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On the fourth floor of the Museum of the Bible, a sweeping permanent exhibit tells the story of how the ancient scripture became the world’s most popular book. A warmly lit sanctum at the exhibit’s heart reveals some of the museum’s most prized possessions: fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient texts that include the oldest known surviving copies of the Hebrew Bible.
But now, the Washington, D.C. museum has confirmed a bitter truth about the fragments’ authenticity. On Friday, independent researchers funded by the Museum of the Bible announced that all 16 of the museum’s Dead Sea Scroll fragments are modern forgeries that duped outside collectors, the museum’s founder, and some of the world’s leading biblical scholars. Officials unveiled the findings at an academic conference hosted by the museum.
Most of the 100,000 real Dead Sea Scroll fragments are displayed in Jerusalem at the Israel Museum’s Shrine of the Book. They were discovered in the Qumran caves in the West Bank in 1947 and are considered the most important historical discovery about the Hebrew Bible. “That pushed our knowledge of the biblical text back one thousand years from what was available at the time,” said Jeffrey Kloha, the Museum of the Bible’s chief curatorial officer.
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.
originally posted by: visitedbythem
Your title is misleading and false.
originally posted by: kloejen
originally posted by: visitedbythem
Your title is misleading and false.
Corrected.
I was reading a few different news articles on this, and took the title from there. My bad.
Actually, this is almost certainly the work of the aboutamm brothers, famous forgers from Egypt who are actually wanted in several countries for their fraudulent activities. While the Bible museum may have been an easy target, so was National Geographic, who paid for "the gospel of Judas "in 2006. It was an obvious forgery, written with iron all ink about 300 years too early, on papyrus that was beginning to flake. The only time papyrus flakes is when it is washed with an acid, to dissolve the existing ink.
originally posted by: MrBlaq
Unfortunately many so-called Christians rarely read
their Bibles. So don't expect any to peruse the
documents.
The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English
have been out for a very long time.
If you desire Church members to keep
their faith, then by all means you best
steer them away.