The Museum of the Bible in Washington has removed five Dead Sea Scroll fragments from its exhibit this week after testing raised suspicions about their authenticity.
The museum, a $500 million endeavor largely funded by the evangelical owner of Hobby Lobby, announced the results of the tests Monday, revealing that five fragments showed "characteristics inconsistent with ancient origin."
The Dead Sea Scrolls are considered the oldest copies of biblical books in the world.
The analysis was performed by a German research institution, which analyzed the ink and sediment layers of the fragments, said Heather Cirmo, a spokesman for the Museum of the Bible, on Tuesday. The report cannot be made public, she said, because modern forgers could use that information to create better forgeries. "Given the preponderance of evidence," she added, "one may conclude they are fake," though it is impossible to trace the exact origin of the artifacts.
The five fragments were removed from the exhibit. Two other fragments, which came from the same batch, are also presumed fake, Cirmo said. The museum, which opened last year, has nine other fragments that will also be tested, she said; only three are on display.
"From the beginning, the museum has been very transparent about the fact that they don't know whether the fragments that they possessed are authentic," Cirmo said, information that was noted in display signs and on the museum's website. The museum also conducted two earlier research projects on its Dead Sea Scroll fragments.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, which comprise more than 800 documents, were written between 200 B.C. and A.D. 70, and contain parts of every book of the Old Testament except for the Book of Esther, as well as detailed information about every aspect of Jewish life from that time period. The first of the writings were discovered in 1947 in a cave near the shore of the Dead Sea and are believed to have been produced by a Jewish sect known as the Essenes.
Only a handful of the scrolls were found intact; most are fragments that scholars have reconstructed into hundreds of different manuscripts. Nearly all are housed in Jerusalem.
But because Bedouins -- not scholars -- discovered the scrolls in the late 1940s and early '50s, some researchers were led to believe that more fragments might exist, said Robert Duke, dean of the School of Theology at Azusa Pacific University.
Starting in the early 2000s, new, tiny fragments began to appear, some containing only a handful of words.
"Since 2002, there have been a series of exhibitions that have featured Dead Sea Scrolls fragments that were held in private collections supposedly from these early days," said Duke, a co-editor on a volume of research that was published in 2016 about fragments in the museum's collection.
Gary Rendsburg, a professor of Jewish studies at Rutgers University, said the sudden emergence of new ancient artifacts was greeted with excitement but also questioned by several scholars.
"There were those who immediately said, 'These have to be forgeries,'" Rendsburg said. "There couldn't possibly be -- from the exploration from the 1940s and '50s -- dozens of fragments sitting around that look like they came out of the cave yesterday."
Jeffrey Kloha, chief curatorial officer for Museum of the Bible, said that he had hoped for different results, but added that it presented "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."
The Museum of the Bible has faced criticism in the past for buying 5,500 ancient clay tablets from an unnamed dealer, a 2010 purchase that prosecutors said was filled with "red flags" and smuggled into the United States from Iraq. Hobby Lobby agreed to forfeit the items and pay a $3 million fine.
Religion on 10/27/2018