Most scholars, meanwhile, have insisted that the scrolls are the work of a tiny sect that wrote them in a monastery at Qumran.

“In 40 years, about the only one Golb has been able to convince is himself,” said Eugene Ulrich a University of Notre Dame professor and eminent scrolls scholar.

But a new archeological dig has produced evidence that puts a spotlight on Golb’s long discredited theories and suggests new ideas about the missing link between Judaism and its offshoot, Christianity.

“A lot of people said he was wrong,” said Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, “But Norman had one small piece of the puzzle all along.”

In its September issue, Shanks’ magazine reported on an archeological dig in Israel that backstops Golb’s ideas about the scrolls–religious texts written in Hebrew and Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Near East in biblical times.

The dig raises questions about whether the crumbling ruins at Qumran are the remains of a monastery, a fortress or a pottery factory.

If the remains are a monastery, as many scholars have long argued, it’s likely that the scrolls were written there. If not, they could have been brought to the site, which bolsters Golb’s argument.

At first blush, the debate between Golb and his critics might seem the hairsplitting for which the Ivory Tower is famed. But Golb said the information from the dig could help shape a broader story about the history of Judaism and Christianity.

“I’ve argued that the scrolls tell us about the intellectual struggles, the spiritual longings, the intense cultural ferment of the world in which Christianity was born and rabbinical Judaism was taking shape,” said Golb, 78.

He thinks that Judaism and Christianity then were running along parallel tracks: Both faiths were often confused and struggling to refit older religious conceptions to more contemporary concerns.

Those ideas can be discomforting to believers. Everyone wants to see his or her religion as unique, even Dead Sea Scrolls scholars.

The first great scholar of the scrolls was Rev. Roland de Vaux, a Dominican priest. He headed the group that studied the scrolls after they were discovered in 1947 in caves where they had been hidden for two millenniums. De Vaux’s team also excavated nearby ancient ruins at Qumran, near the shores of the Dead Sea.

It was already known that among the ancient Jews was a group that withdrew from the hustle-and-bustle of society to form monastic-like groups in the solitude of the desert.

Putting two and two together, De Vaux identified the Dead Sea Scrolls with the group, known as the Essenes, and he announced the ruins to have been the site of their composition. His team labeled one section a “scriptorium,” as a scribes’ room in a medieval monastery was known.

Golb, who received his PhD at Johns Hopkins University in Judaic and Semitic studies, recalled being troubled by De Vaux’s theory since his student days.

When De Vaux came to Chicago for a lecture in 1968, Golb expressed reservations about De Vaux’s theory, a bold move for a junior scholar talking to a gray eminence.

Now, comes independent verification of Golb’s hunch. As noted in Biblical Archaeology Review, Yitzhak Magen and Yuval Peleg concluded that the site wasn’t a monastery and had nothing to do with the Essenes. It began as a fortress–just as Golb said–when the Jews had an independent kingdom. When the Romans afterward took over Palestine, it housed a pottery factory.

“Whosoever severs the link between the site, its Essene community and the scrolls found in the caves, of necessity also undermines all previous ideas about the nature and provenance of the scrolls,” Magen and Peleg wrote.

Those words constitute a great vindication, if not total victory, for Golb, noted Robert Eisenman, a professor at California State University at Long Beach. “Magen and Peleg have done professor Golb a great service,” said Eisenman.

Eisenman added that he is noncommittal on the larger implications of Golb’s views.

Clay pots held the scrolls

The finding that Qumran went from fortress to pottery factory fits in nicely with Golb’s scenario. The scrolls were found in large clay pots, which could have been purchased at the factory by whoever left them in the nearby caves, he notes.

Golb observes that the scrolls were hidden about the time that the Romans were suppressing a revolt of their Jewish subjects. According to Golb, the scrolls constituted a religious library carried off from Jerusalem during the fighting for safe keeping.

Even orthodox scrolls scholars have been puzzled by the great variety of the scrolls’ texts, some of which express contradictory religious views. That is hard to explain on the theory that they were produced by one sect–which, presumably, would honor its own ideas but not others’.

Golb says that the handwriting of about 500 different scribes can be recognized in the scrolls.

“In fact, at Qumran there is room for at most 20 to 30 people,” Magen and Peleg report.

Even Ulrich, the Notre Dame scholar and critic of Golb’s, has had to modify the classical theory in light of his criticism. He accepts that Qumran could only house a handful of residents but posits that manuscripts were carried there by generations of recruits to the Essene cause, each bringing sacred texts of previous religious affiliations.

As Golb sees it, even that much movement in the other side’s position is a recognition of a point he has been trying to make for decades.