So how does a man go from great scholarly heights to the alleged sale of stolen papyri? How is it that Hobby Lobby (MoTB) is suing Christie's over the importation of a illicit tablet fragment seized by the US gov't?
A few questions we hope to answer tonight as we explore not only forgeries in the antiquities market but the illicit trade of true antiquities.
Tonight Morgan, Dee and I are going to be looking at the issue of forgeries in the antiquities market. (A topic we covered previously on BTTP.) Specifically surrounding the DSS and similar.
But some house cleaning first before we begin.
1] We are going to assume y'all know what the pre-2002 DSS are.
2] Although the term Dead Sea Scrolls usually refers to the scrolls found at Qumran, there have been scrolls found in caves at other sites in the Judean Desert that are considered Dead Sea Scrolls. Such as,
In 2017, it was announced a 12th Dead Sea Scrolls Cave was Found in Israel
3] Our focus is going to be on the DSS fragments post-2002 and a few other alleged antiquities.
In 2002, new fragments [of DSSs] 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. As The Atlantic notes, “We’re buyers of items to tell the story,” Green once said. And the story of Christianity he wanted to tell was of the Bible as a God-given record of “absolute authority and reliability.”
4] Not everything we will speak to tonight are forgeries.
That's the back drop we are working within. But, before we jump in, it is important to put modern forgeries into a broader context. Dr Christopher Rollston of Rollston Epigraphy notes 8 points, these four are just the highlights.
(1) First and foremost, it should be emphasized that textual forgeries have a very long history, going back to Ancient and Medieval times.
(2) Textual forgeries abounded during the late 19th century and the early 20th century. IOWs, forgeries are not a new issue.
(3) During the final decades of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st century, epigraphic forgeries continued to abound.
Forged Dead Sea Scroll fragments are part of a much broader phenomenon.
While I do not believe early forgeries were as agenda driven as today, they still existed. Today, though, it is a whole new world.
As David Gee states, “What is surprising is how Christian groups like this [referring to Green and his MoTB] still cling to fraudulent artifacts like these Dead Sea Scrolls, as if to grasp at anything they can use to support their mythology.”
The nature of religious belief leaves adherents vulnerable to frauds like this because they are taught that miracles are commonplace and that they shouldn’t ask critical questions about them. The stories of ancient secrets confined in scrolls or archaic statues is too promising for some scammers to resist.
From CNN in regard to the forgeries,
,,,many of the fragments bear snippets from the Hebrew Bible, which is unusual because less than a quarter of all known Dead Sea Scrolls pertain to Scripture. But evangelicals and others are known to pay higher prices for them.
,,,
depending on their perceived historical, and, for some evangelicals, spiritual value.
They [the forgers and in some cases the buyers] are much more sophisticated with, IMO, a much more targeted mission.
To prove my point, take into consideration a rare, 2,700-year-old papyrus with Hebrew script that had been looted from a cave in the Judean Desert. As noted in 2016,
This is the most ancient mentioning of Jerusalem outside of the Bible in Hebrew script," said Eitan Klein, who holds a doctorate in archaeology and is the deputy director of the Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery, which seized the papyrus.
While it may not be a forgery, it has both geo-political ramifications as well as religious for both Jews and Christians. This is the most ancient mentioning of Jerusalem outside of the Bible in Hebrew script and one of only two Hebrew papyri that date as far back as the seventh century B.C.
Or,
for example, in 2017 Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in
Fort Worth, Texas purchased nine
unpublished
Dead
Sea Scroll fragments.
In
its news release the fragments included writings from the biblical
books of Exodus, Leviticus, Daniel, Psalms and Deuteronomy. One
of the fragments holds passages from Leviticus 18, a biblical passage
that forbids incest and homosexuality.
Do we begin with Hobby Lobby “accidentally” smuggling valuable artifacts from Iraq in 2017 (see also:: https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/united-states-files-civil-action-forfeit-thousands-ancient-iraqi-artifacts-imported) via the black market, which MAY (key word) have funded ISIS.
Hobby Lobby agreed to forfeit thousands of artifacts from modern-day Iraq and pay a $3 million fine to resolve a civil action the Justice Department brought against the company, according to court documents.
The DOJ said the company received the falsely labeled artifacts from a United Arab Emirates-based supplier.
The artifacts, ancient cuneiform tablets and clay bullae, were smuggled into the United States through the United Arab Emirates and Israel, Justice officials said,,,
,,,
Despite the warnings from the cultural property law expert, Hobby Lobby went forward with a deal to buy 5,548 artifacts for $1.6 million in December 2010, a deal "fraught with red flags," the DOJ said.
Or, the revelation from Oct of 2018 that 5 of the MoTB'a scroll fragments were fake. As CNN noted, experts had been warning the museum for years. But now they had definitive proof that some of the fragments had proven to be fraudulent.
But some scholars have been raising questions about supposed Dead Sea Scroll fragments for years, saying that unscrupulous antiquities dealers are preying on evangelicals like the Greens, making millions in the process.
Those same scholars questioned the Greens' fragments even before the museum opened,,,
The museum's reaction at the time, trying to claim that it had been upholding high standards for the entire time.
“Though we had hoped the testing would render different results, this is an opportunity to educate the public on the importance of verifying the authenticity of rare biblical artifacts, the elaborate testing process undertaken and our commitment to transparency,” said Jeffrey Kloha, the chief curatorial officer for Museum of the Bible.
As an educational institution entrusted with cultural heritage, the museum upholds and adheres to all museum and ethical guidelines on collection care, research and display.”
But some scholars have been raising questions about supposed Dead Sea Scroll fragments for years, saying that unscrupulous antiquities dealers are preying on evangelicals like the Greens, making millions in the process.
Or, how about the Lunar Bible fiasco.
The Museum of the Bible in Washington quietly replaced an artifact purported to be one of a handful of miniature Bibles that a NASA astronaut carried to the moon in 1971 after an expert questioned its authenticity.
,,,
The museum replaced the original microfilm Bible with one that was donated by an Oklahoma woman who wrote a book about the Apollo Prayer League, which arranged for Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell to carry tiny Bibles to the moon.
“We know for sure that one on display right now went to the moon, but we could not verify for sure that the one we had originally on display had gone to the moon,” museum spokeswoman Heather Cirmo said. “We couldn’t disprove it, it just wasn’t certain.”
Or, flash forward closer to today (March 2020), the MoTB has confirmed that all 16 of the museum’s Dead Sea Scroll fragments are modern forgeries.
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.
Nah,,,
we're going to jump right into the deep end. Scratch
that, we have to do a bit more backtracking, then we'll jump in.
As
I mentioned, about 2001/2, new
DSS began appearing.
Much wrangling took place
that included:
Biblical Archaeology Review and completion of the Dead Sea Scrolls Publication Project.
Martin Schoyen and the Schoyen Collection of Oslo, Norway with his somewhat prophetic interview statement of a year later, “Schøyen cannot dismiss the idea that there may yet be some scrolls locked away in a vault, increasing in value each passing day.”
As well as the involvement of William Kando and many other known individuals in the trade.
What is interesting to note,
By uncritically publishing the new fragments in the years from 2004 to 2016, the scientific community sent a strong signal to the antiquities market that it really did not care too much about provenance. This not only stimulated the market, it was an enormous encouragement to every looter under the (Judaean desert) sun.
With this later qualifier,
The question of authenticity should not be treated as a simple dichotomy. An unprovenanced object that passes every test for authenticity can obviously still be of dubious legal status (looted, stolen, smuggled, or forged from genuine archaeological components, etc.). In the face of the complexity of fraudulent praxis within the field of the antiquities trade, physical testing is ultimately a cul de sac.
IOWs,
Several features of these fragments should have raised suspicions. For one thing, they were coming out of nowhere, and they were also characterized by a clumsy and hesitant handwriting. In essence they did not look like Dead Sea Scrolls. They even had a curious distribution: Less than 25% of the Dead Sea Scrolls that were found between 1947 and 1956 are biblical, whereas the number is over 85% for the new fragments. We should ask ourselves why is that? It is probably because the market has a higher demand for biblical fragments. For American evangelicals especially, they are worth more.
In their eagerness to publish the new fragments, scholars failed to perform due diligence regarding the fragments’ origin and ownership history. This means that even scholars who did not participate in actual forging of manuscripts facilitated and stimulated the market in dubious objects.
The most striking feature of the post-2002 Dead Sea Scrolls scandal is the pervading negligence. The trade in unprovenanced manuscripts is dependent on actors authenticating, introducing, marketing, facilitating sales, brokering, legitimizing dubious acquisition, defending illicit trade, lending professional authority, publishing, composing provenance narratives, and pumping up prices. Without scholarly involvement in these endeavors, the market in the post-2002 fragments would be unimaginable.
For simplicity sake, IMO, what this speaks to is the difference between pre-2002 DSS and post-2002 DSS. As Justnes and Munch Rasmussen point out, “Less than 25% of the Dead Sea Scrolls that were found between 1947 and 1956 are biblical, whereas the number is over 85% for the new fragments.” That to me, points to an agenda driven motive.
A second bit of backtracking has to do with Martin Schoyen and the Schoyen Collection. Like H/L some of his collection have been deemed fake.
From
early 2014 the core team working on the Schøyen frag-mentshad
entertained the option that a substantial part of the fragments
recently bought by private collectors were forged. Since the
publi-cation of Gleanings, important contributions have shed more
light on the remarkable appearance of more than fifty “Judaean
Desert frag-ments” after 2003. The 2016 publication of the
thirteen fragments of the Museum of the Bible added more material to
the discussion, as Langlois noted palaeographical similarities both
with the disquali-fied Schøyen fragments and fragments published in
Gleanings and concluded that the thirteen manuscripts in the Museum
of the Bible were all forgeries. In the volume itself, Kipp Davis
noted disturb-ing palaeographical and physical features with a number
of fragments. Further, Martin Schøyen disclosed new information on
communication with William Kando prior to his 2009–2010
acquisitions.
To borrow The Atlantic's sub-title, “[a] renowned scholar claimed that he discovered a first-century gospel fragment. Now he’s facing allegations of antiquities theft, cover-up, and fraud.”
The debate that opened Pandora's Box took place February 1, 2012 between Bart Ehrman, and Daniel Wallace. In that debate Wallace claimed verses from Mark have been discovered on a piece of papyrus and dated to the first century. Known as First Century Mark, long story short, it was incorrect dating.
According to The Atlantic,
Sought by universities and cultural institutions the world over, Obbink taught at Columbia before leaving, in 1995, for Oxford, home to the world’s largest collection of manuscripts from the ancient world: half a million papyri that a pair of young Oxford scholars had excavated in Egypt a century earlier. Obbink’s post as a general editor of the collection—the media sometimes called him its “director,” though officially no such title exists—made him one of his field’s most powerful figures. Wallace had not overstated his qualifications.
But years passed with no news of this “first-century Mark,” as the phantom manuscript came to be called. There was no book in 2013, no exhibit when the museum opened in 2017. Wallace’s blog filled with hundreds of comments. “It has been 5 years,” readers complained. “Hurry up!” One man simply quoted from the Book of Proverbs: “Expectation postponed makes the heart sick.”
Yet in 2018, when Obbink finally published the fragment, it made certain hearts even sicker. The Greens would see their dreams of a first-century gospel dashed. The University of Oxford would be thrust into the news in a labyrinthine case of alleged antiquities theft, cover-up, and fraud. And one of the most illustrious figures in classics, though protesting his innocence, would find himself at the center of a trans-Atlantic investigation.
But before we jump too deep, Dee is going to explain the money aspect of the she-bang just to give you an idea of the amounts of money being thrown into the ring.
[Årstein Justnes & Ludvik A. Kjeldsberg, from the University of Agder have put together a tentative timeline of acquisitions with prices paid(2019).]
What has struck me, and this is an observation from 2016 “It is remarkable that in all instances where there is legible text, virtually every fragment in private collections has been identified with a previously known composition” It is almost as if someone was paid to create these fragments, as noted above, “[M]any 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.“
Even
if the fragments were real, they would only confirm how long (and in
what manner) these stories have been told, not that something
supernatural was happening thousands of years ago.
As Kipp Davis noted to CNN at the time,
Davis, who studied the fragments for the Museum of the Bible, said Monday's news about the fakes felt like bittersweet vindication. His takeaway: Evangelicals and others whose faith motivates them to collect artifacts should be very careful with antiquities dealers eager to pique their interest in supposedly ancient scraps of scripture.
"These good intentions that draw from a place of faith are subject to some really gross manipulations," Davis said, "and that is a big part of what has happened here."
As an atheist I am not threatened by the DSS. They prove nothing in regards to Christianity. But to some Christians like Steve Green and his fellow theocrats, they believe the DSS prove the authenticity, the divine inspiration, of the Bible. That the DDS some how prove Christianity as true. It is the primary reason that fragment containing scripture are valued much higher.
Back to Obbink,,,
CV aside, as that is now a big ole fat question mark left for another day, Obbink was once a force to be reckoned with. Maybe he still is. But a question Dee, Morgan, and I wrestle with is – why? I have a really difficult time believing it was all for money, “As the years passed, Obbink seemed more interested in monetizing his work—a common enough practice in the sciences, but rare in the humanities.”
Maybe I am too naive!!
Obbink
was considered by many to be as unbiased as they come – no agenda,
no obvious religious convictions. Some also say that changed after
connecting with MoTB.
It's at this point, according
to the Atlantic,
things get rather weird. And by weird, I mean some of the names
involved are folks I used to “admire” and had dealings with
during my schooling – ie
I have actually attended lectures by both McDowell and Wallace.
In November 2015, a video appeared on YouTube, filmed on a smartphone from the pews of a church in Charlotte, North Carolina. From the pulpit, where he was addressing a conference of conservative Christians, Scott Carroll spoke of seeing a Gospel of Mark from the first century “at Oxford University at Christ Church College … in the possession of an outstanding, well-known, eminent classicist … Dirk Obbink,” who thought the papyrus might date to as early as a.d. 70—the same year most scholars think the gospel was first composed.
This was no longer Daniel Wallace telling a vague, secondhand story on a debate stage. This was an eyewitness with names, dates, and places. The video so unnerved the Egypt Exploration Society that it began a review of all its unpublished New Testament papyri. It learned that one of Obbink’s researchers had found a small fragment of Mark in its collection in 2011, a piece photographed by a curator as early as the 1980s but never before identified.
Was this the discovery that Wallace had announced at the University of North Carolina—and that Carroll had confirmed in the church video nearly four years later?
Confronted by the EES, Obbink admitted to having a fragment of Mark from Oxyrhynchus in his office and showing it to Carroll. But he insisted that he’d never said it was for sale. The EES instructed him “to prepare it for publication as soon as practicable in order to avoid further speculation about its date and content.”
Obbink
could no doubt foresee the consequences of publication: The moment
images of the fragment became public, Pattengale, Carroll, and
Wallace would recognize
the papyrus as the one he’d allegedly offered to the Greens half a
decade earlier. They would notice he’d published it in the official
book series for EES papyri—exposing it as never his to sell.
Perhaps most distressing, they’d see Obbink’s new dating: In a
book of serious scholarship, he’d assign their supposed
“first-century Mark” to the late second or early third century,
making it far less remarkable.
Simply put, Obbink got caught in a really big lie, a lie that time revealed was a whopper. A very convoluted one at that.
The Museum of the Bible began sending to the EES images of every papyrus the Greens had purchased—from any seller. Comparing them against the society’s own photographic inventory, EES officials spotted 13 of its biblical fragments. From written descriptions provided by Hobby Lobby, it identified four more: the gospels that Obbink’s sales contract dated to the first century, though none, the EES said, were in fact that old.
Fifteen of the EES’s fragments had been sold to the Greens by Obbink, for more than $1.5 million, a source who has seen the figures told me. Among them was the Romans scrap Carroll pretended to pull from a mummy mask at Baylor in 2012
As the Daily Beast summarized,
At the time of purchase the Green family, the owners of Hobby Lobby, planned to donate the fragments to Museum of the Bible, the charitable organization and D.C.-based museum they founded. Statements released today by Museum of the Bible and the Egypt Exploration Society reveal that the Mark fragment was just the beginning of the scandal. Investigations have revealed that (so far) 13 pieces in the Museum’s collection are in fact the rightful property of the Oxford-based nonprofit Egypt Exploration Society.
The artifacts in question are all Bible and Bible-related fragments; 12 were written on papyrus and one on parchment. In other words, just the kinds of things that fit the Green Family and Museum of the Bible’s interests. They are part of the Oxyrhynchus Collection, a vast collection of fragments from ancient trash-piles in the city of Oxyrhynchus (modern Al-Bahnasa) in Egypt. The collection was excavated in the late 19th to early 20th centuries and most of it is now the property of the Egypt Exploration Society, which acts as curator of an Oxford-based collection.
The Obbink saga is far from over, and what we've presented here is an overview of sorts. It's such a simple but yet complex debacle I'm not sure we've done it justice. (See Morgan's timeline)
With that said, we have talked a bit about Obbink, but not really the role of Hobby Lobby/MoTB.
The invoice released by Museum of the Bible in June says nothing about the origins of the papyrus fragment other than just “Egypt.” This is legally insufficient. There should be an export date, supporting documentation, and a history of ownership. An enquiry from The Daily Beast to Hobby Lobby, last June, asking for additional provenance details for the sale did not receive any response. The Museum of the Bible, for its part, is not entirely in the clear: any museum accepting donations or loans to its collection should ask for full documentation of the legal status of the item.
As Moss notes,
If the allegations are true, they reveal a perfect storm of complicity between seller, buyer, and institution in which an unscrupulous academic was able to remove and sell valuable historical artifacts; a buyer was willing to look the other way on questions of provenance and legitimate ownership; and a museum failed to do due diligence when accepting donations.
IMO nothing highlights Hobby Lobby's role than their lawsuit against Christie's.
Neither Christie’s nor Hobby Lobby is accused of a crime in these dealings. But in March, British police arrested Dirk Obbink, an American-born Oxford professor of classics, on grounds that he had sold Hobby Lobby fragments of 1st century gospels that belonged to a charitable society. Obbink, once the star of his field, who had been a dealer and a paid adviser to Hobby Lobby (and a former recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant for his research on ancient papyrus), is now free while police investigate those sales. Obbink says the charges were made to damage his reputation.
While H/L is not accused of a crime in this case, I believe it is their greed that allowed for such to occur.
The 3,500-year-old artefact, from what is now Iraq, bears text from the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world's oldest works of literature.
Prosecutors allege that an auction house deliberately withheld information about its origins.
Hobby Lobby said it was co-operating with government investigations.
It bought the tablet from the auction house in a private sale in 2014 for $1.67m (£1.36m) for display at the Museum of the Bible in Washington.
The office of the US attorney for the Eastern District of New York says the tablet was illegally imported into the US.
As made clear by the United States Attorney General’s complaint against the item (for legal reasons the governmental complaints are brought against objects and not people), Hobby Lobby didn’t do anything wrong. They were shown faked provenance documents. In contrast to earlier seizures of Hobby Lobby acquisitions, first reported in The Daily Beast by Joel Baden and me in 2015, the Green family were clearly and overtly deceived. Certainly, their willingness to spend large sums of money on Bible-related antiquities and their history of being cavalier about provenance helped make them a target for what Steve Green has called “unscrupulous dealers.” Allegedly, that group may now include one of the world’s most famous and highly regarded auction houses.
And to be clear, even those with the best intentions get suckered, whether by forgery or illicit trade.
The fragment was first presented by Harvard Divinity School Professor Karen L. King, who suggested that the papyrus contained a fourth-century Coptic translation of a gospel likely composed in Greek in the late second century. Following an investigative Atlantic article by Ariel Sabar published online in June 2016,[King conceded that the evidence now "presses in the direction of forgery."
Radiocarbon dating determined that the physical papyrus is medieval, and further analysis of the language led most scholars to conclude it was copied from the Gospel of Thomas. The fragment's provenance and similarity to another fragment from the same anonymous owner widely believed to be fake further supported a consensus among scholars that the text is a modern forgery written on a scrap of medieval papyrus.
And that brings us to a burning question, how do we know modern forgeries are forgeries?
According to Torleif ELGVIN and Michael LANGLOIS in their paper LOOKING BACK: (MORE) DEAD SEA SCROLLS FORGERIES IN THE SCHØYEN COLLECTION , Kipp Davis notes 8 problematic categories.
small size, (2) dark color, (3) coarse texture, (4) poor scribal skill, (5) strange formation of letters including bleeding of ink, (6) misaligned lines or letters, (7) palaeographical inconsistency, (8) textual plausibility (including surprising textual variants and line-for-line alignment with published text editions).
To that ELGVIN and LANGLOIS added a 9th category. “Further, another category should be added: an undocumented or unreliable provenance for fragments not known before 2003.”
Their overall conclusion,
Out of 37 manuscripts or groups of fragments, 16 are probably authentic, 19 are most likely forgeries, and 2 are debated.
,,,
The presence of around 19 likely Dead Sea scroll forgeries in The Schøyen Collection is, however, worrisome. Since 2003 the Kando family seems to have channeled few authentic manuscripts to private collections: from the first wave of small fragments in 2003–2004 to the larger wave in 2009–2010, most of the Dead Sea scrolls that have appeared on the market are at best suspect—and the Kandos are not the only vendors involved. Fragments from these recent waves have too easily entered our textual databases. Dealers, middlemen, collectors, and scholars who have brought new fragments into the market or opened them to scholar ship need to disclose all information they have about the origin and odysseys of these fragments. Among scholars, questions are raised about ethical aspects involved in the study and publication of unprovenanced texts. But it should be noted that it was the cross-disciplinary teamwork carried out on the Schøyen texts and artefacts that documented the presence of a large number of fake scrolls, some of them revealing the hands of scholarly informed forgers who are yet to be identified.
So,,, taking this all into consideration, what are we left with.
First, I have no issue with the “real” DSS nor what they demonstrate – simply put, the value of the scribes in copying material. But as I stated prior, the DSS prove nothing in regards to the truth claims of Judaism or Christianity, the existence of God, nor the divinity of Christ.
The forged DSS OTOH, demonstrate much. They demonstrate not only greed, but desperation on both the part of the forger as well as the sucker that purchased such.
Third, I am afraid it could put a big ole fat hairy question mark on archeology as a whole - specifically biblical archeology. A field I actually find quite fascinating
Seriously, it does leave me with question of, how low must one go to “prove” their mythology?
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