History Lesson 
Masquerader of The Lost Ark
Is a renegade Texas archaeologist the real Indiana Jones?
(Page 4 of 4)
“So what?” asks Jones. “How much time have they spent excavating in the caves of Qumran?” He is sick and tired of the academics who have never personally dug in the desert and the reporters who always sandwich stories of his search between quotes from skeptical scholars. “If they want to write an article about what we’re doing, fine,” he says. “But if they want to ask Dr. Smellfungus and Dr. Picklesheimer, and all these bastards out here who don’t know anything about anything, much less about what I’m doing in the desert, then that’s something else. They don’t know anything about Qumran! They don’t read Hebrew! If they wanna get the story from some reformed rabbi who went to Hebrew Union College and studied more Christian theology than Judaism, you know, let ’em go and get the story from them! Don’t take my story and pitch it out to people who don’t know what they’re talking about.”
He tosses the TV Guide onto his desk. “Eh,” he says. “I don’t care. I’m totally immune. You know what you have to do to get a dog to bark at you? Go somewhere, do something. Just get out and start walking down a street, especially at night.” He begins barking like a dog—“Woof, woof!”—howling louder and louder, then imitating various breeds and sizes. “One doesn’t even see what the other one is barking at. And the first thing you know, the whole neighborhood is barking because one little feist, who ain’t gonna do nothing, began to bark.”
Jones rises amid walls covered in books, maps, and photographs from the Holy Land. There’s a picture of him with the former chief rabbi of Israel. There’s Jones’s calendar, packed with speaking engagements for the fall. And always over his shoulder is a copy of a fifteenth-century woodcut depicting the long-horned red heifer, which is the same screaming burnt-orange color as the Indiana Jones nameplate on his desk. Jones translates the ancient Hebrew writing on the woodcut. “There is a Gentile who is not an idol worshiper, a Gentile who believes in one God, and he will find the ashes . . . And they will sweep every corner until they have found her.”
So where are the ashes of the red heifer? In the caves of Qumran, says Vendyl Jones. It was there that he made his pivotal find: the two thousand-year-old juglet of anointing oil. How he found it is yet another adventure. It began when his mentor, Pesach Bar-Adon, died of a stroke in 1984. Israeli archaeologists combed Bar-Adon’s office like a lost tomb, unearthing a collection of ancient pottery. Where had it come from? The Qumran caves being excavated by the Texan, Vendyl Jones, the archaeologists were told. Suddenly, interest in Qumran—an area everyone believed had been pillaged by the bedouins—was awakened. Rival treasure hunters joined the fray. First, Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin commissioned a study of the caves there, appointing Hebrew University—affiliated archaeologist Joseph Patrich to survey them. Then, Jones says, the director of Israel’s Institute of Archaeology, Avi Itan, instructed the archaeological officer over the Judean and Samarian deserts not to reissue a permit for Jones’s 1986 dig in Qumran.
“They were yo-yoing me between one office and another,” Jones says. “So I took Professor Ernest Easterly from LSU, one of the American archaeologists on our team, who has a Ph.D. in geography and a doctorate in international law as applied to archaeology. We went to Avi Itan’s office, and I told him, ‘Avi, come Sunday morning, I’m gonna have forty-three people on that hill, and we’re gonna start an excavation. You can either issue us a permit number or bring a court order to stop us. I would like to introduce you to our attorney, who has prepared a writ of mandamus to the Supreme Court of Israel.’”
Two weeks after his visit to Itan’s office, the permit was issued—with the stipulation that Jones turn over all of his maps and data. In the second month of the dig, Patrich arrived, spouting compliments. “He said no one in Israel had the know-how of cave excavations I had demonstrated in the Cave of the Column,” Jones recalls. “He said, ‘If anyone will find the treasures of the copper scroll, it will be Vendyl Jones.’”
Two days later, Jones says, Patrich returned with a proposal. “He said, ‘You have so many people, it would be wonderful if we could work together. If I could have ten or twelve of your volunteers, we could begin excavations in the four nearby caves where the temple scroll was found.’ So I agreed to make a consortium effort between the Institute of Judaic-Christian Research—my team—and Joseph Patrich and his two assistants and Hebrew University.”
So in 1986 and 1988, the two teams excavated simultaneously with two very different goals. Jones and his crew searched for the temple treasures in the Cave of the Column, while Patrich and his assistants and about a dozen of Jones’s volunteers searched for more conventional relics in four caves nearby. One day on the 1988 dig, while Patrich was away at the university, Jones’s volunteers hit a stretch of pale sand, then palm leaves, in Cave Twenty-Four, one of the caves Patrich had designated for excavation. Excited, they called for help. That’s when Patrich’s assistant pulled a small, basket-encrusted juglet from the ground. “When they took it out, they just thought it was probably full of dirt,” Jones says. “But when they got it in the sun, this ointment began to ooze out of it. I didn’t know it was the anointing oil. Nobody knew. Patrich came to me and wanted five thousand dollars to do an analysis on this stuff.”
Jones paid the money and left for Texas. When he returned to Israel in February 1989, on the eve of his seventh dig, he turned on the TV and saw Joseph Patrich, beaming over one of the greatest archaeological finds in modern Israel: the anointing oil, perhaps one of the bottles of oil mentioned in the copper scroll.
“I thought, What the hell is this?” Jones shouts. “It’s very strange that I paid for the report and I hadn’t heard about it! Very strange that I paid his salary, and the salary of his two assistants, spending more than $30,000 for two and a half years, while they worked on what was supposed to have been a consortium effort! But on TV, he is the one who found the oil. He even denied credit to his assistant. Patrich wasn’t even on the dig for ten days before we found the oil. I called him up and said, ‘Joseph, this is Vendyl!’ And he said, ‘Oh, I am glad you are here. I have good news for you!’ And I said, ‘I saw you on TV tonight, and I didn’t hear any mention of who financed the dig—only Joseph Patrich. My opinion is that when God created the world, he created one more horse’s ass than there are horses, and I’m talking to him now.’”
News of the find traveled around the world—at first with no mention of Vendyl Jones. However, the New York Times mentioned Jones and his volunteers on an inside page of the paper, after leading with Patrich on the front page, and the Jerusalem Post headlined a story Texan Unsung Hero of Qumran. But when Patrich wrote an eleven-page account of the dig in the Biblical Archaeology Review—with no mention of Vendyl Jones—the Texan’s volunteers revolted, writing letters to the editor such as this one from an Athens, Tennessee, minister named J. David Davis: “Please give credit where credit is due. Let those who sweated, cried, and bled on these digs know that the record can be corrected.”
During his next Israeli dig, Vendyl Jones settled the score on his own. He fired Joseph Patrich. “He had the chutzpah to tell me that I used him to become famous,” Jones says, wincing.
Until recently, Patrich was on sabbatical at the Harvard-affiliated Dunbarton Oaks, a research center in Washington, D.C. While he commends Jones for his excellent organizational abilities and the money and manpower the Texan has brought to Israel, he says that Jones’s search for the ashes is a pipe dream and that his efforts would be better used to excavate other caves for more realistic relics. “He’s not interested in archaeology too much, only in his fundamentalistic ideas,” says Patrich with a laugh. “What does the anointing oil have to do with the temple artifacts? He’s just wasting money and wasting time and wasting the goodwill of the people because of the place he insists on excavating.”
So Patrich was not honored to work beside the real Indiana Jones? The laugh grows into a roar. “What does it have to do with this particular person, other than that he is a Jones?” he asks. “There are maybe a hundred thousand million other Joneses in America. Indiana Jones! What does it have to do with this person?”
Then Patrich stops laughing. “So what do you know about the excavation?” he asks, pumping for information about Jones’s upcoming dig. “When is he going again? When is the next season scheduled?”
In March 29, Jones and 35 volunteers took off for Israel in search of the ashes of the red heifer. By mid-April, they had unearthed nine hundred pounds of a red substance believed to be Second Temple incense. A month later, however, the Israeli Departmentof Antiquities canceled Jones’s permit and ordered him to shut the dig down.
But Jones would not be deterred: He refused to leave the site without a court order, challenged the Israeli bureaucracy in the press, and threatened to petition the courts for access to the caves. Now back in Arlington, he’s plotting another excavation, a seven-month dig that he’s confident will uncover the ashes. Even then, Jones’s quest will continue—until he’s found all the lost treasures. “There’s four hundred caves down there, and only forty have been excavated or plundered,” he says. In other words, Vendyl Jones is eager to begin another sequel.
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