The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception
(1991, ISBN 0-671-73454-7) is a book of non-fiction by authors Michael Baigent
and Richard Leigh
. Rejecting the established, peer-reviewed consensus that the Dead Sea scrolls
were the work of a marginal Jewish apocalyptic movement, and following primarily the thesis of Robert Eisenman
, the authors argued that the Scrolls were the work of Jewish zealots who had much in common with, and may have been identical to, the early followers of Jesus
led by his brother James the Just
. This provides a different version of the history of early Christianity
and challenges the divinity of Jesus, shakes the fundamental aspects of modern day Christianity.
Leigh and Baigent describe how the scrolls were kept under wraps for decades by a team dominated by Catholic scholars under the leadership of a Dominican friar, Roland de Vaux
. They contend that the preconceptions of de Vaux and other members of the team led them to ignore evidence of the probable 1st-century provenance of many of the scrolls, and instead, to consign these scrolls safely to the distant past.
The book was severely criticised by Hershel Shanks
of Biblical Archaeology Review
. Joseph Fitzmyer
has described it as consisting largely of a "pattern of errors and misinformed statements".