Five of Museum of the Bible’s Dead Sea Scrolls are forgeries

The Museum of the
Bible^[1], which opened to the
public on November 17, 2017, is a $500-million monument to the
world’s most popular book. Few artifacts capture the scripture’s
timelessness more than the Dead
Sea Scrolls^[2], the oldest known copies
of Biblical text—which is why the museum’s founders are rumored to
have spent millions of dollars to obtain 16 of them for their
collection.

However, research suggests that some of
the fragments that visitors will encounter may be modern forgeries.
On October 22, 2018, the Museum of the Bible announced that five of
its 16 Dead Sea Scrolls fragments are probably modern forgeries,
based on analyses conducted by Germany’s Federal Institute for
Materials Research. The report corroborates concerns raised by
biblical scholars in 2017, just before the Museum of the Bible
opened.

“Though we had hoped the testing would
render different results, this is an opportunity to educate the
public on the importance of verifying the authenticity of rare
biblical artifacts, the elaborate testing process undertaken and
our commitment to transparency,” said Jeffrey Kloha, chief
curatorial officer for Museum of the Bible, in a statement. “As an
educational institution entrusted with cultural heritage, the
museum upholds and adheres to all museum and ethical guidelines on
collection care, research and display.”

The spotlights on the Museum of the Bible
burn especially bright. The museum’s founder Steve Green, who owns
the Hobby Lobby craft
chain^[3], has faced intense
public scrutiny for his company’s antiquities purchases, including
5,500 ancient clay tablets that U.S. authorities claim were illegally smuggled into the country^[4]. In July, Hobby Lobby
reached a settlement on the tablets with the Department of Justice.
The company has returned the artifacts to Iraq.

Widely respected Biblical scholar David Trobisch^[5] now directs the
collection—and the Museum of the Bible has supported the very work
on the Dead Sea Scrolls which has uncovered evidence of
forgery.

“Anybody who thinks that in a gigantic
museum that there’s going to be no item [with disputed
authenticity], it’s like believing that there’s no amoeba in your
water,” says New York University Biblical scholar Lawrence
Schiffman^[6], who consulted the
museum on its presentation of the Dead Sea Scrolls. “The museum did
everything they’re supposed to do.”

Discovered by a Bedouin shepherd in the
caves of Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls consist of passages of the
Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, that range from 1,800 to more than
2,000 years old. They comprise the oldest copies of Biblical text
ever found. (See
digital copies of the Dead Sea Scrolls^[7].)

From 1947 to 1953, many of the scrolls were purchased from
Bedouin by the local merchant Khalil Iskander Shahin (also known as
Kando), who then sold them to collectors and academic institutions.
But once the 1970
UNESCO convention on cultural property^[8]
kicked in, the illicit excavation and selling of newfound scrolls
was made illegal.

Today, many of the Dead Sea Scrolls—which total some 100,000
fragments—are housed in the
Shrine of the Book^[9], part of the Israel
Museum, Jerusalem. The private market fights for the literal scraps
grandfathered into current law, mostly pieces that entered private
collections before 1970.

In the early 2000s, about 75 grandfathered-in fragments—most no
bigger than large coins—were put up for sale, many by Kando’s
relatives. Sixteen of the fragments were purchased by the Green
family from 2009 to 2014. Many of these “post-2002” fragments
aren’t academically revelatory: Their texts mirror content known
from earlier Dead Sea Scrolls. Nevertheless, museums and private
collectors jumped at the chance to claim physical ownership of some
of the earliest known Biblical texts.

At the time of these purchases, Schiffman says that the
post-2002 fragments were largely considered authentic. But this
consensus began to unravel in early 2016, when University of Leuven
researcher Eibert
Tigchelaar^[10] challenged the
authenticity of several fragments held by Norwegian collector
Martin Schøyen. Tigchelaar’s efforts quickly snowballed.

“It took a long time to come to the point where I became
convinced… [that] a few of these are probably not authentic—at
least a few,” says Kipp Davis^[11], a Dead Sea Scrolls
expert at Trinity Western University who has closely studied
post-2002 fragments.

In interviews last year, Schiffman and Davis noted that while
the field is now wary of forgeries, some highly respected scholars
still believed the new fragments to be genuine. Schiffman said that
at least a few of the post-2002 fragments must be real, since they
fit into authentic Dead Sea Scrolls like puzzle pieces. (Who
wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?^[12])

In a 2017
interview with CNN^[13], leading Dead Sea
Scrolls scholar Emanuel Tov^[14] said that he didn’t
think the fragments are fake. "I will not say the Museum
of the Bible has no inauthentic fragments," he said at the
time. "I will say I have not seen the proof."

Other scholars, however, err on the side of forgery. “I think
that over 90 percent of the post-2002 fragments most probably are
modern forgeries,” says University of Agder researcher Årstein
Justnes^[15], who leads the Lying Pen of Scribes
project^[16], which monitors the
post-2002 fragments.

If some of the Museum of the Bible’s Dead Sea Scroll fragments
are in fact forgeries, how did they come about?

In some examples Davis has examined from the Norwegian Schøyen
Collection^[17], ink sits atop the
ancient parchment’s patina, or bleeds over the fragments’ tattered
edges, as if the ink was laid down centuries or millennia later.
One manuscript was even found covered in modern table salt^[18], which forgers
apparently used to mimic the salty crust on authentic Dead Sea
Scrolls.

Research on the Museum of the Bible’s fragments continues;
scholars took
their first stab at them^[19] in 2016, in a 236-page
volume co-edited by Tov and Davis. Even then, researchers supported
by the museum, including Davis, had flagged possible signs of
forgery in some of the museum’s fragments—including one that was on
display when the museum first opened.

In that fragment, a passage from the Book of Jonah, one Hebrew
character is squeezed into a corner that wouldn’t have been there
when the parchment was whole. The lines of text also seem to follow
the contours of the fragment’s torn edges. “These [lines of text] are probably not authentic,” says Davis. “It looks more like the
letters were applied to something that has already
deteriorated.”

In a separate Museum of the Bible fragment that’s not currently
on display, the Hebrew text—a portion of the Book of Nehemiah—is
interrupted by what looks like the Greek letter alpha. The Greek
letter appears in the same passage in a Hebrew Bible published in
1937; the character denotes a footnote.

As scientific work continued, the museum had installed placards
under each of the fragments that were on display, which read:

“In 2002, dozens of previously known ‘Dead Sea Scroll’ fragments
began appearing with antiquity dealers. Universities, museums, and
private collectors acquired many of these ‘new’ fragments. As
scholars began to study them, some noted puzzling features and
labeled them as forgeries.

“[The Museum of the Bible] published the initial research on its
scroll fragments in 2016, but scholarly opinions of their
authenticity remain divided. Scientific analysis of the ink and
handwriting on these pieces continues.”

Now, the Museum of the Bible says that all five fragments that
were on display were probably forgeries. It has now replaced them
with three other fragments that haven’t been chemically analyzed
yet. Placards will still be displayed beside them.

Schiffman, who wrote the placard text, said at the museum’s
opening that its staff had done their job to be transparent with
visitors. Now, it’s a matter of uncovering the fragments’ true
origin story.

“What we need now is a detective,” he said.