Museum of the Bible Scroll Fragments

How Sixteen Fragments Reached Washington

Between 1947 and 1956 roughly nine hundred manuscripts came out of the caves around Qumran, and by the end of that period the supply had stopped. Then, from about 2002, small inscribed scraps began appearing on the antiquities market, offered as newly surfaced Dead Sea Scroll fragments and sold at high prices to collectors, seminaries and universities, mostly in the United States. Dozens of such post-2002 pieces are known, spread across collectors and institutions. Sixteen of them were acquired by the collection that became the Museum of the Bible, which opened in Washington in November 2017.

Thirteen of the fragments were published in a scholarly volume in 2016. Almost at once, specialists in the Judean Desert manuscripts raised concerns — the way the ink sat on the surface, the shape of certain letters, the way each fragment happened to carry a well-known and quotable passage. The museum's response is the part of this story that matters most. In October 2018 it announced that testing at the German federal materials institute had found that five fragments then on display showed characteristics inconsistent with ancient origin, and it took them off display. It then commissioned an examination of the entire collection.

That examination was carried out by C. Loll of Georgetown University, founder and director of the firm Art Fraud Insights, with a team of conservators and materials scientists, and was paid for by the museum itself. The methods were the ordinary ones of scientific art examination: multispectral and reflectance transformation imaging, 3D microscopy, and on a subset of pieces a full elemental and molecular profile using infrared spectroscopy, macro X-ray fluorescence, scanning electron microscopy and micro-Raman spectroscopy.

The Verdict, Published by the Owner

The report ran to 212 pages and was presented at a symposium in Washington on 13 March 2020, with the full text given to the invited respondents beforehand. Its conclusion, in the words of the investigator who led it, was that after an exhaustive review of the imaging and analysis none of the textual fragments in the collection are authentic, and that each one shows characteristics suggesting a deliberate forgery made in the twentieth century to imitate a genuine Dead Sea Scroll fragment.

The mechanism was straightforward once it was visible. Most of the pieces were made from ancient leather rather than the prepared parchment the real scrolls use — old leather being cheap, plentiful and genuinely old, which defeats a radiocarbon test on the material. The surfaces were coated to imitate the colour and texture of scroll skin. The ink was applied in modern times, and in places it had pooled into cracks that could only have formed long after the writing would have been done.

The museum did not bury the finding. It commissioned the work, published the report, and built a two-day event around it at which specialists who had been given all 212 pages beforehand responded to it; its chief curatorial officer said plainly that no other institution holding post-2002 fragments had done the same. The public half of that event, set for 15 March, was called off as the health emergency of that week took hold — the museum stayed open that weekend and closed from the Monday — which is why the story reached most people as a news item rather than as a scholarly occasion.

Why This Belongs in a Bible Study App

This article is here because the institution that was taken in was ours. The Museum of the Bible was founded and funded by evangelical Christians, staffed in part by evangelical scholars, and built to make the case for Scripture to the public. It bought forgeries. The temptation for a Christian publication is to skip that or to file it under someone else's failure, and the reason to refuse the temptation is not modesty — it is that a reader who learns this elsewhere, after being told only the encouraging things, will reasonably conclude that everything else was curated too.

There is also a straightforward lesson in it about how the deception worked, and it is not about credulity. Every one of these fragments came without provenance. There was no cave, no excavation record, no chain of custody back to a findspot — only a dealer, a price and a story. Wherever provenance is absent, the object cannot be checked against anything but itself, and a forger's whole job is to make the object survive that examination. The market for biblical antiquities is large, the supply of genuine material is fixed, and the gap between the two is filled by exactly this.

What the episode does not touch is the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves. The manuscripts excavated from the caves between 1947 and 1956 have a findspot, an excavation record and a mountain of published analysis; they are among the best-attested ancient manuscripts in existence, and nothing in the 2020 report bears on them at all. The forgeries were made because the real thing is real and valuable. Distinguishing the two is what the report did, at the owner's expense, and publishing it is more to the museum's credit than a shelf of genuine fragments would have been.

Scripture references

• Deuteronomy 4:2 — You shall not add to the word which I command you, nor take away from it
• Proverbs 30:6 — Don't add to his words, lest he reprove you and you be found a liar
• 1 Thessalonians 5:21 — Test all things, and hold firmly that which is good — the instruction the museum eventually followed
• Proverbs 14:15 — A simple man believes everything, but the prudent man carefully considers his ways

Sources

• Holding institutionMuseum of the Bible, "A Journey for the Truth: Investigating the Recent Dead Sea Scrolls Fragments" — Museum of the Bible — the owner of the fragments, publishing the finding against itself · Museum newsroom, March 2020. Carries C. Loll's conclusion verbatim, the list of analytical methods used, the 2018 German federal materials institute result on five fragments, and the 2016 publication of thirteen of themSupports: The verdict, the methods, the sequence of testing, and the museum's own account of its decision
• ScholarshipC. Loll and Art Fraud Insights, Museum of the Bible Dead Sea Scroll Collection: Scientific Research and Analysis — Colette Loll, founder and director of Art Fraud Insights, with a team of scientific specialists · A report of 212 pages, commissioned and funded by the Museum of the Bible and presented at its symposium on 13 March 2020Supports: The full technical basis for the conclusion that none of the sixteen fragments is authentic
• ScholarshipC. Rollston, "The Forger Among Us: The Museum of the Bible Dead Sea Scrolls and the Recent History of Epigraphic Forgeries" — Christopher Rollston, George Washington University · Rollston Epigraphy, 15 March 2020. Places these fragments in the wider pattern of market forgeries in Northwest Semitic epigraphy. Served over plain httpSupports: The reading of this episode as one case in a long-running pattern rather than an isolated accident

Further reading

• Museum of the Bible: the conference announcing the testing results

Reflect

The museum paid for the investigation that embarrassed it, and then published the result. When was the last time you went looking for evidence that you were wrong?