The Lying Pen of Scribes
March 13, 2020 10:51 AM   Subscribe

Just a few years after being forced to return 5,500 clay tablets smuggled from Iraq after being looted from archaeological sites, the Museum of the Bible has learned that all 16 fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls in its collection are modern fakes.

Many scholars have long believed that all the fragments purporting to be from the Dead Sea Scrolls that have emerged since 2002 are fakes. The University of Agder's Lying Pen of Scribes project tracks those fragments. The Museum of the Bible has also been criticized in recent years for purchasing papyrus fragments that had been stolen by an Oxford papyrologist as well as possessing a manuscript that had been stolen from the University of Athens.
posted by Copronymus (25 comments total) 35 users marked this as a favorite
 
Too rich.
posted by Glomar response at 10:55 AM on March 13, 2020 [6 favorites]


hahahahahaha... there must be a parable that's appropriate to this situation
posted by drewbage1847 at 10:59 AM on March 13, 2020 [17 favorites]


Yeah this is a good week for small victories over the hegemony.
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 11:10 AM on March 13, 2020 [2 favorites]


When a museum employee managed to translate one of the fragments, they determined that it read "Man, those Samoans are a surly bunch."
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:13 AM on March 13, 2020 [28 favorites]


Actually, it read "Be Sure To Drink Your Ovaltine".
posted by DanSachs at 11:17 AM on March 13, 2020 [19 favorites]


Amazing. Glad the head investigator's name is Loll. The third "l" being, of course, redundant. Hobby Lobby and the Museum of the Bible can go jump in a giant puddle of animal glue.
posted by kaelynski at 11:25 AM on March 13, 2020 [9 favorites]


Dirk Obbink and Hobby Lobby, previously.
(obligatory their first album was the best at this obvious 1970s jazz fusion macrame collective name.)

in summary: bwahahaha! Antiquity stealing fundies can go take a hike.
posted by scruss at 11:38 AM on March 13, 2020 [3 favorites]


And previously-er.

Apologies for the own-horn-tooting.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 11:50 AM on March 13, 2020


Loll insisted on independence. Not only would the Museum of the Bible have no say on the team’s findings, her report would be final—and would have to be released to the public. The Museum of the Bible agreed to the terms. “Honestly, I’ve never worked with a museum that was so up-front,” Loll says.

Everything else aside, this is really cool of the museum to let her do her job and accept findings impartially.
posted by kurosawa's pal at 11:50 AM on March 13, 2020 [18 favorites]


DEAD SEA LOLS
posted by rodlymight at 11:52 AM on March 13, 2020 [13 favorites]


Couldn't have happened to a more deserving bunch of museum owners
posted by caution live frogs at 12:22 PM on March 13, 2020 [4 favorites]


Does this mean it's too late to get in on the forgery action? I won't buy from Hobby Lobby, but I've got no problems selling to them.
posted by asperity at 12:29 PM on March 13, 2020 [5 favorites]


Would've been nice if this had been a double-blind test.
posted by clawsoon at 12:40 PM on March 13, 2020


Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God to open a Bible museum without committing or suffering world-class grift.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:25 PM on March 13, 2020 [17 favorites]


Amid all the (justified) gloating at the expense of Hobby Lobby, spare a thought for the team of scholars who worked on the 2016 publication, Dead Sea Scrolls Fragments in the Museum Collection:
The work on these fragments was conducted under the auspices of the Museum of the Bible Scholars Initiative, whose mission is to publish research conducted collaboratively by scholar-mentors and students. The ultimate goal is to provide students with the opportunity to develop as scholars under the guidance of their scholar-mentors.
The people I feel sorry for are the young scholars whose publications will now have to be retracted, through no fault of their own, and possibly with devastating results for their academic careers.
posted by verstegan at 1:39 PM on March 13, 2020 [12 favorites]


Those young “scholars” worked for the “Museum of Bible Scholars Institute.” I’m pretty sure scholarship isn’t really in play if something they might have found contradicted evangelical fascism. Zero sympathy.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 6:21 PM on March 13, 2020 [4 favorites]


Let me retract that. Upon reflection, I don’t actually know the institution or their intentions and am leaping to a conclusion based on my preconceived prejudices.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 6:25 PM on March 13, 2020 [5 favorites]


“Let my proclamation go out across the land: Ha ha!”
posted by No-sword at 6:31 PM on March 13, 2020 [1 favorite]


Tell Steve Green: Ea-nasir sends the following message: amateurs!
posted by praemunire at 7:23 PM on March 13, 2020 [4 favorites]


Eh, more fakery.
posted by BlueHorse at 7:51 PM on March 13, 2020


Anything we can read that isn't pay walled? Not having any success reading the linked articles...
posted by Windopaene at 8:22 PM on March 13, 2020 [1 favorite]


“All roads lead to Bethlehem,” said Lawrence Schiffman, a Hebrew scholar at New York University and adviser to the Museum of the Bible […]

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last …”

I've been following this on and off as a layperson, and kudos is due to The Lying Pen of Scribes, whose blog, available at that address, has laid out the reasons for concern and the unfortunate consequences of forgery for some years. E.g., “Troubling anomalies”, and elements that raise “questions”, “suspicions”, and “concerns” in Dead Sea Scrolls Fragments in the Museum Collection (Brill, 2016)
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:09 AM on March 14, 2020 [5 favorites]


The quotations collected in the "'Troubling Anomalies'" post suggest that the scholars knew very well that something was wrong, which is interesting...
posted by thomas j wise at 5:20 AM on March 14, 2020


Their possessions echo their reality. Their desires echo their banality.
posted by Oyéah at 9:53 AM on March 14, 2020 [1 favorite]


the scholars knew very well that something was wrong

There's a common pattern I've observed:

Suspect documents tend to be kept more or less out of the public eye, and scholars are reluctant to risk making definitive statements on things they haven't been able to examine closely. And most forgeries aren't very exciting in themselves: they typically are copied from existing texts and are chosen for marketability. For instance, one of the things that stood out about the post-2002 DSS fragments was that the mix of texts was unlike that of the DSS generally, being almost all recognisable bits from the Bible. The real DSS had lots of extracanonical works and doctrinal manuals, but those wouldn't sell as well. So you have a double whammy: it's hard for a scholar to comment authoritatively on something they haven't seen, and if that something isn't significant there's little incentive to do so.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:29 PM on March 14, 2020 [2 favorites]


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