One of the most amazing document finds in history was discovered in 1955. The Reverend Dr. Joe H. Uhrig, one of its founding members, only knew he was traveling to the "Holy Land" to study the Bible. He began his work in the intriguing new sector of "televangelism" after returning to America. His television program, Hand to Heaven, was shot at Alexandria, Virginia's "small rural church." It was created by him as a studio set. Outside, a mock graveyard was present.
Instead of names, the tombstones have passages from the "Ten Commandments." As much as the 1956 film The Ten Commandments, was the ideal depiction of Christianity at the time. The prophet of God, Moses, gets "the Law" from the tough, attractive actor portraying him. People adored this version of the Bible, despite how Hollywoodized it was. A show.
But at least to the media-savvy showman, the notion of a "new" supernatural revelation was in the air. Early in 1960, the Rev. Uhrig's television church was “padlocked by angry creditors,” the newspaper notes, as word spread that he “had gone to Beirut, reportedly to search for Dead Sea scrolls.”
The little Syrian guy in Bethlehem had evolved into a distributor of the manuscripts discovered in desert caves. The long-forgotten library of the prehistoric "Essenes" was resurfacing. Uhrig also discovered that Kando was hiding a scroll from him through a friend of a friend he met on his 1955 journey.
This scroll was not like the majority of the others—brown and brittle, withered by time. When unrolled, it was about twenty-seven feet in length. The parchment was thinner and described as being ivory white in tone. Later, researchers would look at the special salt coating's preservation properties. But it must have appeared miraculous to Uhrig in 1960 when he first viewed the scroll.
The Rev. Uhrig approached Yigael Yadin, the archaeologist and Israeli military commander who had overseen the nation's involvement in the scrolls, on Kando's behalf and showed him a portion of the scroll under conditions of extreme secrecy.
Urig narrates later:
"I pulled it off. And I said, ‘I want to take this with me. This is the only way to prove to Yadin that this is genuine. He’s got to know what it is."
Uhrig met with Yadin in secret and gave him a price of $750,000. Yadin's "eyes burst" as Uhrig brought out the shard, so why would the archaeologist then hand it back? With little to no apparent interest, Yadin stated, "This is a deed to some land." It would cost him $130,000. And that's all.
The game-playing is only revealed when subsequently comparing accounts. Yadin read the piece, which is a completely original religious book that discussed the function of the High Priest of a Jewish temple. He had devised a scheme to obtain it for less money. The Scroll was considered a Biblical document that described the story of Christianity, but without Moses.
Even the New York Time had recently published an article where they try to give a vivid description of a Bible that contains no Moses, nor the story of Exodus.
The Temple Scroll was added to a collection of unexpected cave discoveries that they would later refer to as the "Rewritten Bible." A 2002 paper by Bernard M. Levinson and Molly M. Zahn suggests it was an effort to revise the Bible into a superior work.
“By removing the repetitions and logical inconsistencies that stem from the highly redacted nature of the canonical Pentateuch, by increasing the text’s coherence and consistency, the redactor presents a more perfect Torah — one more worthy of God.”
There isn't much actual knowledge concerning the Temple Scroll. Why was it given a different finish than the other scrolls and for what reason? Where did it originate? It was supposedly discovered in "Cave 11" in 1956, but Kando's son argued it was actually from the first cave, which had been discovered a decade earlier.
Kando himself never spoke of the history he’d lived. Frank Moore Cross notes:
“There were attempts to record his memoirs, but he always refused. Now he is dead, and we shall never know his story. If he had recounted his part in the history of the scrolls, I doubt if any of us would have been able to distinguish between what was true and what was false.”
The tale of the Syrian smuggler in Bethlehem who spent years hiding the unidentified words of God under his bedroom floor in a shoebox is left for one to consider. He said that Kando preserved the huge jar in which the scroll was discovered. It remains on display in the family’s souvenir store in Bethlehem. Any tourist can pose beside a clay container that, for millennia, held the only copy of a different Bible. As always, everyone is their own judge, but it is imperative to remember that not everyone during those Biblical times agreed with Chrsitanity. -New Brake
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