History Lesson 
Masquerader of The Lost Ark
Is a renegade Texas archaeologist the real Indiana Jones?
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Biblical scholars like Bruce Metzger, the author of The Canon of the New Testament, are aghast at Jones’s interpretation of biblical history. “Any biblical scholar, even any Jewish scholar, would say that’s a bunch of hogwash,” Metzger says. But Jones was called to arms by his discoveries. “I felt a destiny in my life, a purpose,” he says, “although I didn’t know what it was.” In the mid-fifties he resigned his Tennessee pastorate and spent eight years focusing on Judaism and the Talmudic Torah. “A lot of the peers I had gone to school with, and pastors in the area, thought I had gone off my rocker, hobnobbing with the Jews and studying with a rabbi.”
Jones’s next move confirmed their suspicions. Eager to test his dogma on a congregation, he became the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Lynn, North Carolina, whose members were too busy feuding among themselves to realize they were being taught not the New Testament but the Torah. Jones’s tenure, from 1959 to 1964, almost cost him his life, he says. Incensed that he was allowing blacks to attend his services, Ku Klux Klansmen shot up his house and put nitroglycerine in his heating oil. Today Jones details his valiant fight for half an hour—fending off Klansmen! shotgunning car windows!—but in April 1967, he quietly packed up his first wife and five kids and moved to Israel.
He was intrigued by the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls—how they were discovered in 1947 when an illiterate bedouin goatherd threw a stone into a cave near the Dead Sea and heard it crash against a clay pot. As the story goes, after hanging the parchment and papyrus scrolls on tent poles for several weeks, the bedouin sold what they believed were rolls of old leather, perfect for sandal straps, to a Jerusalem cobbler. The scrolls finally found their way to Israeli historians, Jones says, on a prophetic day: November 29, 1947, the very date the United Nations partitioned Palestine, a move that led to the creation of the state of Israel. Spurred on by that find, Israeli archaeologists poked around the caves and uncovered a scroll hammered onto a nine-foot sheet of copper—the now-famous “copper scroll.” It described a “river of the dome”—a cave marked by a dome-shaped stone formation above a river—and approximately sixty places where the treasures of the ancient temple were hidden in caves along the Dead Sea. “The rock that cracked the crock in 1947 is still ricocheting throughout academic caverns, breaking up a lot of crackpot hypotheses of our day,” Jones wrote in his newsletter. “An illiterate young shepherd boy … is the paramount example that God has chosen the foolish things of the age to confound the wise.”
Some scholars pronounced the copper scroll a hoax, asserting that the bedouin tribe around Qumran had stolen all the treasures between 1947 and 1953. Jordan’s King Hussein had the caves declared off-limits to Israeli excavation. Yet Vendyl Jones was convinced. In a honeycomb of four hundred caves about twelve miles east of Jerusalem, he believed, were treasures that would nullify the religions that replaced Judaism—and would vindicate his own embattled philosophies. “If I could find these things,” he says, “the supremacy of Judaism would be proven.”
Wendyl Jones drives a pickup truck as long as a limousine, a $32,000 Ford XLT Lariat customized with a sixteen-ton winch, fog lights, a camper with seating for a dozen diggers, and big blue “B’nai Noach” signs on the sides. “I had to wait six months to get this,” he drawls. “I bought it to take to Israel to ferry diggers from the kibbutz to the cave. But the customs, duty, and taxes came to thirty thousand.”
So the truck is landlocked in Arlington, where it is used to ferry Jones between his many speeches to religious groups, civic organizations, and would-be expedition volunteers. Today, headed toward downtown Dallas, he tells the story of his Israeli adventures. They began just after the Six Day War in 1967, in which Jones says he was the only non-Jewish American to fight for Israel. He was enrolled in the department of Judaica at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, but his real schooling occurred in the desert, where he wandered constantly, searching for the river of the dome described in the copper scroll.
One evening in April 1968, Jones recognized a gangly, gray-haired neighbor walking near the Jerusalem YMCA and gave him a lift. “Before we got to his house,” Jones says, “he asked me my name and I said, ‘Jones. Vendyl Jones.’” The man asked if he was Jones the Baptist, a reference to the “Texas Reverend Vendyl Jones” lauded in the Israeli press for his help during the Six Day War. “And he leaned over, kissed me on the cheek, and said, ‘God bless you! I would like you to come to my house for coffee!’” Jones recalls. “He said I’d have to forgive the condition of his home because his wife was deceased. So I said, ‘Why don’t you come to our house for supper?’ Then I realized I didn’t even know the man’s name.” As it happened, the man was Pesach Bar-Adon, a leading Israeli archaeologist and author. “I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek,” Jones says. “I told him, ‘Bring your maps! I want to discuss the desert!’”
That night, over a Southern-fried chicken supper, Jones told Bar-Adon of his quest: to find the Nahal HaKippa, the river of the dome. Bar-Adon smiled. Everyone wanted to find the river of the dome, Bar-Adon said, but he himself had searched for years and had found nothing.
That didn’t stop Jones, however. A few months later, on September 18, 1968, he stood jubilant in the desert, shouting, “Wahad bibi!” (Arabic for “My only sweetheart”). After commissioning aerial photographs, Jones was certain he had found the site described in the copper scroll—a small wadi, or dry riverbed, with a dome adjacent to a double cave divided by a column near an area called Qumran. On an ancient map, he discovered its ancient name: Secacah. Wild with excitement, he tried to reach Bar-Adon. When he couldn’t, he contacted two Israeli university professors, took them to the cave, and blurted out what he thought he had found.
Jones stares at the highway, still smarting from the memories. “I wanted them to excavate it, and I just wanted to be on the team!” he remembers. “But they said, ‘There’s problems, problems. We can’t excavate here.’ Then the next weekend they went down with a bunch of university students and didn’t even invite me to go! You know, I showed ’em the cave. I showed ’em the column. They’re sold. And then they get a bunch of students and didn’t even say, ‘Shalom.’”
The professors dug down to bedrock and found nothing. But Jones persisted. When he returned to the cave, he didn’t tell anybody, not even Pesach Bar-Adon. “Everything fit so perfectly according the scroll,” he says. “And there’s bedrock. What are you gonna do? Argue with the stone? So I sat in the cave looking at the bedrock, studying it. It was just horizontal bedrock. But as I looked up, the ceiling of the cave was vertical strike and very jagged. Now, if you’ve got vertical strike walls and a vertical strike ceiling, you should have a vertical strike oor. In other words, the bedrock should be uneven, right? But this was just as smooth as pavement. I said to myself, ‘Wait a minute! That might not be bedrock.’”
Jones and two Arab boys dug deep and discovered that his assumption was right—the “bedrock” was actually concrete. “I had been taught that concrete didn’t come along until the tenth or eleventh century,” he says. “But here you had concrete. So I went through the concrete oor and about three and a half feet below I hit a solid plaster oor. And in just a little shaft we picked up several pieces of Qumran pottery and twigs, branches of trees that had to have been there over two thousand years.”
But then Jones suddenly had to leave Israel. His son needed a kidney transplant, and he would be the donor. When he returned to Israel in 1977, he had three things going for him. A California couple who had heard him deliver a speech in Van Nuys anted up $5,000 to join him on his first full-scale excavation. Pesach Bar-Adon had scurried down into Jones’s cave after hearing about the concrete oor and happily emerged from the darkness with a deal: If Jones would supply the money and the manpower, Bar-Adon would furnish the expertise and permits. And Randy Filmore, an out-of-work freelance writer from Baltimore was ready to make Vendyl Jones famous.
Or at least that’s the way Jones tells it. The writer cannot be found to vouch for himself—although Jones has a picture of the tall, thin, bearded Filmore huddling with his 1977 dig crew, and members of the crew have confirmed Filmore’s existence. “He was a freelance writer who wrote TV scripts, trying to create a five-part series on the Israeli military, but the military wouldn’t cooperate,” Jones recalls. “He was living in a kibbutz. But kibbutz life was so dead that he found nothing to write about there. He didn’t have anything to do, so he volunteered for our dig. He wanted to do an article about the search for the temple treasures.”
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