[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by OMG!WTF!

Does any of the forged material attempt to add content to the "story"? Like in art, there are copies of known work, and there are the more complex and daring pieces that attempt to create something new, something the artist would have painted "next". And so they add to the story of that artist and his or her life and work. When discovered as a forgery, in some cases, they greatly diminish the entire body of that artist's work. Is that what's going on here?

Not really. In a short essay that I wrote for the LA Times Marginalia Review of Books I made the following point:

Originally Posted by Kipp Davis

"This strong predilection in the private collections for “biblical” texts is no accident: Schøyen, MOTB and other institutions like APU and SWBTS have been ravaging antiquities markets, and they all enter with their own agendas and expectations intact. Their extravagant spending habits are guided by a strong, overarching theological interest in the text and formation of the Bible to produce eclectic collections of artefacts that project quite a specific narrative about its truth and reliability. For example, SWBTS acquired fragments in 2009–2010, which they featured in a public exhibition in 2012. Their collection includes an especially unusual fragment containing four lines of text that preserves parts of Lev 20:24 and 18:28-30 subsequently, in that order. The second passage stems from a notorious proscription against homosexuality, widely regarded as a significant theological touchstone by many Evangelical Christians. Bruce McCoy, the director of the Seminary’s exhibition said in a 2013 interview that this fragment commanded an especially high purchase price precisely because “the particular passage is a timeless truth from God’s word to the global culture today.” This is a special case, but it illustrates an important reality in today’s market for “biblical antiquities”: private collectors are willing and able to pay exorbitant costs to own even small scraps of the history of the Bible. But furthermore, some also seem to believe that their philanthropic endeavours satisfy a confessional directive to ensure and promote the integrity of the Bible. This rings true in Martin Schøyen’s tribute to his own collection of 32 DSS fragments:

"Schøyen sought “sacred objects” unto the singular glory of God. The patrons of SWBTS, we are led to believe, were more inclined to employ their purchases to practical use. “Armour”—the son of SWBTS President Paige and Dorothy Patterson—has produced a first-hand account of the surprising acquistion by the Texas seminary of Judaean Desert manuscript fragments: “the building of an antiquities collection is congruous with the greater mission of theological education, and particularly so with the building of a department of biblical archaeology, which had long been one of Paige's foremost objectives.” Armour elucidates the importance of this mandate in typically tortured run-on prose:

"Glorifying God and to educating apologetic Evangelicals helps some to justify the prohibitive cost of amassing private collections of biblical antiquities. But Armour’s elaboration is even more consequential than all that. To his credit, he sees the incredulity of critics toward building such programmatic collections of small scraps of ancient literature. He calls it an understandable “knee-jerk reaction” to simply assume that such is borne of an obsession by Christian fundamentalists with the historicity of the Bible. There is rather a good deal more at stake for those who hold fast to their belief in the Bible’s truthfulness:

"An inherent urgency resounds in Armour’s appeal that dwarfs the monetary value of the small parchments themselves. But do these particular scroll fragments really satisfy his lofty claims? In addition to the scrap of controversial rhetoric from Leviticus, the remaining fragments in the SWBTS exhibit comprise bits of legislation against bribery and exploitation (Exod 23:8–10), prostitution and ceremonial impurity (Lev 21:7–12), rules for sacrifices (22:21–27), a petition by Moses to sooth God’s wrath (Deut 9:25–10:1), a prescription for temple sacrifices (Deut 12:11–14), a poem of anxious hope in the face of death (Ps 22:4–13), and portions of a vision ascribed to the prophet Daniel about the end of the world, which features descriptions of terrifying mystical creatures (Dan 7:18–19). The truth of the matter is that the Bible fragments at SWBTS—much like those belonging to Schøyen, MOTB, and APU—are too small to be of much scholarly, historical significance: they are curios. Despite his claims to the contrary, it seems more probable that a fundamentalistic obsession with the Bible is indeed what lays behind an underwhelming collection of enscribed leather and papyrus bits."

Originally Posted by OMG!WTF!

I guess we don't know what a good portion of the real scrolls say. A forgery would have to include portions of text that have not yet been published, otherwise it would be an obvious copy and of no real significance. Are these forgeries attempting to add content to the history of religious text? Have they changed the way we interpret the Bible? Cause that'd be pretty ballzy.

We actually have a very good idea about what the real Dead Sea Scrolls have to say, and there are dozens of good translations and introductions on the market. As to your second point, the correspondences to modern editions is actually a feature that I have detected of a few of the fragments in my exposé.

For example, Schøyen owns three fragments containing text from 1 Enoch, and each of them "preserve" text that the original editor of actual 1 Enoch Qumran scrolls had suggested for his reconstructions of places where the original copies had deteriorated. He did this by retroverting Ethiopic and Greek back into ancient Aramaic, because the DSS yielded our only Aramaic copies of this text. The problem is that these retroversions don't always work, and the Ethiopic and Greek translations do not show a linear progression from Aramaic. So, it was pretty clear that these fragments were based on suppositions made by a scholar in this 1970s and not ancient editions.

I also pointed out another similar problem with a fragment of Jeremiah in Schøyen's collection: the fragment preserved a reading very close to the Greek translation of the passage, but one which bears a curious relationship to the Hebrew original. In an effort to explain this peculiarity the editors of Biblia Hebraica (the standard critical edition of the Hebrew Bible) hypothesized that the Hebrew was actually an ancient acronym which stemmed from an earlier version retained now only in the Greek translation. Schøyen's fragment very conveniently preserved the only manuscript evidence of exactly the same reading the BHS editors hypothesized. (I should note that there were other serious problems with this fragment, beyond the variant reading).

As near as I can tell most of the forgeries have been cleverly designed to raise very little controversy. They correspond to already known texts and from fairly obscure places of small significance in the Bible. The forgers know their audience: Since Evangelicals are strongly committed to this idea of the totality of inspiration for ALL of scripture, then any scrap from any part of the Bible—be it Isaiah 53 or Numbers 2—is of equal value.