the abrupt ending of the book. At the time the book appeared, Panikkar belonged to Opus Dei, an arch-conservative order.

(Emphasis added.)

 

So from the Unknown Christ to Opus Dei! Opus Dei being that 'sinister, secretive and Orwellian organization' as Dr Roche of Oxford called it. As a former member of the organization, Roche clearly knew whereof he spoke. But he probably did not know that it was also a criminal organization with close ties to Licio Gelli's P2 that might have had a hand in the death of Pope John Paul I. And Orwellian is indeed an apt way of describing Panikkar's The Unknown Christ of Hinduism.

The fortunes of Opus Dei have been in the doldrums of late, what with its major benefactor Roberto Calvi 'suicided' in London by his Mafia friends, followed by the arrest of its patron Jose Mateos - 'the richest man in Spain' - by German authorities. So Opus Dei - the spiritual soulmate of Gelli and Sindona's P2, the maker and breaker of governments in Italy and Latin America - is the hidden Christ! This should give some idea of how far removed the Church, the Opus Dei ('Work of God') and its patron the present Pope (John Paul II), are today from any spiritual concerns. It is not known if Raimundo Panikkar is still a member of Opus Dei. One hopes not.

I brought up this episode among other reasons to draw attention to the fact that the Vatican does not distinguish between politics - no matter how unscrupulous - secular affairs and doctrinal issues. It may safely be stated that every organization of the Vatican is a secular department that may or may not have any religious duties. This means: whenever there is any dispute about a particular doctrine, or a perceived threat to it, the Vatican views it as a threat to its secular empire; as likely as not it will use purely secular methods to counter it - for it knows none other. It is in this light that we need to view the conduct of the Church in the face of the threat posed to it by the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scholars may complain that its methods hinder progress, but as far as the Church is concerned, its survival as an absolute monarchy is at stake. It is a war for survival, and all is fair.

This is how the Church has operated throughout its nearly two thousand year history. It is unrealistic for Biblical scholars and historians now to expect the Church to change its ways and play by the rules of academia and adhere to free debate. (Not that academia itself has always played by these rules, but that is a different story.) Recognizing this basic fact will help one understand the Church's response to its present crisis - the resurrection of the Inquisition in howsoever a modified form. It is worth taking a look at this hoary institution, and its metamorphosis into its present form - as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

 

3. Thought control: The Holy Inquisition

 

The Inquisition has probably left a greater impression on the European psyche than any other institution of the Church. The fact that Americans on the whole are less hostile to Christianity than Europeans is to be attributed to the fact that they have escaped its horrors. The Holy Inquisition was founded by Pope Gregory IX in 1232 in response to wild reports from the clergy that there was an epidemic of witches and heretics. The honour of holding trials was a monopoly of the Dominicans who have always dominated the Inquisition and its successors like the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In 1239, Gregory sent the Dominican Robert de Bougre to Champagne in France to investigate a bishop by name Moranis accused of heresy. De Rosa tells us: "In one week Father Robert had put the whole town on trial. On 29 May, he sent 180 people, including the bishop to the stake." (p. 226)

It was an appropriately unholy beginning for the Holy Inquisition. In 1252 Pope Innocent IV permitted the use of torture in the trials by Inquisition. This was no more than extending official recognition to an already widespread practice. For something like the next five hundred years, trials by Inquisition probably consumed more of the Church's resources and attention than any of its other activities. But it was also highly profitable, for it could now be used for blackmail. In addition, a victim's worldly possessions were invariably confiscated by the Church.

The Inquisition is the unique institution of its kind in world history. While Christianity and Islam - and Nazism and Communism later - have all sought to punish dissent and unorthodox views, the Inquisition went much further. It sought to detect and root out heresy before it was expressed - in the mind itself. It forced its victims through torture to confess to all sorts of 'crimes' even before they were committed or even conceived. It was thought control pure and simple. Even Stalinist Russia did not go so far. The procedure to be followed in the trials by Inquisition was summed up in one of the Church's own publications known as Libro Negro, the' Black Book'; it was more popularly known as the Book of the Dead. Signed by the Grand Inquisitor himself, it said:

 

Either the person confesses and he is proved guilty from his own confession, or he does not confess and is equally guilty on the evidence of witnesses. If a person confesses to the whole of what he is accused of, he is unquestionably guilty of the whole; but if he confesses only a part, he ought still to be regarded as guilty of the whole, since what he has confessed proves him to be capable of guilt as to the other points of the accusation...

Bodily torture has ever been found the most salutary and efficient means of leading to spiritual repentance. Therefore, the choice of the most benefiting mode of torture is left to the Judge of the Inquisition...

[Sic: benefiting whom? Emphasis added.]

If, notwithstanding all the means employed, the unfortunate wretch still denies his guilt, he is to be considered as a victim of the devil: and, as such, deserves no compassion from the servants of God, nor the pity and indulgence of the Holy Mother Church: he is a son of perdition. Let him perish among the damned.

(de Rosa, p. 228)

 

In these trials, to be accused was to be condemned, there is no record of anyone being acquitted.[5]

The headquarters of the Inquisition is a large yet curiously unprepossessing building within sight of St Peter's in Rome. Its official name is Casa Santa - Saintly House - better known as the Palace of Inquisition. It is still very much in operation under its new name of 'Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith' under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Munich - that man of gloom and doom whom we have already met. Tourists and visitors are rarely informed of its existence and few ever get to see it despite the enormous impact it has made on European and world history. One who did visit the Casa Santa was the brilliant French novelist Emile Zola, who, in his novel Rome written more than a hundred years ago has left us this evocative portrait of the Saintly House (noted by de Rosa, pp. 193-4):

 

It is in a solitary silent district, which the footfall of pedestrians or the rumble of wheels but seldom disturbs. The sun alone lives there, in sheets of light which spread slowly over the small, white paving. You divine the vicinity of the basilica, for there is the smell of incense, a cloistral quiescence as of the slumber of the centuries. And at one corner the Palace of the Holy Office rises up with heavy, disquieting bareness, only a single row of windows piercing its lofty, yellow front.

 

The Inquisition was by no means limited to Rome, for the Popes carried it with them wherever they went. In Avignon, in southern France where the papacy had its residence for an extended period in the Middle Ages, the papal residence contained an elaborate facility for torturing victims. In building it, no pains had been spared in making the place as comfortable as possible - comfortable for the Inquisitors that is, not the victims. Peter de Rosa gives us the following chilling description:

 

...poignant testimony was given by a devout English Catholic 140 years ago. Robert Richard Madden paid a visit to Avignon with a friend. He left his impression in his book Galileo and the Inquisition. He was shaken to find how much of the great palace of the Popes was taken up with the courts, cells and dungeons of the Inquisition.

He saw the torture chamber with its acoustical device of irregular walls for absorbing the screams of the victims. He stood in the judgement hall where the prisoners had stood and noted above his head 'several circular apertures in the ceiling, about five or six inches in diameter, communicating with an upper chamber, where the prosecutors, it is said, and those who took down in writing the proceedings and answers of the prisoners, were stationed, unseen by him, and yet by whom, every word he uttered was recorded'.

It struck Madden as wicked that someone on trial for his life was not allowed to see either the prosecutor or the hostile witnesses, nor to be told what he was accused of...

Madden passed to the most appalling place in Avignon, where alleged heretics were burned. By means of a narrow passage, he entered a vast circular chamber, 'exactly like the furnace of a glass house or a chimney', shaped like a funnel. It was about two hundred feet high with rings and bars to which prisoners were chained. They had to put on sulphur shirts to make them burn better. The blackness of the walls testified to how many men and women had suffered in that terrible place.

(de Rosa, pp. 249 - 50)

 

One begins to understand what Hitler meant when he told the Bishop of Osnabruch - "I am only doing what the Church has done for fifteen hundred years, only more effectively. "

In perhaps the greatest irony of all, victims were pitilessly tortured for questioning the Church doctrine: Ecclesia non novit sanguinem - The Church has never shed blood!

From all this it is clear that the self-styled 'Princes of the Church' who presided over the trials by Inquisition must have been among the most sadistic men that ever lived. For a present-day comparison and a relatively mild comparison - we may look to the mullahs of Bangladesh and Pakistan who seem to delight in administering sixty, eighty or a hundred lashes to teenage girls by accusing them of imaginary crimes against which there is no defense. There is something about fanaticism in the name of God that brings out the most sadistic impulses.

It would be a serious error to think of the Inquisition as a Medieval aberration that was rendered irrelevant by the progress of civilization. When Napoleon conquered Spain in 1808, some of his soldiers and officers found hundreds of naked victims huddled in torture chambers in a monastery in Madrid, even though the monks had at first denied their existence. Battle-hardened soldiers of the French Army, used to war and bloodshed, could not stomach the sight of so many cells, dungeons and instruments of torture. They freed the victims and blew up the monastery with gunpowder.

The Spanish Inquisition at its height was presided over by Tomas de Torquemada - a Dominican priest - a man whose name is still synonymous with the horrors of the Inquisition. Between 1483 and 1498 he was responsible for the sentencing of over 114,000 victims of which 10,220 were burned. Most of the rest received life sentences and died miserably in prison. Speaking of Torquemada, Prescott, the famous historian of the Spanish Empire wrote:[6]

 

This man [Torquemada] ... was one of that class with whom zeal passes for religion and who testify their zeal by a fiery persecution of those whose creed differs from their own: who compensate for their abstinence from sensual indulgence, by giving scope to those deadlier vices of the heart, pride, bigotry, and intolerance, which are no less opposed to virtue, and are far more extensively mischievous to society.

 

The Inquisition was finally suppressed in Spain only in 1813. It is not widely known that the Inquisition made its way to India and other parts of Asia under the Portuguese Jesuits.[7] The Portuguese ruled the enclave of Goa on the west coast of India from 1510 to 1962 when they were finally driven out by the Indian army. The first demand for the Inquisition in India was made by St Francis Xavier in 1545; it came into existence in 1560. For more than two centuries, until it was abolished in 1812, the Holy Office of Goa had the responsibility for rooting out heresy not only in India (where it failed) but in all the Portuguese possessions in the east.

The Jesuit historian Father Francisco de Souza tells us that the goal of the Inquisition in India was to destroy Hinduism and also persecute the Indian Jews who had lived peaceably with the Hindus for several centuries. Filippo Sassetti, a Venetian merchant living in Goa tells us that the Goa Inquisition assumed particularly virulent form after 1565 when the great Vijayanagar Empire was defeated by a confederacy of Deccan Sultanates. Francois Pyrad, a Frenchman who lived in Goa from 1608 to 1610 tells us that the number of victims persecuted was very large. The authority of the Inquisitors who were deputed by the Pope exceeded that of the Portuguese Viceroy and the Archbishop. J.C. Barreto Miranda, a Goanese historian, wrote of the Inquisition:

 

The cruelties which in the name of the religion of peace and love which this tribunal practised in Europe, were carried to even greater excesses in India, where the Inquisitors, surrounded by luxuries which could stand comparison with the regal magnificence of the great potentates of Asia, saw with pride the Archbishop as well as the viceroy submitted to their power. Every word of theirs was a sentence of death and at their slightest nod were moved to terror the vast populations spread over the Asiatic regions, whose lives fluctuated in their hands, and who, on the most frivolous pretext could be clapped for all time in the deepest dungeon or strangled or offered as food for the flames of the pyre. (Priolkar, p. 30)

 

The Portuguese Inquisition was abolished in 1812, and the Spanish in 1813. It continued however in Italy. Pope Pius VII, after his release from imprisonment by Napoleon, reintroduced the Sacred Inquisition in 1814; by then Waterloo had removed the threat of Napoleon and his liberalising reforms. As late as 1829, anyone in the Papal States in possession of a book banned by the Church was treated as a heretic. Under both domestic and international pressure Pius forbade the use of torture in trials by Inquisition only in 1816. But the practice continued for many years. As late as 1856, Pope Pius IX signed an edict permitting 'excommunication, confiscation, banishment, imprisonment for life, as well as secret executions...' (de Rosa, p. 244)

Even this was not the end. In 1864, Pius IX issued his famous Syllabus Errorum condemning eighty 'principal errors of our age', reviving the Inquisition in all but name. These 'errors' included science, liberty, freedom of thought, freedom of conscience and of opinion, tolerance - in short, everything that we hold sacred - all denounced as heresies. The Syllabus went on to become perhaps the most important document of the First Vatican (1869-70). Freedom of thought and tolerance - the greatest enemies of dogmatism - were simply not to be tolerated. The Inquisition and its modern successors were and are meant to root out all traces of them.

It is not my intention here to catalogue all the grisly details of the Inquisition, but one statistic slands out. Matilda Joslyn Gage tells us in her book Women, Church and State (New York: Arno Press,

1972):

 

It is computed from historical records that nine millions of persons were put to death for witchcraft [in Europe) after 1484, or during the period of three hundred years, and this estimate does not include the vast number who were sacrificed in the preceding centuries upon the same accusation.

 

Assuming conservatively a similar figure for the ten centuries or so of Christianity previous to 1484, we arrive at a truly staggering figure of not far short of twenty million! - And this for witchcraft alone, and also not counting the enormous numbers of men, women and children that were consigned to the flames and the sword by the Jesuits and the 'Christian' soldiers in the Americas. It is worth taking a brief look at this blood-soaked chapter in human history - probably the most destructive chapter in the history of the world.

 

4. Devastation of the Americas

 

The destruction of Native American civilizations by Soldiers of the Cross lies outside the scope of the present work, but the Pope's (and other evangelists') recent forays into Asia which the Church sees as the field of a 'great new harvest' makes it relevant again. As previously observed, Pope John Paul II recently Stood before the Asian Bishops' Conference in Manila and promised: “A new harvest of faith will be reaped in this vast and vital continent." Those who have now become the Church's latest target would do well to gain some idea of what the previous great harvest - in the Americas - was like. It will serve as a salutary reminder of what religious reapers are capable of.

Since Christian colonization of the Americas has been thoroughly documented by historians, a few examples will suffice to show that it was no less destructive than the Inquisition in Europe. Nor is this surprising considering that both were products of the same movement and mindset - the Counter-Reformation led by the Jesuits. We have abundant eyewitness accounts of the atrocities committed in the name of Christ. In his famous work The Devastation of the Indies, Bartolome de Las Casas (1474-1566) - a contemporary of Columbus and other early colonizers who knew many of them personally -provides the following grim catalogue:[8]

 

Some of the secular Spaniards [i.e. not Jesuit priests) who have been here [Hispaniola] for many years say that the goodness of the Indians is undeniable and that if this gifted people could be brought to know the one true God they would be the most fortunate people in the world.

Yet into this sheepfold... there came some Spaniards who immediately behaved like ravening wild beasts... And Spaniards have behaved in no other way during the past forty years, down to the present time, ...killing, terrorising, afflicting, torturing and destroying the native peoples, doing all this with the strangest and the most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before, and to such a degree, that this Island of Hispaniola, once so populous (having a population that I estimated to be more than three million), has now a population of barely two hundred persons.

(p. 29; emphasis added.)

The Island of Cuba... is now almost completely depopulated. San Juan [present Puerto Rico] and Jamaica are two of the largest, most productive and attractive islands; both are now deserted and devastated.

(pp. 29-30)

And the Christians, with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out massacres and strange cruelties against them [natives of Hispaniola]. They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in child-bed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces...

(p.33)

 

Reading de Las Casas is decidedly not for the squeamish. Also, the passages I have quoted are far from being the most gruesome to be found in The Devastation of the Indies; there are others which are significantly worse. To continue with his account:

 

As for the vast mainland, which is ten times larger than all Spain, ...we can be sure that our Spaniards, with their cruel and abominable acts, have devastated the land and exterminated the rational people who fully inhabited it. We can estimate very surely and truthfully that in the forty years that have passed, with the infernal actions of the Christians, there have been unjustly slain more than twelve million men, women and children. In truth, I believe without trying to deceive myself, that the number of slain is more like fifteen million.

(pp.30-l)

The Spaniards have killed more Indians here [around Mexico City] in twelve years [1518-30) by the sword, by fire, and enslavement than anywhere else in the Indies. They have killed young and old, men, women and children, some four million souls during what they call the Conquests...

(p.58)

And this very same tyrant [Pedro de Alvarado] has written that the land of Guatemala was even more populous than Mexico, which is the truth. But he and his brothers and other Spaniards have slain four or five million souls... and they will still go on killing.

(p.72)

The Spaniards broke up marriages, separating husbands and wives, robbed couples of their children, took for themselves the wives and daughters of the people, or gave them to the sailors as consolation, and the sailors bore them away on their vessels that were crowded with Indians, all of them dying with hunger and thirst.

(p.73)

 

They have killed in these realms [modern Peru] within ten years more than four million souls and are still killing.

                                                                      (pp.118-9)

A few days ago they tortured with sharpened reeds and then killed a great queen, the wife of the Inca, King of all the realms which the Christians seized and laid waste. And they took the queen, his wife, and against all justice and reason killed her, even though it was said she was with child, for the sole reason to cause suffering to her husband.

(p.119)

 

De Las Casas' charges against the atrocities of the Conquistadors and the Christian priests provoked a furious reaction from the Spaniards. Many apologists for colonialism in the name of religion tried to discredit him, but his account is supported by other sources. Even Samuel Eliot Morrison in his largely admiring biography of Columbus was forced to concede: "The policy and the acts of Columbus for which he alone was responsible began the depopulation of the terrestrial paradise that was Hispaniola." Morrison further tells us that of the original population of the island "one third were killed off between 1494 and 1496."[9]

Massacre of a third of the population in two years! Not even Hitler could match this record - with all the technology at his disposal.

The devastation of the once prosperous island of Hispaniola - called 'terrestrial paradise' by all early visitors - was so great that Isabela, the first seulemem established by Columbus had to be abandoned in 1497, barely five years after it was founded. Today it presents a desolate spectacle - a mute witness to barbarism in the name of religion. Few visit its ruins, for the place is believed to be haunted by the ghosts of victims past. Morrison wrote: "As early as Las Casas' day the ruins were said to be haunted. Terrible cries were heard by hunters who approached the place..." (ibid.) Visitors today are told that these cries can still be heard on moonlit nights.

There apparently was no limit to the ingenuity of the colonizers when it came to extermination of native populations. In their authoritative study History and Sociology of Genocide, Frank Chalk and Kurt Johansson point out that European colonists even used a form of bacterial warfare:[10]

 

Given the incredible virulence of smallpox as a destroyer of Indians in the New World, some authors have looked for evidence that the Europeans started epidemics deliberately. ...In one documented case cited by McNeil, the commander and other British officers stationed at Fort Pitt [present Pittsburg] ...gave the Indians a handkerchief and two blankets from the local smallpox hospital... Sir Jeffery Amherst, commander-in-chief of the British forces in North America, instructed his subordinate, "You will do well to try to inoculate (sic) the Indians by means of blankets as well as try every other method that can serve to extirpate this exorable race. "

(pp. 176-7)

 

The Portuguese Jesuits were not far behind as John Hemming discovered: [11]

 

The Jesuits were intelligent enough to appreciate that epidemics were probably imported by Europeans, and that they struck hardest at converts congregated into mission settlements. ...Some may have believed that it might be better for Indians to be baptised but dead than heathen but alive and free. But it often seemed that what really mattered was pride in maintaining the mission system. The Jesuits became obsessed with their personal 'soul-count'.

 

In other words, they saw themselves as God's bureaucrats. This pride in maintaining the mission system - its image, often against the interests those whom it is supposed to serve appears to be very a strong motive even today. Most patients in Mother Teresa's hospitals in Calcutta would be better off in other hospitals, but it is often said that she refuses to let them go. Dr Robin Cox, the editor of the authoritative British medical journal Lancet found the conditions in her hospitals to be appalling. Mary Loudon, another British visitor, found that they lacked antibiotics and saw needles being used and reused without being sterilized. If any other private or public hospital were to be found operating under such conditions, it would have to face the wrath of the health department. Apparently Mother Teresa's name is sufficient to keep these places going, allowing her to go around the world claiming that hundreds of poor patients are being treated at her hospitals. She does not of course mention that patients are crowded fifty to sixty into a single room with no beds as Mary Loudon found during one of her visits. It should also be mentioned that her hospitals have been lavishly funded over at least the past thirty years. So lack of funds is not an excuse.[12]

This obsession with numbers - or the 'soul count' and the pride that goes with it - is something all Christian missions seem to be afflicted with. (It was common also among the judges of the Inquisition.) This often had catastrophic consequences for the patients at these missions. Speaking of the Jesuits in America, Francis Jennings writes:[13]

 

...not even the most brutally depraved of the conquistadors was able purposely to slaughter Indians on the scale that the gentle priest unwittingly accomplished by going from his sickbed ministrations to lay his hands in blessing on his Indian converts.

 

These priests were not all that gentle as the Inquisition shows. The point is: the Inquisition (and the slaughter of the Indians in the Americas) was no aberration like the Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts; it was one of the most systematic and thoroughly organized persecutions in history that was matched in modern times only by Hitler, Stalin and Mao.

As far as numbers are concerned, the Belgian scholar Koeoraad Elst estimates that the Indian population in the Americas was reduced from ninety million to twelve million or less - a loss of over eighty-five percent - as a result of the Spanish conquests. What motives animated the minds of these men professing love for God and Jesus? De Las Casas, himself a Catholic priest - the first to be ordained in the New World - a man who probably witnessed more suffering at the hands of these sadists than anyone who ever lived provides a coldly uncomplicated answer.

 

Their reasons for killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches in a very brief time and thus rise to a high estate disproportionate to their merits. It should be kept in mind that their insatiable greed and ambition, the greatest ever seen in the world, is the cause of their villainies.

(de Las Casas, p. 31)

 

This is colonial barbarism pure and simple, but they used Christianity - the 'true faith' - to give themselves a moral justification for their avarice. They were products of feudal Europe, and every priest and every soldier saw for himself an opportunity to become a feudal lord in the New World through plunder and slavery. What is of interest to us here is that this appalling history of bloodshed at the hands of the Inquisitors and the Conquistadors - the worst the world has ever known - was facilitated by the application of the anti-rational Doctrine of the Faith which freed one's conscience and yet had to be sustained against all perceived threats and challenges. It was also a most convenient instrument of expansion and exploitation, freeing its practitioners from all accountability. Faith thus became a cover for greed.

The greatest threat of all to the Doctrine of the Faith is seen by the Church to come from scientific inquiry and reason. It was only natural then that the Holy Inquisition should have extended its reach to the control of scientific ideas, as Galileo was to find out.[14]

 

5. From Galileo to the Scrolls monopoly

 

Suppression of ideas has a long pedigree in the history of Christianity. Pope Paul IV formalized the process in 1559, though by then it already had a thousand-year history. He established the Index of prohibited books which made it a crime to read any work listed on the Index. The practice of proscribing books was abolished by his namesake Paul VI only in 1966. By that time the Index had become wholly ineffective.

Before I get to Galileo and the Dead Sea Scrolls, it is worth noting that suppression of dissent goes on as before though without the physical violence of former limes. Cardinal Ralzinger, the modern day Grand Inquisitor, is as busy as any of his predecessors keeping his bishops in line. Priests, theologians and teachers are dismissed for deviating from the official line. In all this Ratzinger was doing no more than following the official practice and recent history. As de Rosa records:

 

J.H. Ignaz von Dollinger was Professor of Church History at Munich in the middle of the nineteenth century. Just prior to Vatican I [1869-70], he published The Pope and the Council in which he tried to show how false and exaggerated were the claims to infallibility. He was put on the Index less than two weeks before the Council had its first session. Rome has always found it easier to stifle arguments than to answer them.

                  The Index was finally discontinued after more than four centuries by Paul VI. The year was 1966.

                                                    (de Rosa, p. 243)

 

In recent years, two of the most distinguished theologians and Church historians - Edward Schillebeeckx and Hans Kung – have faced the wrath of the present Pope for questioning papal infallibility. Kung, widely regarded as the world's greatest Catholic scholar, was removed from the Catholic faculty of the Universily of Tubingen at the express command of Pope John Paul II. But the university, unwilling to lose so eminent a scholar as Dr Kung offered him a position outside the Catholic faculty. Not everyone however is as fortunate as Kung who can command a prestigious position at almost any university in the world. The basic fact is that the present Pope has been free in using his power and influence to muzzle theologians and other scholars. But this is only to be expected of an instilution that muzzled one of the greatest scientists of all time - Galileo Galilei.

Galileo, born in 1564 - the same year as Shakespeare - had slarted out as a medical student but soon switched to mathematics. He was also a skilled experimenter and designed many useful instruments including one for determining the centre of gravity of irregular bodies. He was appointed professor of mathematics at Padua in 1589 but later moved to Pisa. As late as 1609 he was an obscure figure toiling in a relatively undistinguished university; many others in Europe like Paris, Prague, Vienna, Oxford and Cambridge enjoyed higher reputations. He was then already forty-five, and there was nothing to suggest that he was the man destined to bring about the scientific revolution.

Late that year, upon receiving news that a Dutch optician had built a telescope, he went on to build a much better one of his own. After a good deal of trial and error, he built a telescope with high enough magnification to observe the planets of the solar system. (De Rosa mentions a magnification of a thousand which seems incredible.) This suggests that Galileo, in addition to being a brilliant mathematician, must have been an instrument designer of genius. The two skills seldom go together.

Its first application was military. He sold it to Venice receiving in return a life appointment at the universily at double his previous salary. He next turned his telescope to the skies when a whole new world was revealed to him. Being a skilled mathematician, it did not take him long to realize that the heliocentric theory of Copernicus - in which all the planets including the earth revolve around the sun - was the only one that made sense both mathematically and observationally.

But this went against the teachings of the Church which held the earth to be the centre of the universe. It was a classic case of conflict between dogma and science that was to be repeated over and over again in the next three centuries, though never so dramatically as in the case of Galileo.

Galileo was not altogether a naive man and yet he underestimated the political power of the Church acting in the guise of religion. He came from a family of some distinction. His father Vincenzo Galilei was a musician and composer of note. Vincenzo was a member of a group known as the Camareta which was responsible for major reforms in musical style and practice that was to lead to one of the great achievements of Western civilization - the opera. It was an age when Church dominated life, and Galileo was wise to the ways of the world. He knew that his discoveries had to be presented in a manner that would not offend Church authorities. And yet he blundered.

Galileo had many friends and admirers among the clergy. Cardinal Bellarmine seemed at first like one of them. When Galileo visited him in Rome, Bellarmine cautioned him not be rash, and also told him to present his findings merely as a new hypothesis rather than a proven fact. The same advice was repeated by Cardinal Barbereni. But Galileo, believing that he had strong supporters in Rome, threw caution to the wind, and went ahead and published his discoveries. In his publications he attacked and ridiculed old theories, noting that the Bible was not a scientific text. Most unwisely, he quoted a wit known as Cardinal Baronius pointing out that "The aim of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how to go to heaven, not how heaven goes." The Church was not amused.

Soon Galileo began to get worried. He found that Cardinal Bellarmine who had been so cordial in his meetings in Rome was not prepared to be flexible with Church dogma and look favorably upon his new discoveries. In addition, he was of the opinion that mathematics was an abstract discipline that bore no relation to physical reality. Of course, he had no competence to express an opinion on these matters, but that made little difference as long as he held a high position in the Church. Like any British bureaucrat in colonial India, a high Church official was considered an expert on everything and his opinions carried weight.

Galileo was dismayed: how could they possibly ignore evidence that he had brought right before their own eyes? But they refused to look through his telescope because Scripture had already told them what the heavens were like: earthly laws of nature, after all, did not apply to the heavens. Some clerics called out for Copernicus' blood, but were disappointed to learn that he had been dead more than sixty years. More ominously, one of Galileo's books made its way to Casa Santa - the office of the Holy Inquisition. Peter de Rosa, who has given a vivid account of the episode writes:

 

His Eminence [Cardinal Bellarmine] was telling him not to meddle with Scripture while he was pontificating on science without any training at all. He [Galileo] knew now that Bellarmine would not scruple to silence him by summoning him before the Inquisition.

(p.315)

 

And that was exactly what happened. Pope Paul V authorised the Congregation of the Index - one of the offices of the Holy Office (Inquisition) - to deal with Galileo and his writings. It ruled that his theory was 'foolish and absurd, philosophically false and formally heretical'. It was also 'erroneous in faith'. The Pope sent word to Galileo through Bellarmine that he was not to defend or teach his views. Otherwise, he would be jailed.

Galileo, tired by the ordeal and in poor health agreed. He had been more fortunate than most others in his position despite his humiliation at their hands; these were the 'princes of ignorance' in the words of Nostradamus - another believer in Copernicus' model who, in the century before Galileo, had also been called to appear before the Inquisition. Galileo's work was put on the Index of prohibited works. At the same time he was left free to pursue his researches as long as his public statements did not contradict Church dogma. This point is important: he was not forbidden to pursue his theoretical and experimental studies.[15]

It was not the end of his travails however. In 1623, his 'friend' Cardinal Maffeo Barbereni ascended the Holy See as Pope Urban VIII. By then Galileo was living in retirement in Florence, working on a book that he was to call a Dialogue of the Two Systems of the World on the Copernican and the older Aristotelian system favored by the Church. This was to be a non-committal account of the two theories cast in the form of a Platonic dialogue. He visited the Pope in Rome in 1630 and requested him to contribute a preface. The Pope apparently agreed.

There was the inevitable delay in publication, and Galileo went ahead and published it on his own in 1632 without the papal imprimatur or the preface. Written in elegant Italian the book was an instant success. But the usual intrigues started with the Jesuits poisoning the Pope's mind by claiming that despite its non-committal title, it was heretical and posed a greater danger to Church teachings than 'Luther and Calvin combined'. It was also insinuated that in Simplicius, the defender of the old system of Aristotle and Plolemy, Galileo had caricatured Pope Urban himself. This made Ihe Pope furious and he ordered Galileo's prosecution.

In poor health, Galileo had to journey to Rome in February 1633 to stand trial. There was no evidence against him for he had not violated the earlier injunction. So the Inquisitors, following the time-honoured Church method, produced a forged document in which Galileo was said to have been enjoined in 1616 from 'teaching or discussing Copernicanism in any way'. It was a lie: he had only been told not to teach or defend the new doctrine; he was free to discuss it as a 'mathematical and logical supposition' and conduct research. And that was all he had done in his Two Systems. But he was judged guilty for being in violation of the forged document.

He still had friends in high places - even in the Holy Office itself. The commissary general of the Inquisition recommended that he be let off with a reprimand, but the congregation insisted that he should be sentenced. He was found guilty of having 'held and taught' the Copernican doctrine and ordered to recant.

On June 21 of 1633, an old and infirm Galileo, the greatest scientist to appear on the world stage in the two thousand years from Archimedes to Newton, was made to kneel before the 'princes of ignorance' and confess that he 'abjured, cursed and detested' his past errors. The sentence carried imprisonment, bue it was commuted to house arrest and seclusion for the rest of his life by his 'friend' Pope Urban VIII. Galileo died on January 8, 1642. At that time he was still under house arrest for a crime that he had not committed even by the arbitrary rules of the Inquisition; he had been framed with the help of a forged document. In his forced seclusion, even his daughter could not visit him without official permission. The dispute was not about truth but authority.

Peter de Rosa summed up the whole sordid episode in these poignant words:

 

The Founder of Modern Science, at the behest of the Roman Inquisition, was forced to affirm, in accordance with the Catholic faith, that the earth is the motionless centre of the universe. A scholar who, in any list of the world's great men, would figure in the first twenty, was condemned by a group of clerics, none of whom would figure in the first million.

(p.320)

What wounded Galileo most was the disgrace. It had been visited on him for no reason he could understand. He thought of himself as a devoted Catholic. ...Small-minded Vatican clerks had humiliated him but they could not stop the progress of science. His was the classic case of truth being crushed by power, genius being silenced by petty bureaucracy. It showed Rome's fear and hatred of the enquiring mind which was to be repeated time after time in the succeeding centuries. ...It made war on Darwin and Freud, on biblical scholarship, on attempts to understand the world on its own terms...

(pp. 321-2)

 

And this brings us back to the Dead Sea Scrolls, to modern day Grand Inquisitors like Cardinal Ratzinger and his minions like Father de Vaux, with their belief that only suppression of all dissent can save the Church from collapsing. This brings us also to the Biblical scholar John Allegro and his futile efforts to make public the findings of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This of course posed a serious threat to the Scrolls' monopoly, which the Church could never tolerate.

 

6. Inquisition today: the case of Allegro[16]

 

At the very outset it would be well to recognize that John Marco Allegro is not a scholar who can even remotely be compared to Galileo. And yet he posed a greater threat: where Galileo was persecuted for defying the authority of the Church, the case of Allegro was different: he questioned the very foundation of Christianity and Church doctrine. When in a particularly impetuous mood, he wrote one of the Catholic scholars on the International Team who had expressed the wish to become a priest - 'by the time I've finished, there won't be any Church left for you to join.' (Baigent and Leigh, p. 46)

With such an attitude, it was not long before it became clear to Father Roland de Vaux and other members of the Intemational Team that John Allegro would have to be silenced before he could become a major problem. In this they succeeded, but not before he created a storm in Biblical circles. It is not as if Allegro set out to create problems for the Church; as an agnostic he seems never to have understood that scholarship is not everything, especially as far as the Church is concerned. And he paid the price for this ignorance in terms of his own career and reputation. A brilliant Biblical scholar and a pioneering student of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Allegro was made to look like some sort of a nut. It is only now, with the release of the Scrolls, that his views are being vindicated. Truth has finally triumphed.

He was not of course the first Biblical scholar to question the basic beliefs of Christianity - its originality and even the historicity of Jesus on the basis of the Scrolls. As I noted in a previous chapter, that honour in modern times belongs probably to the Frenchman Andre Dupont-Sommer. In one Qumran text he had found references to a Teacher of Righteousness who was a Messiah and the leader of a sect calling itself the Sect of the New Covenant. According to the same text, he was persecuted, scourged and murdered. This Teacher of Righteousness, according to Dupont-Sommer, was the model used in creating Jesus the Messiah (Christ) of the Gospels.[17]

        This claim was first made in 1950. John Marco Allegro came on the scene shortly thereafter. A talented linguist in addition to being one of the leading young Biblical scholars of his day, he joined the International Team under Father Roland de Vaux in 1953. Allegro's Catholic sounding name probably lulled de Vaux into admitting this iconoclastic Englishman into the Team. Also, there was nothing at that time to suggest that he was to become a thorn in the side of the International Team and even the Church itself. Allegro was known simply as a linguist and Biblical scholar of exceptional promise. He was given some important fragments from the Qumran Cave 3 to study and analyse.

Allegro's work on the Scrolls was extraordinarily productive, especially when matched against the output of his Ecole Biblique colleagues which appears slight by comparison. Men like Father de Vaux with his long full beard and flowing white robes concentrated on cultivating the appearance and manner of a Biblical prophet, but contributed little of substance to scholarship. He excelled mainly at public relations, where his impressive bearing and ponderous mode of expression passed for wisdom and profundity. When one examines the real contributions of the members of the International Team of the Ecole Biblique, one is struck by the fact of how relatively insignificant it is. But what they lacked in scholarship, they made up through association - with an institution that resounded with the name Ecole Biblique et Archaeologique Francaise de Jerusalem. Then there was also the prestige associated with having a monopoly over the Scrolls. All this gave the International Team and the Ecole Biblique an aura that is not justified by its scholarly performance.

Much of their 'expertise' was sheer presumption, with no one in a position to challenge them because of lack of access to the source material over which they held a complete monopoly. Baigent and Leigh saw through this when they wrote: "The more we consulted the 'experts', the more apparent it became that they knew, effectively, little more than anyone else." (p. xvii; original emphasis.)

It was not just journalists and writers like Baigent and Leigh who complained about the delay; even distinguished academic scholars like Geza Vermes and Eisenman and Wise found it to be unpardonable. Their observations are worth another look. Vermes wrote in 1985:[18]

 

Eight years ago I defined this situation as a 'lamentable state of affairs' and warned that it was 'likely to become the academic scandal par excellence of the twentieth century' unless drastic measures were taken at once. Regrettably, this has not happened and the present chief editor of the fragments [of the Scrolls] has in the meantime gone on record as one who rejects as unjust and unreasonable any criticism regarding the delay.

 

More recently, Robert Eisenman, who has waged a tireless battle for the publication of the Scrolls described the situation as follows:[19]

 

The struggle for access to the materials was long and arduous, sometimes even bitter. An International Team of editors had been set up by the Jordanian Government to control the process. The problems with this team are public knowledge. To put them in a nutshell: in the first place, the team was hardly international, secondly it did not work well as a team, and thirdly it dragged out the editing process interminably.

(p.2)

It was from the ranks of the French School - the Ecole as it is called, an extension of the Dominican Order in Jerusalem - that all previous editors were drawn, including the two most recent, Father Benoit, the head of the Ecole before he died, and John Strugnell. The International Team had been put in place by Roland de Vaux, another Dominical father. In several seasons from 1954-56 De Vaux did all the archaeology of Qumran. A sociologist by training, not an archaeologist, de Vaux had also been head of the Ecole.

(pp.2-3)

 

It was not only incompetence that caused the delay; as we saw in previous chapters, Catholic scholars of the Ecole Biblique had very strong doctrinal reasons for preventing any public exposure of their findings. Allegro was not party to this delay and deception: he was both highly capable and also not bothered by doctrinal considerations. He saw himself as a scholar involved in an enormously exciting and important research program. And unlike his plodding colleagues, his productivity was impressive - both in quality and quantity. He soon had several significant publicalions to his credit.

In contrast to the turgid style cultivated by Biblical scholars and theologians, Allegro wrote in an easy to read, lively style. His popular book The Dead Sea Scrolls, first published in 1956, was an instant success that ran into several editions. In 1968 appeared his monumental contribution: Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, Vol 5, the fifth in the prestigious series published by Oxford University Press. At that time, he was recognized as one of the world's foremost Biblical scholars, and probably the leading authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He had an unmatched command of the primary sources and was a formidable linguist to boot.

And yet, by 1970, aged only forty-seven, Allegro was finished - discredited by de Vaux and his colleagues, kicked out of the International Team, and, worst of all, dismissed both by the popular press and in academia as a crank and a publicity hound. What had happened?

The crisis that came to head in 1970 had been brewing for a long time. His love for the subject, and his enthusiasm in making his exciting discoveries known to the public went against the interests of the institution he was working for. Where he wanted the world to know what the birth of Christianity was really like, de Vaux and his superiors at the Vatican were concerned entirely with the damage which the revelations of the Dead Sea Scrolls could do to their doctrinal position and the viability of their Church. Allegro, as a scholar and an agnostic failed to see how sensitive his colleagues were to anything that appeared to threaten the foundations of their Church. His own upbringing and education as a liberal Englishman had probably not equipped him to deal with sombre and self-important men like Father de Vaux, Father Skehan, John Strugnell and others in the same mould; these were either ordained priests or were planning careers in the Church. It was not just doctrine that was at stake, but their careers as well.

Most of all, Allegro did not know that the institution he was working for - the Ecole Biblique of Jerusalem - was secretly controlled by the Pontifical Biblical Commission; the Commission happens to be part of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - known in former times as The Holy Inquisition, as we already saw. So a modern-day Grand Inquisitor was secretly watching over the

activities of John Marco Allegro![20]

His own free and informal style in dealing with his colleagues – at times bordering on the flippant - also did not help matters. He once wrote John Strugnell that his 'recent study of my fragments [of the Scrolls] has convinced me that Dupont-Sommer is more right than he knew'. (Baigent and Leigh, p. 46) Allegro either did not know or didn't care that the Church regarded Dupont-Sommer as the very incarnation of the Devil.

Allegro's impetuosity seemed to know no bounds. At one time Strugnell was considering a career in the Church, as a theologian. Learning of this Allegro wrote to him:

 

I shouldn't worry about that theological job, if I were you: by the time I've finished there won't be any church left for you to join.

(ibid.)

 

Under normal circumstances one would dismiss it as a joke. But the Church is not known for its sense of humour. In this case, knowing how damaging the Scrolls are to the foundations of the Church, and how close Allegro was to the truth, it had even less reason to be amused.

Blissfully ignorant of all the turmoil he was causing, Allegro went on with his campaign to popularise his findings. He gave a series of three radio talks one of which was picked up by The New York Times as I indicated in an earlier chapter. The American magazine Time also ran an article under the title: 'Crucifixion before Christ'. All this was getting back to de Vaux, who was under pressure from the Vatican to do something about silencing Allegro. This of course was not as easy as in the time of Galileo when people were simply hauled up before the Inquisition and accused of heresy. The Church had to wait for a mis-step by Allegro and use modern methods of silencing him.

Father de Vaux and his colleagues may have lacked Allegro's brilliance and scholarship, but they had behind them the immense prestige that goes with being the custodians of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Church's formidable propaganda machine. The name Ecole Biblique and the authority of its director was sufficient to command the respectful attention of the media. Eisenman and Wise put it this way:

 

...control of the unpublished manuscripts meant control of the field. How did this work? By controlling the unpublished manuscripts - the pace of their publication, who was given a document to edit and who was not - the International Team could, for one thing, create instant scholarly 'superstars'. For another, it controlled the interpretations of the texts... Without competing analyses, these interpretations grew almost inevitably into a kind of 'official' scholarship.

(Eisenman and Wise, p. 5)

 

In effect, these interpretations soon acquired the force of revelations of favored scholars - or revelations of revealed texts! And now, with its doctrinal position at stake, the Church did not hesitate to use this monopolistic authority. The March 16, 1956 issue of The Times of London carried a letter signed by Father de Vaux and several other senior members of the International Team making the following charges against Allegro:

 

There are no unpublished texts at the disposal of Mr Allegro other than those of which the originals are at present... where we are working. Upon appearance in the press of citations from Mr Allegro's broadcasts we are unable to see in the texts the 'findings' of Mr Allegro.

We find no crucifixion of the 'teacher', no deposition from the cross, and no 'broken body of their Master' to be stood guard for until Judgement Day. Therefore there is no 'well-defined Essenic pattern into which Jesus of Nazareth fits' as Mr Allegro is alleged in one report to have said. It is our conviction that either he has misread the texts or he has built up a chain of conjectures which the materials do not support.

 

This is a remarkable exercise. Leaving aside the impropriety of accusing one of their own professional colleagues in a newspaper, de Vaux and his colleagues were guilty of deliberate misrepresentation: as Allegro himself pointed out in a reply, he had never used the word Essenic; the word he had used was 'messianic' which changes the whole meaning, and at the same time challenges the uniqueness of Jesus as Christ. This was what de Vaux and his colleagues were desperately trying to deflect by falsely introducing Essenic. It was a diversionary tactic that at the same lime sought to discredit Allegro. (It is also worth noting that Eisenman and Wise have found what they believe are references to crucifixion in documents that had been held back. This is discussed briefly in a later chapter. The release of the manuscripts has tended to vindicate Allegro's position.)

Doubt and confusion had been planted in reader's minds, and Allegro's credibility seriously impugned by the allegations. Most readers were not in a position to see the subtle game that was being played. Then the mighty Church propaganda machine took over. Articles began to appear in Catholic-controlled magazines and newspapers attacking not only Allegro, but also Edmund Wilson and Dupont-Sommer. One of the authors went so far as to claim that the Scrolls add next to nothing to our knowledge of the origins of Christianity or even Judaism! The amazing thing is that the author of this article was not a Biblical scholar, had no competence to study the Scrolls, let alone express opinions about their contents. These were the modern-day incarnations of 'princes of ignorance' that had presumed to judge Galileo.

But strangely, Allegro, though in hot water with his colleagues and superiors continued his work as a member of the International Team. The Ecole Biblique was nominally an international institution located in Jordan until the 1966 Six Day War, after which it came under Israeli jurisdiction; Father de Vaux probably had no authority to fire him. Also, King Hussein, in whose territory the Ecole Biblique was then situated, had appointed Allegro to the prestigious position of advisor to the Jordanian Government on archaeology and tourism. So the position of the officials of the Ecole Biblique was extremely delicate. De Vaux might also have thought it unwise to antagonise the British, for there were already complaints that the International Team was full of Catholics though the agreement under which the Ecole Biblique had been granted custody of the Scrolls had specified that all denominations had to be represented. All told, Allegro was too well known a scholar to be dismissed lightly - a fact that an acutely public relations conscious man like de Vaux surely recognized.

Allegro soon ran into more problems concerning a newly-discovered text known as the Copper Scroll. It is unnecessary to go into all the details; it suffices for our purposes that Allegro soon discovered that his readings of the Copper Scroll were to be held back from publication for the familiar reason: they cast serious doubts on the Church's version of the origins of Christianity. He also found that his colleagues, without informing him, had released a press statement about the Copper Scroll that was contrary to his own findings; none of them had studied it, but they put out a version that was in conformity with the Church's position. It was clearly aimed at pre-empting any damaging revelations that might come out of Allegro's study of the Copper Scroll. He was stunned by this brazen-faced duplicity.

This was soon followed by veiled threats transmitted through intermediaries to stop him from publishing his own findings. Allegro himself wrote in September 1959 to an unnamed colleague:[21]

 

As conveyed to me, the request [not to publish findings] was accompanied by the expression of some strange sentiments originating, it was said, from yourself and those for whom you were acting. There appeared even to be some forecast of consequences were I not to accede to this request.

 

The recipient of the letter wrote back telling Allegro not to think he was being persecuted! What strikes one as extraordinary in all this is that the only thing that seemed to be of any concern to the Ecole Biblique was the potential impact of the findings on Church doctrine; scholarship was not even secondary, only an evil to be suppressed. By no stretch of the imagination can an institution like the Ecole Biblique be called a scholarly one. Neither can its members be called scholars when they went to such lengths to hide and suppress knowledge.

           Allegro found all this politicking not at all to his taste. He began to distance himself from the Ecole Biblique to concentrate more on his writing. His book The Dead Sea Scrolls had been a huge success,

running into something like twenty printings. In 1970 he published his most famous book - Sacred Mushroom and the Cross - which was again a best-seller, but also gave his enemies an opportunity to destroy his credibility. They accepted it with glee.

The book itself is a tour de force demonstrating his remarkable mastery of two distinct fields - linguistics and Biblical scholarship. In this book Allegro argued that Jesus never existed historically, but was only a psychedelic image that appeared under the influence of a hallucinatory drug known as psilocybin that is found in some mushrooms that grow in the region of the Holy Land. According to his theory, Christianity grew out of a shared psychedelic experience of a group that created a fictional figure called Jesus.

The theory is not as bizarre as this brief description might suggest, though I do not find it easy to accept. The book is meticulously researched and his thesis closely argued, but unlike his books on the Dead Sea Scrolls, far from convincing. The basic problem that I have with his thesis is that it can neither be proved nor disproved on the strength of available evidence. As the philosopher of science Karl Popper observed, any theory must be falsifiable. But Allegro's theory of drug-induced hallucinations leading to the emergence of Christianity among men who lived two thousand years ago defies this test. This is not something that one trained in the sciences finds easy to accept.

As might be expected, the book raised a storm. The real concern was his conclusion about the Historical Jesus - that he may have never existed: this position of course can be defended. But his enemies concentrated on the other part of his theory. They were now handed a weapon whereby he could be attacked and discredited for the part of his thesis having to do with mushrooms containing psychedelic drugs. A reviewer scoffed that Allegro had traced 'the source of Christianity to an edible fungus'. He later went on to analyse Allegro's mental state, hinting that there must be something wrong in it to lead him to such a theory. Neither the reviewer nor anybody else for that matter dared to challenge him on his really substantive conclusion - that there was no evidence for the historicity of Jesus; their main goal in fact was to divert attention away from it. It was a remarkable example of character assassination used as a diversionary tactic.

What strikes one as extraordinary in all this is the route taken by his detractors: instead of looking at Allegro's evidence and logic, they attacked him personally. It is nothing unusual for a researcher to propose an unconventional theory; without such theories there can be no progress. As I can recall, some twenty years ago, the distinguished French mathematician Rene Thorn wrote a controversial book called Structural Stability and Morphogenesis. In this he advanced a new theory, which he called 'catastrophe theory', for mathematical modeling of non-physical phenomena including wars, political revolutions, economic chaos and others. It was a brilliant and daring piece of work that at the same time failed to find acceptance among his colleagues. And yet no one made personal attacks on Thorn or cast doubts on his sanity. Then there is always the possibility that an idea may be ahead of its time.[22]

Apparently, this rule does not hold true for 'scholars' belonging to the Church. Allegro was subjected to relentless attack and ridicule. But a year before his untimely death in 1988, Allegro had the last word. He said in 1987 that the scholars of the International Team had for years "been sitting on the material which is not only of outstanding importance, but also quite the most religiously sensitive. ...There is no doubt... that the evidence from the Scrolls undermines the uniqueness of the Christians as a sect." (Baigent and Leigh, p. 63) This charge has also been vindicated following the release of the Scrolls transcripts. Whatever the merits of his theory about psychedelic origins of Christianity, his insights into the message of the Scrolls have proven prophetic.

Setting aside all the squalid intrigues, here is what the Allegro episode boils down to: one of the foremost Biblical scholars of his time, and probably the leading authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls who had also studied the texts in the original, declared that the evidence of the Scrolls undermines the uniqueness of both Christianity and Jesus Christ. In a letter to Father de Vaux written on September 16. 1956, Allegro told him:

 

You go on to talk blithely about what the first Jewish-Christians thought in Jerusalem, and no one would guess that your only real evidence - if you can call it such - is the New Testament, that body of much worked-over traditions whose 'evidence' would not stand for two minutes in a court of law...

As for... Jesus as a 'son of God' and 'Messiah' - I don't dispute it for a moment; we now know from Qumran that their own Davidic Messiah was reckoned a 'son of God'...

(Baigent and Leigh. p. 56. emphasis added.)

 

So, what Allegro saw in the Dead Sea Scrolls was the following: the Qumranians had their own Davidic Messiah who was called son of God! And the text from which he was citing had not been made public until they were released by Eisenman in 1991. (It could be one of the fifty texts published by Eisenman and Wise in their Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered in which the notion of Messiah, as the Son of God, appears often. It appears also in the latest revision of Geza Vermes' Dead Sea Scrolls: Qumran in Perspective.) The fact that Allegro found it necessary to reject the historicity of Jesus is compelling evidence that he found nothing to support Jesus of the Gospels - that 'evidence' that 'would not stand for two minutes in a court of law' in his own words. This is a serious blow to the originality of Christianity and the uniqueness of Jesus. And every new piece of evidence coming out of the Scrolls since they became public is adding to the views of Allegro.

Here then is a final point to ponder: if Allegro were really talking nonsense, de Vaux and his colleagues could have presented their evidence and refuted him. The very fact that they continued to hide their texts, choosing character assassination over refutation shows that they did not have truth on their side. No matter what one may think of his thesis about psychedelic experiences, his conclusions relating to the Dead Sea Scrolls are being vindicated by new findings, while his detractors are daily appearing in less and less favorable light.

Is it any wonder then that de Vaux set out to hound and destroy John Allegro?

 

7. Summary

 

Does this hold any lessons for us today? The first point to note is that the Church has not changed. It has not become more tolerant as some Hindu intellectuals fondly believe; individual Christians may be tolerant and willing to live at peace with their non-Christian brothers and sisters. That, however, has never been the issue: Christians, as a rule, are no better or worse than any other group of human beings. The issue is not Christians as people but the ideology of Christianity and its officialdom, and the institution that carries the banner - the organized Church.

The Church, it must also be noted, has not repudiated its exclusivist dictum: "He that is not with me is against me" (Matthew 12.30). Nor has it changed its priorities as the episode of John Allegro emphatically demonstrates. It continued its monopoly hold over the Scrolls until it was dragged out kicking and screaming - with Eisenman finally publishing the texts that he had surreptitiously obtained. Allegro himself described the 'scholarly' situation that prevailed in his time in the following words:

 

What is perhaps even more disturbing than this 'partial boycott' of the Scrolls on the part of Christian scholars is the cloak of secrecy that has hung over the acquisition and disposal of these vital and often most controversial documents ...Scrolls have been secretly unearthed by the Bedouin, fleetingly glimpsed by specialists, and then allowed to 'disappear' from the face of the earth. ...Meanwhile attempts are made to dissuade visiting archaeologists from joining expeditions to search systematically for more Scroll caves, and the curator of the museum [of the Ecole Biblique] comes to Britain to tell television audiences that such searches are best left to the illicit excavations of the Bedouin who, presumably, can be relied upon to channel their discoveries through the museum for rich rewards.

(Allegro 1990, p.14)

 

In the circumstances, as long as the Church feels that its fragile foundation stone - its Doctrine of the Faith - needs protection from scrutiny to save itself from sinking, there is no assurance that something like the Inquisition will not be revived if circumstances allow, for, under whatever name, the Inquisition still lives. More importantly, the state of mind that led to the Inquisition has not changed. The basic point is: there is no way of sustaining this superstition called the Doctrine of the Faith except through coercion and deception. If one sees deception being used more than force, it is only because that is all that is possible today. The basic fact is: the Church and its central doctrine cannot face the truth or rational enquiry. As long as this remains the case, one cannot blithely assume that old practices will not be revived if circumstances are found favorable.

        This concern has been expressed by others. After reviewing the record of the persecution of innocent people for witchcraft, in which James I of England had taken a special interest, the Victorian author Charles Mackay wrote:[23]

 

Instances of this lingering belief [in witchcraft] may be cited both in France and in Great Britain, and indeed in every other country in Europe. So deeply rooted are some errors, that ages cannot remove them. The poisonous tree that once overshadowed the land may be cut down by the sturdy efforts of sages and philosophers; the sun may shine clearly upon spots where venomous things once nestled in security and shade; but still the entangled roots are stretched beneath the surface, and may be found by those who dig.

 

Another king like James I might make them vegetate again; and more mischievous still, another Pope like Innocent VIII might raise the decaying roots to strength and verdure.

 

This 'lingering belier, as Mackay calls it, in the Doctrine of the Faith is very much alive in the minds and souls of churchmen like Cardinal Ratzinger and Pope John Paul II. As long as its votaries are bent on spreading their anti-rational Doctrine of the Faith for their own benefit in the guise of serving Jesus, its potential victims cannot afford complacency.

This may be compared to the Islamic institution of Jihad - or holy war - which has been revived even in our own time whenever circumstances have been found favorable, and the clergy feel they can get away with it. As long as Christianity and Islam remain exclusivist ideologies, both the Inquisition and the Jihad - in whatever form - must be seen as natural corollaries of their exclusivist doctrines and their urge for expansion and control of others. History tells us that their harvest is tyranny at home and expansion abroad. The same view was expressed by the French thinker Voltaire a century before Mackay. In a letter to Frederick the Great of Prussia written on January 20, 1742, Voltaire wrote:

 

Can we not go back to those ancient villains, illustrious founders of superstition and fanaticism, who were the first to bring the knife onto the altar so as to turn into victims those who refused to be their disciples?

Those who say that the time of these crimes is past, that we shall no longer see a Bar Kokba[24], a Mohamet, a Jean de Leyde [Jan Beukelz], etc., that the flames of wars of religion are extinguished, are doing, it seems to me, too much honour to human nature. The same poison still subsists, although less developed: this plague, seemingly dormant, now and then throws up germs capable of infecting the earth...

 

Prophetic words indeed, though Voltaire little realized the ferocity with which sectarian violence was to be let loose in our century. The march of civilization is no guarantee against such revival, for both Christianity and Islam have destroyed civilizations before in the name of God. They can do so again. We are already getting a foretaste of it in north-east India, where under missionary influence, some tribes have been made to give up such ancient and 'primitive' practices as protecting their forests as sacred ground and exploit them instead.

The result: the region around Cheerapunji - once the most luxuriant rainforest in the world - resembles a treeless desert.[25] This is 'progress' in the name of Jesus. After all, hasn't the Bible told the missionary to tell the unenlightened heathens who revere nature that:

 

...the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast on the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered.

          Every moving thing that moveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.

                                                          Genesis 9.2 - 3.

 

This has been the guiding principle of the Church wherever it has taken its banner. Wherever they have gone, the agents of the Church have left a trail of devastation - of ruined civilizations and a ravaged ecology. This owes to the fact that Christianity admits, and even encourages unlimited exploitation of the physical world; it is a religion not of synthesis and harmony with the world, but of exclusivist dominance. It grants its chosen people - those that profess faith in its doctrine - exclusive and unlimited license for the exploitation of the physical world - its people, its plants and animals, its natural resources.

Armed with this predatory doctrine, Christian missionaries have uprooted the ancient practices of societies that had allowed them to live in harmony with nature, putting in their place a self-serving elite controlling an exploitative state that has led to the devastation of natural ecology. This has been the story from the tropical rainforests of South and Central America, to the equatorial forests of Africa, to the monsoon jungles of north-east India. The results of this fundamentally anti-ecological doctrine - one that combines the Doctrine of the Faith with the Doctrine of Greed - have been presented as the fruits of progress. The impact of Christian expansion on the ecology of the globe is a subject that calls for a serious study.

This composite doctrine gives us also a clue to the future - telling us how the Church may react to its present crisis. We shall next see where this may lead.