The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of ancient religious texts discovered in a series of caves at Qumran beginning in 1947. While most of the scrolls are housed at a museum in Israel, some fragments have been circulating through private owners. Between 2009 and 2014, Steve Green, the president of Hobby Lobby, bought 16 fragments for the Museum of the Bible, which he founded. In 2016, doubts began to form about the fragments’ authenticity, and an investigative team was consulted.
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In a report spanning more than 200 pages, a team of researchers led by art fraud investigator Colette Loll found that while the pieces are probably made of ancient leather, they were inked in modern times and modified to resemble real Dead Sea Scrolls. “These fragments were manipulated with the intent to deceive,” Loll says.
The new findings don’t cast doubt on the 100,000 real Dead Sea Scroll fragments, most of which lie in the Shrine of the Book, part of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. However, the report’s findings raise grave questions about the “post-2002” Dead Sea Scroll fragments, a group of some 70 snippets of biblical text that entered the antiquities market in the 2000s. Even before the new report, some scholars believed that most to all of the post-2002 fragments were modern fakes.
“Once one or two of the fragments were fake, you know all of them probably are, because they come from the same sources, and they look basically the same,” says Årstein Justnes, a researcher at Norway’s University of Agder whose Lying Pen of Scribes project tracks the post-2002 fragments.
National Geographic follows the investigators and the methods they used to determine the authenticity of the scroll fragments. It’s a fascinating story. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Library of Congress)
Source: neatorama