Before we dig in, I want to clarify a very important point or should I say points. 1] the DSS deemed forgeries are those that came into circulation post-2002 not the original collection (1947-58). There is a reason this point is important, and we will return to it. But as a bit of foreshadow, think Steve Green, the Museum of the Bible, and the Reich; interwoven in this are tax ramification. https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-museum-of-the-bible-exploits-jewish-traditionand-saves-its-evangelical-christian-donors-millions

Green and his family have a clear set of beliefs that, they hold, should shape American life: The U.S. is a Christian nation, the archaeological record supports an evangelical Protestant view of the Bible, and Americans should be compelled by law to live according to this interpretation. And they are determined to prove it.

2] There are geo-political ramifications concerning some of these questionable fragments. We wont be broaching this topic at all. It's a cluster-fuck getting into the whole notion of Christian Zionism

3] And our final point, there are numerous conspiracy type theories surrounding the scrolls. Some, may be warranted. It also is not a topic we will be broaching.

I know many of us, in discussions with Christians, have faced this tactic,,, But the DDS prove the Bible - no, no they don't. We'll come back to that maybe in more detail. Of late, though, I have seen a very dishonest tactic being used - the sweeping counter claim the DDS are fake - which raises the question, how should or can non-believers utilize the recent disclosure that some post 2002 fragments have been determined to be forgeries?

If you remember, Green and family were at the heart of the Hobby Lobby case. But, Green is also deep in the theocratic movement in the US. If you recall from a 2014 post,,,

That’s our goal, so that we can reintroduce this book to this nation. This nation is in danger because of its ignorance of what God has taught,,, Someday, I would argue, it should be mandated. (Starting about the 4:28 mark)

For those unaware, one of the goals of Mr. Steve "Hobby Lobby" Green, is to have a 4 year Bible curriculum, that they (the Green Scholars Initiative) write, be mandated in all public schools. Currently, the Mustang School Board (OK) approved Green's curriculum although it is still in draft.

While the issue of Mustang,OK didn't quite pan out, Green was, during this time, in the beginning phases of the Museum of the Bible. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/bible-museum-planned-for-washington-dc/2012/07/10/gJQAWH2MbW_story.html

So we are going to make the assumption y'all know what the DDS are. Trading in antiquities has been in existence since the early days of what we would call archaeology. And the concept of forgeries has been around since forever. Just ask Bart Erhman, Forged (2011) - the book posits that 11 or more books out of the 27 books of the Christian New Testament canon were written as forgeries.

Or consider this, the business of biblical relic collecting dates back to, at least, the fourth century, when Helena of Constantine came to Jerusalem looking for pieces of the True Cross. And who can forget the impact charlatan Ron Wyatt, who took to digging in Israel, claimed to have found the Ark of the Covenant and once announced that he had found the blood of Jesus. We have the James Ossuary as well as the “Jesus wife” fragment.

So why are we here tonight?

The 100,000 fragments of the DDS are housed in the Shrine of the Book, part of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. The excavation and selling of fragments is outlawed under a UN convention on cultural property from 1970, which means that private sellers fight over any fragments removed before that time.

In 2002, new fragments began mysteriously appearing on the market, where many were scooped up by evangelicals eager to own a piece of biblical history and find tangible evidence attesting to their belief in the inerrancy of Scripture. Some evangelicals' idolization of Scripture made them easy marks for unscrupulous dealers, scholars say.

The founder of the Museum of the Bible, Steve Green, faced scrutiny over the purchase of more than 5,500 artifact from 2010 that originated from Iraq. The chain agreed to pay a $3m fine to settle a case with the Department of Justice that claimed the objects were illegally smuggled. The items have since been returned. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/iraq-hobby-lobby-smuggler-artifacts-arts-crafts-museum-bible-a8333646.html

Hobby Lobby said that it was new to the world of antiquities when it began acquiring historical items for its Museum of the Bible in 2009 and made mistakes in relying on dealers and shippers who “did not understand the correct way to document and ship” them. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/iraq-hobby-lobby-smuggler-artifacts-arts-crafts-museum-bible-a8333646.html

That's the back drop we are working within. Personally I don't by the Museum's explanation and I do know of others who feel the same way but for slightly differing reasons. https://chasingaphrodite.com/2017/07/10/hobby-lobbys-legal-expert-speaks-i-cant-rule-out-they-used-my-advice-to-evade-the-law/

Since the original discovery approximately 70 more “scrolls” have filtered onto the market in the past 15 years. None of these new scrolls have a reasonable provenance: Unlike the original Dead Sea Scrolls, we don’t know which cave at Qumran they were discovered in, much less where they have been since then. https://www.thedailybeast.com/bible-museums-dead-sea-scrolls-turn-out-to-be-forgeries

Now, it is revealed, the five small scraps purported to be parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls are forgeries. This isn’t news to scholars, who have been objecting to the presence of the fragments in the museum for roughly two years. https://www.thedailybeast.com/bible-museums-dead-sea-scrolls-turn-out-to-be-forgeries

See also::

As you can see this is quite a mess. I don't want to get to bogged down in the political aspects of this, but it bears repeating that Steve Green is a theocrat with dominionist leanings that clouds everything he says or does. He knew there were question about his collection, but did nothing until pushed. If I remember correctly it wasn't until the Schoyen Collection had some of their fragments tested that Green did anything. The SC is the largest private manuscript collection in the world, mostly located in Oslo and London. Formed in the 20th century by Martin Schøyen, it comprises manuscripts of global provenance, spanning 5,000 years of history. It contains more than 13,000 manuscript items; the oldest is about 5,300 years old. There are manuscripts from 134 different countries and territories, representing 120 distinct languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B8yen_Collection

I know y'all are sitting there wondering WTF this has to do with anything at this point. Simply put, Green is making a mockery out of “biblical” archaeology specifically and archaeology as a whole. Just as creationists or anti-vaxxers try to undermine the science of evolution and vaccines with bullshit science, Green is doing the same to archaeology.

Good example::

The men the Greens chose as their buyers were straight out of Bible archaeology’s seedy-saintly central casting. One such man was Scott Carroll.Carroll eventually earned the scorn of mainstream classics scholars, who nicknamed him “Palmolive Indiana Jones” after a YouTube video showed him encouraging students to use the common household detergents Palmolive or Dawn to take apart Egyptian mummy masks. The ancient masks, made of recycled papyrus in the early Christian era, sometimes contain fragments of text that Carroll and other confessional scholars define as Bible-related material.

An evangelical writer in this field, Josh McDowell, scoffed at the scholars alarmed by the destruction of the masks and explicitly connected the process to a religious experience: “These biblical manuscript fragments will be used of God to bring many young people to Christ.... Pray with me that these discoveries will be blessed of God to bring people to Christ.” https://www.newsweek.com/2016/04/15/hobby-lobby-steve-green-bible-museum-washington-dc-444752.html

More on Carroll https://www.bricecjones.com/blog/more-on-the-private-collecting-of-the-indiana-jones-of-biblical-archaeology

Furthermore, the debacle surrounding the DDS fakes and the Bible Museum may have engulfed other “innocent” parties. https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/26/us/evangelicals-dead-sea-scrolls/index.html I believe Green's greed has ramped up the need for these fakes – ie he created the market for such (School of Theology at Azusa Pacific University, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. As Deana notes SBTS may not be so innocent a victim.). He doesnt give a flying fuck who may be harmed by his actions as long as he benefits. https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/26/us/evangelicals-dead-sea-scrolls/index.html

For years, Justnes and other scholars have been calling on the Greens and other evangelicals to reveal how and from whom they acquired the Dead Sea Scroll fragments. In an interview before the Bible museum opened last Fall, Steve Green told CNN that wasn't sure who sold his family the Dead Sea Scroll fragments.

"There's been different sources, but I don't know specifically where those came from." A spokesperson said Green was not available for comment about the German test results.

"They should tell us where they bought them and show their papers," Justnes said. "The physical tests are super sexy and what the public wants to hear about, but without an object's provenance, it is just unethical. And it helps the illicit market."

Were do these forged fragments come from?

Virtually all the material found after the initial 1947 discovery was sold by the Bedouins to a dealer in Bethlehem nicknamed Kando. Kando, in turn, sold these fragments to the, now known as, the Rockefeller Museum. The authenticity of the fragments was confirmed, as the archaeologists were able to find some remains of the same manuscripts in fragments left in the caves when they excavated them. Nonetheless, there has been a persistent claim ever since that Kando kept some fragments, or that the museum didn’t buy some fragments, and that these were sent by him through Lebanon to a bank vault in Switzerland before the Jordanian adoption of antiquities laws prohibiting the exportation of such items. When the materials began to surface in 2002, they were said to come either directly from this vault through Kando’s son William, or from fragments that had been sold earlier to collectors that were now available again on consignment. A few American dealers seem to have represented William Kando, the second generation in this business, in selling these fragments to collectors.

In 2016 the Museum of the Bible published what should have been a standard-setter in scholarly literature concerning the DDS. https://facesandvoices.wordpress.com/2018/11/05/open-letter-to-brill-fake-and-unprovenanced-manuscripts/ But questions arose, one of its editors, Kipp Davis, hinted in a brief note at the irregularity of the lettering on one fragment published in the volume. Davis, criticized the museum for publishing descriptions of the fragments in 2016 without fully investigating the origins of the texts.

But by the time the volume was actually published, Davis and another scholar from Norway, Årstein Justnes, began to circulate articles on the Internet arguing that some or all of these fragments were forgeries. After the publication of the results of the Schøyen tests, the majority of Dead Sea Scrolls scholars took very seriously the claim that the 70 or so fragments that came on the market after 2002 were indeed forgeries. When the Museum of the Bible received the results of the tests of its own fragments it did the only responsible thing, removing them from the exhibit cases and replacing them with others that have not yet been invalidated, those in their collection that are most likely to be authentic. Of course, the signs will stay, warning viewers that these fragments may also be forged. Don’t be surprised, however, if these fragments also turn out to be problematical. http://lawrenceschiffman.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/buyer-beware-forged-dead-sea-scrolls.pdf (I lifted Schiffman's explanation as it seems thorough, but may be a bit biased. Criticism of him includes being part of the cabal of elitists that control access to the scrolls. Some have questioned his more scholarly presentations concerning interpretation etc.)

So I want to throw this caveat out there, since this debacle began, I have heard differing understandings of what transpired concerning TmotB. I may have been wrong concerning my initial assessment concerning the museum itself in how it was handled. I still have my doubts especially concerning Green, but understand that I am severely biased where he is concerned.

Separately, critics have seized on a changing mission statement of the museum from its earliest days, when founders said they aimed to prove the authority of the Bible, to a new, more neutral goal of inviting people to learn more about the Bible. Museum president Cary Summers described the change as a natural progression as the project moved ahead.

But John Fea, a historian at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, points to the family’s goal of helping people “engage with” the Bible as a telling indication about what the Greens hope to achieve. He said the “Bible engagement” concept was popularized by the American Bible Society in the 1990s amid concern that people who owned copies of the Scriptures weren’t necessarily reading them.

Fea said advocates for this strategy ultimately hope the Bible will inspire a desire to learn more and maybe accept Christ.

“There’s a public face to this Bible engagement rhetoric and then there’s a private aspect of what it really means,” Fea said. “It debunks the whole notion that this is just a history museum.” https://wtop.com/local/2017/11/museum-of-the-bible-built-by-hobby-lobby-owner-opens-in-dc/slide/1/

But my doubts are based on the handling of how the artifacts were smuggled out of Iraq. In 2010, as a deal for the tablets was being struck, an expert on cultural property law who had been hired by Hobby Lobby warned company executives that the artifacts might have been looted from historical sites in Iraq, and that failing to determine their heritage could break the law. H/L executives and Green knew exactly what they were doing, knew it was illegal, and still did it.

Green's role in the forgery industry (whether he knows it or not)

With the 1991 full release of the DDS, new interest was spurred but with it a dark side as well. Collectors, most of whom were Evangelical Christians seeking to connect tangibly with the Bible, began to attempt to purchase fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts. Several individuals and institutions bought such fragments, believing that they were buying the real thing. Today, some 70 fragments have been identified as having surfaced on the antiquities market from 2002 on. But as we recently heard in a press release issued on October 22 by the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, regarding five of their own fragments, many if not all of these 70 fragments are almost certainly modern forgeries. http://lawrenceschiffman.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/buyer-beware-forged-dead-sea-scrolls.pdf

According to Schiffman the forged fragments have some very specific characteristics. It is the first one he mentions that of interest to us tonight (1) They are almost all Biblical, which appears to be a response to the Christian market in which collectors want to “own a piece” of Scripture.

And this goes to an earlier point, we encounter in apologetics, the use of the DDS generally for innerancy by Christians. But as I also mentioned it is just as wrong for “us” to make the sweeping statement that the DDS are fake. Only 70 fragments are currently under scrutiny, all from post 2002.

NatGeo sums it up well, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/12/inside-bible-collectors-search-other-original-christian-texts/

People of many faiths venerate religious relics. But for those who believe that God speaks through words written down by prophets and apostles in past ages, ancient texts are foundational to their faith. From artfully adorned medieval manuscripts to humble fragments of papyrus, revered texts represent tangible links to God’s appointed messengers, whether Muhammad, Moses, or Jesus Christ.

Reverence for holy writ is integral to the faith of evangelical Christians, who have become a driving force behind the search for long-lost biblical texts in desert caves, remote monasteries, and Middle Eastern antiquities markets. Critics say that the evangelical appetite for artifacts is fueling demand for looted objects—a charge borne out to some degree by recent investigations and by reports from legitimate dealers.

“Evangelicals have had a tremendous impact on the market,” says Jerusalem antiquities seller Lenny Wolfe. “The price of anything connected to the lifetime of Christ goes way up.”

Briefly, Greens role can be summed up thus, some scholars accused the Greens of buying too many artifacts too quickly, without being sure exactly where they came from, or who had owned them in the past. They made it widely known that they were buying everything. Every antiquities seller knew the Greens were buying everything and not asking questions about anything. As I mentioned, Green has been quoted as stating, “There's been different sources, but I don't know specifically where those came from.”

IOWs he doesn't care. Basically Green's greed is fueling the market. A market antiquity dealers are willing to supply no matter through fraud or smuggling. It doesn't help his cause when he has outright stated he wants to use the museum as a proselytizing device to make more Christians. Although as, the AP noted the exhibits avoided interpreting the Bible and did not delve into issues like evolution and marriage. https://wtop.com/local/2017/11/museum-of-the-bible-built-by-hobby-lobby-owner-opens-in-dc/slide/1/

The Tax angle – buying Torahs

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-museum-of-the-bible-exploits-jewish-traditionand-saves-its-evangelical-christian-donors-millions

Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby (2017), Candida R. Moss & Joel S. Baden

Simply put, Moss and Baden believe that the half-billion-dollar museum is part of a broad effort by religious conservatives to promote an evangelical view of the Bible’s history, importance, and influence on American society. The Torah scrolls at the museum play a substantial role in this project.

This is where Green's personal brand of Christianity comes into play, or I should apologetics. The MotB believes their Torah display demonstrates the consistency of Jewish Scriptures - all of these perfectly identical copies of scripture attest to the unchanging nature of the biblical text from antiquity to the present. The scriptural and textual integrity of early modern Torah scrolls is evidence of divine agency in the preservation of biblical manuscripts.

According to traditional Jewish law, decommissioned Torah scrolls are to be either buried in a Jewish cemetery or stored in perpetuity in a genizah, a dedicated synagogue space for out-of-use ritual objects. Damaged scrolls can also be restored and rededicated for ritual use, while those that survived the Nazi era are permitted to be displayed in exhibits dedicated to documenting the Holocaust, as they are, for example, at the Holocaust Museum.

For many Jews, this type of language is unsettling: it colonializes Judaism and its most sacred text, making them into part of a Christian narrative, both historically and theologically. The idea that the Bible came directly in its current form from God and never changed over the millennia is a standard position for some evangelicals, but one that, to most biblical scholars, is deeply problematic.

Another reason the museum owns so many Torah scrolls: because they are relatively cheap for the Greens to buy and, when donated to the museum, can be worth many times their purchase price in tax write-offs. Consider, the purchase of a decommissioned Torah scroll is between $1,000 and $1,500 apiece. But they could be appraised for a great deal more; $50,000 to $250,000 and even more.”

When we asked Steve Green how he decides which artifacts to donate to the museum, he confirmed that the donation process is driven by financial considerations. While the Torah purchases are a good tax deal, so is donating to your own museum.

Only after the fragments were published and put on display did Museum of the Bible begin to study their authenticity in depth. By this time, Hobby Lobby had donated them to the museum, and the Green family had likely received their tax break for their donation. In their 2017 book Bible Nation, biblical scholars Candida Moss and Joel Baden report that, for their philanthropic activities, the Green family follows a set ratio of appraised value-to-purchase price of 3:1 — that is, an appraised value (and therefore a tax write-off) at least three times the purchase price. This ratio is reportedly followed for all of their various donations, including antiquities. Due diligence after the donation is convenient, in that the profit has already been made.

Tax breaks for donation to museums are a common device to encourage philanthropy. What makes MOTB unique is that the Greens are donating the artifacts to their own museum — which is legally a separate entity from Hobby Lobby. To put it another way, the government is effectively paying the Greens to amass a collection of dubious antiquities. https://hyperallergic.com/467318/dead-sea-scrolls-at-the-museum-of-the-bible-revealed-as-forgeries/

http://illicitculturalproperty.com/taxpayers-paid-triple-for-the-forgeries-at-the-museum-of-the-bible/

Why are the DDS important to Christianity?

Before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered 70 years ago, the earliest and most complete version of the Hebrew Bible was from the

9th century. For many believers it is a question of whether their faith is based on fact or fiction? As Green notes, “When visitors to our museum see an ancient text, they’re seeing evidence that what they believe isn’t just a bunch of fairy tales.”

In order for what Green states to be true, one would have to rely on the presuppositional argument that god exists AND he spoke to the authors of the bible. BUT no autographs exist. The bible as we known it only survives because the various books were hand copied countless times until the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. No two copies are exactly alike.

Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (2005) Bart Ehrman

While it’s true that more than 5,500 Greek New Testament manuscripts have been found, close to 95 percent of those copies come from the ninth to the 16th centuries. Only about 125 date back to the second or third centuries, and none to the first.

Many in Christendom believe the DDS eliminates those discrepancy using the argument we don’t have the autographs of any Greco-Roman literature. Or, the thousands of NT variants are rendered moot because scholars have such a wealth of texts to study and compare, they’ve been able to identify those errors and largely recover the original wording.

With a growing number of predominantly Evangelical Christian collectors willing to pay upwards of six figures for the tiniest snippet of “holy” text, there is a clear motive for forgery. Increasingly upon expert inspection, these fragments are thought to have been written by a modern hand. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/12/inside-bible-collectors-search-other-original-christian-texts/

"The sellers of these fragments have preyed on the well-meaning faith of Evangelical Christians who are compelled by the idea of owning a piece of ‘the Bible that Jesus read,'” said Davis in 2017. “This is more than a simple form of manipulation,” he said. Given how seriously Evangelicals “are committed to their notion of sanctity of scripture, there is a danger of inflicting collective psychological harm.” https://www.timesofisrael.com/five-proven-dead-sea-scroll-forgeries-only-the-tip-of-the-iceberg-says-scholar/

So , no matter how one looks at it, the DDS are agenda driven whether Jewish or Christian or even secular.

As a side note::

That belief—that the more we learn about the Bible, the more we can investigate how accurately it has been transmitted over the millennia—may account for a program launched in the summer of 2010: the Green Scholars Initiative. Designed to facilitate the academic study of the artifacts in the Green Collection, the program has focused on early biblical manuscripts. For the past five years, a growing group of scholars has taken part in this project.

For papyrologists on the lookout for unpublished texts to work with, it’s an exciting opportunity. The initiative doesn’t just provide scholars with access to rare and previously unknown materials that wouldn’t otherwise be available for study. It also provides them with access to the most-advanced technologies for pursuing that study, funds their travel to conferences and colloquia, and all but guarantees an eventual outlet for publication. But rather than make its holdings available to any scholar who might want to use the collection for legitimate research, as is the usual procedure, the Green Scholars Initiative carefully selects individual scholars to work on its material, seemingly without regard for traditional scholarly standards. Highly qualified scholars seeking publication rights to precious, never-before-seen papyri have been denied permission unless they agreed to join the Green Scholars Initiative, while scholars who had never before touched an ancient manuscript have been recruited to participate. In 2013, the then-director of the initiative, Jerry Pattengale, stated that “no religious requirement for involvement” was in place. But it’s worth noting that almost all the institutions with which the initiative’s scholars are affiliated are explicitly Christian, and most are evangelical. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/01/can-hobby-lobby-buy-the-bible/419088/

That anti-intellectualism pervades the Greens' ambitions, and it lays bare the family's agenda. Among other things, Moss and Baden report that David Green once admonished the collection's director, "You will not use this collection to undermine the King James Bible," reflecting the conservative evangelical view that "the King James is not really a translation of the Bible at all; it is simply the Bible." https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-one-evangelical-family-is-reshaping-politics-law-and-religious-research/2017/11/16/ba043b8e-b998-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html?utm_term=.2fec220fc934

Resources::