https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/03/museum-of-the-bible-dead-sea-scrolls-forgeries/ Independent researchers funded by the Museum of the Bible announced that all 16 of the museum’s Dead Sea Scroll fragments are modern forgeries. The Museum CEO exclaimed, “We’re victims—we’re victims of misrepresentation, we’re victims of fraud.” The pieces are probably made of ancient leather, they were inked in modern times and modified to resemble real Dead Sea Scrolls; all with the intention of deceiving for profit.
The researcher's 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 2000's. Even before the new report, some scholars believed that most to all of the post-2002 fragments were modern fakes. Question: how had the forgers managed to fool the world’s leading Dead Sea Scroll scholars? “It really was—and still is—an interesting kind of detective story,” says Jeffrey Kloha, the Museum of the Bible’s chief curatorial officer. “We really hope this is helpful to other institutions and researchers, because we think this provides a good foundation for looking at other pieces, even if it raises other questions.”
The investigative team’s best guess is that the leather itself is ancient, recovered from scraps found in the Judean desert or elsewhere. One tantalizing possibility is that they come from ancient leather shoes or sandals. One of the fragments has a row of what look like artificially made holes, somewhat similar to those found in Roman-era shoes.
The authentic Dead Sea Scrolls trace back to 1947, when Bedouin herders found clay jars in Palestine’s Qumran caves that held thousands of parchment scrolls more than 1,800 years old, including some of the oldest surviving copies of the Hebrew Bible.
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Of additional interest:
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1988/10/09/the-forgeries-that-shook-the-mormon-church/9a30edad-a9b3-4381-b10e-ecfb11c9af42/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPiCkEEOa-U
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