The Museum of the Bible, Antiquities Collection, Looting and Forgery

[Locke]

That was a really good show, I enjoyed it.

I think my favourite parts were the snarky and more than a little shady Israeli 'Antiquities Dealer' and Kip's first finding where the forger didnt realize not to forge the Hebrew Asterisk from their source material.

Overall really, really good. Highly recommend.

And if you cant examine millennia-old documents while having a beer and a smoke at your table with some tape and a cavalier attitude then what good is being an antiquities analyst? There have to be some perks!

[Textcritic]

I’m a Dead Sea Scroll detective.


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[Locke]

Originally Posted by Textcritic

I’m a Dead Sea Scroll detective.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

The heavy dramatization is just the cross you have to bear.

[Wormius]

Originally Posted by Textcritic

I’m a Dead Sea Scroll detective.

You gotta go after Lenny. He seems shifty, man.

[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by Wormius

You gotta go after Lenny. He seems shifty, man.

They're all shifty. About a decade ago Lenny Wolfe unloaded an email dump in which he accused a number of scholars and fellow antiquities dealers of forging Dead Sea Scrolls. About six months ago one of the Christian colleges that purchased fake fragments filed suit against another antiquities dealer for fraud. The guy who helped Museum of the Bible to amass their collection has gone into a lucrative business convincing well-heeled Evangelicals to purchase outrageously expensive biblical antiquities and to collect massive tax write offs after donating them to private institutions. (Since the IRS writes off 100% of the appraised value, purchasers can triple their investment with exorbitant appraisals, which are exceptionally difficult to challenge.)

Everyone is dirty.

[Timbo]

Originally Posted by Textcritic

I’m a Dead Sea Scroll detective.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Is "All Writey Then" your signature phrase? Sorry I'll see myself out.

[HockeyIlliterate]

Educational episode.

Textcritic, when you are asked to examine a document, do you go in to the process believing that it is authentic and try to prove that it is a fake, or do you go in thinking that it is fake and try to prove that it is authentic?

[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by HockeyIlliterate

Educational episode.

Textcritic, when you are asked to examine a document, do you go in to the process believing that it is authentic and try to prove that it is a fake, or do you go in thinking that it is fake and try to prove that it is authentic?

Good question.

I actually presented a paper this summer at a conference in Warsaw titled "Cartesian Doubt and the Ethics of Discovery: Palaeography, Provenance and Publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls," in which I explore this issue. It was more of an historical study in which I argued that while Jewish "palaeography"—that is, the study of ancient handwriting and scribal practices by which most manuscripts are dated and authenticated—was refined through rigorous scholarly review as a result of the original discovery and publication of the Scrolls in 1953–59, it has been more recently and inappropriately marshalled in defense of newer discoveries without much reflection on methods or the lack of controls. This is a serious problem because of how impressionistic and subjective the study of handwriting is, and how little we actually know about developments of writing techniques and scripts in antiquity. So, right from the outset, I approach my work with a growing awareness of and alarm about the incredibly tenuous nature of many of the tools used in the past for evaluating manuscripts.

My own background also plays into this. No scholar can pretend to be completely objective, and especially now in the increasingly competitive and cut-throat climate of academia biases seem to be becoming more pronounced and unavoidable. My work in authentication started in 2012 when I was invited to help with publishing Dead Sea Scroll fragments in The Schøyen Collection in Norway. When I started in 2012, the notion that there could be forgeries in this or any collection did not even cross my mind. By 2014 I was sufficiently convinced that at least half of Schøyen's collection were most likely forgeries, and when I was asked at that point to help edit the Museum of the Bible fragments, it was impossible for me to not start from a perspective of doubt. Especially now in the light of so many of these fragments missing adequate provenance information, this seems to me to be the most prudent approach. Ultimately, I also think it important to be self reflective and completely transparent about my own biases and how I developed them.

I think as a scholar who respects and believes in science, it is incumbent upon me to eliminate questions of forgery, rather than to work toward rationalisations for authenticity. I am much more comfortable being wrong than I am in being duped.

[Wormius]

Are you concerned that scholars are giving forgers ideas of how to counterfeit more authentically, or do they simply not have the tools to be able to evade detection? Or were the counterfeits done long ago when detection methods were primitive? I imagine with the amount of money behind this, they would be investing some money into forging better.

[Fuzz]

Is a lot of the text open to interpretation, or are the letters/words easily to translate directly? I guess going along with that question, given the degraded nature of it, do people tend to see what they want to see, and not necessarily read the words that may have been there, but can't be deciphered clearly?

[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by Wormius

Are you concerned that scholars are giving forgers ideas of how to counterfeit more authentically, or do they simply not have the tools to be able to evade detection? Or were the counterfeits done long ago when detection methods were primitive? I imagine with the amount of money behind this, they would be investing some money into forging better.

This is always a concern. The physicist that I worked with in Germany was extremely reluctant to publish any of our findings because of of this. I tend to think that the publicity is a risk worth taking, mostly for the amount of exposure it creates for this issue.

I am uncertain about when the forgeries were manufactured. There are reports of Bedouin attempting to sell fakes to the archaeologists who excavated the Qumran site back in the 1950s, and it is entirely reasonable to think that these were produced back then. By my way of thinking, even if scholars passed on purchasing forgeries as we are told, it seems likely that the forgers would not have simply given up, and would most likely have found a more gullible buyer. On the other hand, ALL of the forgeries have entered the market after 1993, and after the death of the antiquities dealer who brokered the sales of virtually all of the authentic Dead Sea Scrolls. It remains an open question, and I think it is also possible that there is more than one source for the fakes.

As for the question of technology, I also tend to think that several of the errors I have observed are virtually impossible to avoid. The problem for the forger is that he or she needs to use ancient material, and while it is possible to acquire small bits of ancient leather—it would need to pass C-14 tests. (As a side note, that attention whore Joel Baden said on the documentary that it is easy to purchase ancient uninscribed parchment on e-Bay; this is simply not true. While it is the case for papyrus, parchment was much less common in antiquity, and thus, finding any uninscribed scraps is exceedingly difficult. This is why almost all of the modern forgeries are actually made from ancient leather, NOT parchment.) Ancient leather is already so badly damaged and deformed that it makes for a completely unforgiving writing surface. Close inspection of the fragments reveals rather unambiguously the application of ink to already ancient and damaged materials. At one point in the documentary I was attempting to show how ink appears on damaged edges or delaminated portions of the fragment. The scale I was working on was 400x magnification, using a Keyence VHX-6000 3D digital microscope. I maintain that producing convincing script on an ancient fragment that can pass for authentic at that scale is virtually impossible. It would require working in micrometres, but with ancient tools and materials.

[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

Is a lot of the text open to interpretation, or are the letters/words easily to translate directly? I guess going along with that question, given the degraded nature of it, do people tend to see what they want to see, and not necessarily read the words that may have been there, but can't be deciphered clearly?

It depends on the fragment and the scholar. Some are abundantly clear and with no ambiguity in reading. Others are so hopelessly damaged that they can in theory support any variety of readings. Some scholars are loathe to even attempt reconstructions of fragmentary texts, while others have been known to manufacture entire columns of text from a handful of surviving letters.

The project leader in Norway while I was there was notoriously prone to doing this. Here is a picture of a fragment from a manuscript he published last year:

https://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/ex...image/B-295453

The text in the centre of the fragment is generally clear and legible on the IR photograph. But on the right side there are a few letters and words preserved from a preceding column. This is a well known text from the Old Testament book, Song of Songs, so in theory it is possible to create a plausible reconstruction of several lines of text from just the letters along the edge. But my former boss has produced a full column from this, and more significantly has attempted to argue for a number of unattested alternative readings on the basis of this extremely conjectural reconstruction.

Sometimes these desires for discovery can receive further interference from a scholar's own preconceptions and biases. A rather famous case is the text of a manuscript of Psalms, dating to the first century C.E. One of my former colleagues edited this scroll a couple decades ago, and from the fragment pictured in this link (https://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/ex...image/B-366235)—which preserves text from Psalms 22:15–21—he produced a rather astonishing reading.

Psalm 22 is noteworthy as the text that Jesus quoted when he was crucified, and it has long been understood by Christians as a fulfilled prophecy of Jesus's exectution. Beginning in v. 10, Psalm 22 reads:

"You drew me from the womb,
made me secure at my mother’s breast.
11 I became Your charge at birth;
from my mother’s womb You have been my God.
12 Do not be far from me,
for trouble is near,
and there is none to help.
13 Many bulls surround me,
mighty ones of Bashan encircle me.
14 They open their mouths at me
like tearing, roaring lions.
15 My life ebbs away:
all my bones are disjointed;
my heart is like wax,
melting within me;
16 my vigor dries up like a shard;
my tongue cleaves to my palate;
You commit me to the dust of death."

This Psalm is a personal prayer for deliverance from persecution, conflict, and death. And it is understandable how and why it gained currency among the first Christians as a description of Jesus's death. Vv. 17–19 reads in the Hebrew:

"Dogs surround me;
a pack of evil ones closes in on me,
like lions [they maul] my hands and feet.
18 I take the count of all my bones
while they look on and gloat.
19 They divide my clothes among themselves,
casting lots for my garments."

The text in that third line is כארי ידי ורגלי, lit. "like a lion, my hands and my feet."

The meaning of the clause has always been somewhat perplexing owing to the absence of the verb (such things happen from time to time in ancient Hebrew poetry), but the problem became even more pronounced with the ancient Greek translation, the LXX, which reads: "they pierced my hands and feet." The LXX was the Old Testament text that was used most predominantly by the early Christians, so scholars have naturally for a long time assumed that this was a corruption introduced into the text as a means to bolster the idea that Psalm 22 was a prophecy which foretold the impalement of Jesus's hands and feet with nails which fixed him to a Roman cross.

So, the corresponding text of Ps 22:17 in the fragment pictured in the link above appears on the left edge, in the third clearly visible line. I don't know about you, but I can barely make out the shapes of letters in this part of the fragment. The editor transcribed כארו ידי ורגלי, which translates as "they hollowed out (or bored) my hands and my feet." It's a terribly awkward construction, but could conceptually correspond to the Greek, and this would mean that rather than a Christian invention, there is actually evidence for this present in an ancient Hebrew text which predated the time of Jesus. The difference between the two readings is found in deciding between two letters—either כארי, "like a lion" or כארו, "they hollowed out." These two letters are very frequently indistinguishable in ancient Hebrew, and even more difficult to discern when the text is as badly damaged or faded as in the linked fragment.

So, yeah. Here is a clear instance where one of my colleagues allowed his own hopes and beliefs to guide his scholarship, and to distort the facts. He passed away two years ago, but for a long time he would promote this reading from this scroll as evidence for the fulfillment of prophecy in the Bible. Here is an excerpt from a talk he gave in 2011 at an event sponsored by Christian apologist Josh McDowell:

Now some would say, "You see, the church has messed with the text. They wanted to put Jesus in their text, so they ignored the Hebrew wording and put in 'they’ve pierced my hands and feet.'" That is a great challenge, but, my friends, I’ve got good news for you. This passage is preserved in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and I know what I’m talking about because I am the editor of that scroll. It contains this passage. It is in the oldest copy of Psalm 22 in the world and it says: "Dogs have surrounded me, a band of evil ones have encircled me; they have pierced my hands and my feet." Isn’t that amazing?

[Fuzz]

Isn't that amazing?

Yes, yes it is!


Thanks for that, it was kinda what I thought, though obviously everyone will interpret to their own degree I always had suspicions watching these history shows that a lot of liberties can be taken by those interpreting little bits of text.


I was also wondering if it had been attempted, or considered in the future, loading all these fragment scans into a computer algorithm that could attemt to find common edges and join them back. Given there are so many perhaps a computer could more quickly re-assemble them. Though perhaps there are just to many missing pieces on most of them.

[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by Wormius

Are you concerned that scholars are giving forgers ideas of how to counterfeit more authentically, or do they simply not have the tools to be able to evade detection? Or were the counterfeits done long ago when detection methods were primitive? I imagine with the amount of money behind this, they would be investing some money into forging better.

Originally Posted by Textcritic

This is always a concern. The physicist that I worked with in Germany was extremely reluctant to publish any of our findings because of of this. I tend to think that the publicity is a risk worth taking, mostly for the amount of exposure it creates for this issue...

As for the question of technology, I also tend to think that several of the errors I have observed are virtually impossible to avoid. The problem for the forger is that he or she needs to use ancient material, and while it is possible to acquire small bits of ancient leather—it would need to pass C-14 tests. (As a side note, that attention whore Joel Baden said on the documentary that it is easy to purchase ancient uninscribed parchment on e-Bay; this is simply not true. While it is the case for papyrus, parchment was much less common in antiquity, and thus, finding any uninscribed scraps is exceedingly difficult. This is why almost all of the modern forgeries are actually made from ancient leather, NOT parchment.) Ancient leather is already so badly damaged and deformed that it makes for a completely unforgiving writing surface. Close inspection of the fragments reveals rather unambiguously the application of ink to already ancient and damaged materials. At one point in the documentary I was attempting to show how ink appears on damaged edges or delaminated portions of the fragment. The scale I was working on was 400x magnification, using a Keyence VHX-6000 3D digital microscope. I maintain that producing convincing script on an ancient fragment that can pass for authentic at that scale is virtually impossible. It would require working in micrometres, but with ancient tools and materials.

I wanted to say something more about this ...

While there is a risk in tipping our hand to the forgers in how to produce better fakes, the solution is abundantly simple.

In the first place, I think the exposure which raises awareness and hopefully by extension casts much more needed light on the scandalous antiquities markets, looting and fraud will reciprocally make it just that much more difficult for antiquities dealers to buy and sell artefacts. If the Greens have become the poster-boys for wasting millions of dollars on forged antiquities, I would think other potential buyers would think twice, and demand better documentation and transparency in their acquisitions.

This leads to a second point: Forgeries would be impossible to sell if the Isreali government would finally do the right thing and completely shut down the antiquities markets. Virtually all of the Dead Sea Scrolls in private collections are not provenanced. There is no record of their discovery, removal, and original sale. As part of my research project I have taken the opportunity to review records and receipts at the Museum of the Bible for dozens of their purchases, and many of these are laughably bad. Some amount to little more than a hand written record on the back of a napkin for million-dollar acquisitions. It is frighteningly stupid. If it were illegal to buy and sell antiquities, it would be nearly impossible for anyone to profit off of forgeries, and more importantly, this would in turn protect the integrity of archaeological sites, cultural heritage objects, and their contribution to our understanding of antiquity. When artefacts are removed illegally from archaeological digs, much of their scholarly value is significantly diminished, unrecoverable, and this is honestly the greatest tragedy in all of this.

[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

Yes, yes it is!


Thanks for that, it was kinda what I thought, though obviously everyone will interpret to their own degree I always had suspicions watching these history shows that a lot of liberties can be taken by those interpreting little bits of text.


I was also wondering if it had been attempted, or considered in the future, loading all these fragment scans into a computer algorithm that could attemt to find common edges and join them back. Given there are so many perhaps a computer could more quickly re-assemble them. Though perhaps there are just to many missing pieces on most of them.

There is a project in Germany that is attempting to do this, although as far as I know they continue to struggle with various issues in making it viable. Other thoughts have been to match fragments through DNA, or by mapping hair follicles on the grain side of the parchment.

[Cecil Terwilliger]

For anyone else who missed it, it’s on again Sunday morning at 2am.

[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by Cecil Terwilliger

For anyone else who missed it, it’s on again Sunday morning at 2am.

And for those who didn't miss it the first time, you can watch it again!

[monkeyman]

I have it recorded. I'm going to watch it this weekend.
I always enjoy Nova programming.

[nik-]

That segment about scanning the carbonized scroll, using the metal in the ink to differentiate from paper, and then building each layer digitally and unrolling them to read it literally blew my mind.

What an incredible process.

[Locke]

Originally Posted by monkeyman

I have it recorded. I'm going to watch it this weekend.
I always enjoy Nova programming.

NOVA is great as a taster to get me more interested in certain subjects and then learn more. I thought this episode was really good.

Originally Posted by nik-

That segment about scanning the carbonized scroll, using the metal in the ink to differentiate from paper, and then building each layer digitally and unrolling them to read it literally blew my mind.

What an incredible process.

Yeah...I really liked how they broached that as part of their process where the original guys were eyeballing it at their desks with a smoke and a beer and they just shut it down until technology progressed to the point where they could safely and accurately analyze the scrolls.

That process was so, so cool.

"How is that going to work?"

Its basically Magic.