Thread by @incunabula

100% - all 16 Dead Sea Scrolls fragments - held by @museumofBible have now been conclusively shown to be modern fakes.

This likely means that all the fragments held in the Schøyen Collection are also faked.

This is a gigantic multimillion dollar fraud.
nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/0…

The commercial and academic ramifications of this are enormous. Almost all of these Dead Sea fragments can be traced back - via various dealers - to the Kando family. The article says "William Kando, who sold 7 pieces to Green, did not respond to an email request for comment."

Emanuel Tov, Professor Emeritus in the Dep. of the Bible at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and main editor of "Dead Sea Scrolls Fragments in the Museum Collection", published by Brill in 2016, released a statement as below, which reads a little like clutching at straws to me.

As a collector myself of later Hebrew manuscripts, I know from direct experience what the asking prices for these Dead Sea fragments typically were - well over $1m for scraps barely a few centimeters square were the norm.

The scale of the apparent fraud is simply breathtaking.

No one who's followed Brent Nongbri's blog (brentnongbri.com) can fail to notice some of the very same names coming up here in this Dead Sea Scrolls context, as have come up in discussions of disputed and unprovenanced papyri bought by the Green family.

Dead Sea Scrolls scholar James Charlesworth, who retired from the Princeton Theological Seminary in 2019, helped validate the @museumofBible's Dead Sea Scrolls Genesis fragment’s authenticity.

He's now reported as saying, with what I presume is a rueful tone....

The scientific testing indicates that ALL the pieces were likely faked by the same person or persons. This was an extraordinarily sophisticated operation - these fragments were not crude forgeries, they were good enough to fool many of the world's top Hebrew manuscript scholars.

It's hard to overstate the importance of this all. The shockwaves from this report as revealed in today's National Geographic piece, will shake the high end biblical manuscript market, and the world of biblical Hebrew manuscript scholarship, to their core.
on.natgeo.com/33nk1He

To be clear, all this applies ONLY to the recent fragments which have come up for sale since around 2002.

It does NOT apply to the original Dead Sea Scrolls, now mainly held in Jerusalem's Shrine of the Book (a part of the Israel Museum), whose authenticity is undisputed.

"The Lying Pen of Scribes" is a research project administered by the University of Agder in Norway.

It has been at the forefront of questioning the authenticity of these Dead Sea Scroll fragments.

Here is their full timeline of post-2002 developments.
lyingpen.com/2020/03/13/pos…

Here is the full 214 page scientific report on the Museum of the Bible's Dead Sea Scrolls fragments, on which the National Geographic article is based.

Download as a PDF file here:
dropbox.com/s/04gsrlqol2t3…

"We’re victims — we’re victims of misrepresentation, we’re victims of fraud,” CEO Harry Hargrove said at an academic conference hosted by the museum."
timesofisrael.com/dead-sea-scrol…

"After an exhaustive review of all the imaging and scientific analysis results, it is evident that none of the fragments in Museum of the Bible's Dead Sea Scroll collection are authentic," said Colette Loll, founder and director of Art Fraud Insights."
upi.com/6991010t

"The forgeries held in the museum’s collection were among the group of 70 fragments of dubious provenance that entered the private market in the 2000s, dubbed the “post-2002” Dead Sea Scroll fragments." artnews.com/art-news/news/…

"All of the fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls owned by an American museum are fakes and they may have been made from Roman boot leather, scientists have revealed."
thetimes.co.uk/article/museum…

Since 2002, there have been two groups of buyers for purported Dead Sea Scrolls fragments: Evangelicals - the Green family by far the most important, but also including institutions like Azusa Pacific University; and the famed Norwegian manuscript collector, Martin Schøyen.

Martin Schøyen's fragments were published by Bloomsbury in 2016 in a book called "Gleanings from the Caves". Some of the fragments were identified as fakes in this book, others were described as genuine. It must now surely be presumed that ALL are fakes.

bloomsbury.com/uk/gleanings-f…

Some of Martin Schøyen's fragments are shown on the Schøyen Collection website, described as genuine, and frequently authenticated by Dr Charlesworth, now retired from the Princeton Theological Seminary, who also authenticated the Green's Genesis fragment.
schoyencollection.com/dead-sea-scrol…

These are Martin Schøyen's fragments purportedly from the Great Isaiah Dead Sea Scroll, again described as authentic, but apparently from the same ultimate source as the @museumofBible fragments, and so almost certainly also faked.

schoyencollection.com/dead-sea-scrol…

I mention the Schøyen fragments because, unlike the Green family who were uninformed novices when they started buying, Martin is an expert and highly experienced collector, with access to world-class academic advice. This is an indication of just how convincing these fakes were.

It's also, perhaps even more importantly, an indication of the unparalleled romance and allure of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and their ability to make otherwise sane, expert and cautious collectors go completely, to use the technical term, batshit.

There are a lot of gleeful comments on this thread because the Greens, the MOTB and, for other reasons, Martin Schøyen, are all politically unpopular - especially on Twitter. But both should be commended for commissioning independent analysis and publishing the unvarnished truth.

The fundamental issue with these manuscript fragments is their complete lack of verifiable (ie non-anecdotal) provenance. Without this it's arguable whether the authenticity of small fragments like this can *ever* be verified with certainty, even with rigorous scientific testing.