The term used by Robert Eisenman and Robert North to describe and interpret the contents and provenance of the Dead Sea Scrolls as the work of a small group of celibate, extremist, Jewish sectarians, sometimes called the Essenes but without any concrete evidence for that assignment, who lived at Qumran and copied the large library of scrolls that were found in the caves nearby. It is perhaps better to refer to this as the early working hypothesis which some, like Norman Golb, have dubbed the Qumran-Essene hypothesis or the less specific Qumran-Sectarian hypothesis. As Eisenman, Golb and others have long recognized, the overwhelming weight of all the available evidence makes this hypothesis almost totally untenable. It became an ideological agenda for those who controlled the scrolls and has effectively stiffled open and scholarly debate of the contents, meaning, origins and significance of the scrolls for almost 50 years.
At the time of the discovery of the scrolls the available scientific community able to handle the tasks of excavating the caves and the Qumran environs, conserve, translate and publish the scrolls, and interpret their larger significance was limited and, in fact, included no world recognized authorities in any requisite field; not scroll scholarship, not archaeology, not stratigraphy, not Jewish history, not ancient middle eastern languages, not even classical Roman history. Nevertheless, the local group headed by Pere de Vaux determined to keep it a local and to the extent possible a limited and united effort. That group had almost fifty years to generate their consensus while denying any else access to their cache of material.
A well organized and modern attack on the same problem, if it were to be undertaken today, would include many authorities from many disciplines from the very beginning. Instead what the world got was an amateurish and ultimately incompetent effort whose 50 year reign of non-communication is only now coming to an end with the wider dissemination of photographs of the the scrolls that for so long have remained hidden.
In spite of that, it is difficult to undo or properly redo the excavations that were undertaken so long ago or even to force the wider community of scholars to rethink the widely promulgated assumptions disguised as scientific discoveries by a lazy band of third rate scholars with an agenda that they do not acknowledge to this day.

This definition is in context to Dead Sea Scrolls. See more contextual defintions for "Consensus".