Dead Sea Scrolls down: Museum of the Bible buys fake artefacts
The Dead Sea Scrolls are some of the world’s most valuable religious artefacts. Two millennia old, they include scraps of the early Hebrew bible and offer an insight into the world from which Christianity emerged.
So when the billionaire businessman and evangelical Christian Steve Green opened the Museum of the Bible in Washington last year, five scroll fragments took centre stage.
There was only one problem. They were fakes.
A team of German experts analysed five of the museum’s 16 pieces after doubts were raised two years ago.
They announced this week they had “characteristics inconsistent with ancient origin”.
The museum immediately withdrew the pieces from display and replaced them with another three, which will also be tested for authenticity.
It was something of an educational moment, museum staff said.
“This is an opportunity to educate the public on the importance of verifying the authenticity of rare biblical artefacts, the elaborate testing process undertaken and our commitment to transparency,” said Jeffrey Kloha, chief curator for the museum.
It marks the latest embarrassing setback for the museum, highlighting the difficulty in determining authenticity of fragments of the scrolls, which can sell on international markets for more than $1 million (Dh3.6m).
The 430,000 square foot museum cost $500m when it opened in November.
Its views of the Capitol were said to demonstrate the commitment of its evangelical founders and sparked concerns that the project was part of a plan to persuade America’s leaders to put Protestant Christian values at the heart of policy.
Mr Green and his family amassed a collection of up to 40,000 biblical artefacts and manuscripts, but the exhibits attracted controversy even before they went on display.
Last year, Hobby Lobby, the company owned by the Green family, agreed to pay $3m and
The Green family’s company Hobby Lobby also bought 5,500 Iraqi artefacts, smuggled out of the country, in 2010
return 5,500 artefacts smuggled out of Iraq as part of a settlement with the United States Justice Department.
At the time, Mr Green said his company should have conducted more due diligence on the origins of the clay tablets and seals, for which he paid dealers more than $1.6m.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are another example of the fraught nature of buying and selling antiquities.
Their discovery in the middle of the past century shook up the study of the early bible. Bedouin shepherds stumbled on the fragments of parchment and papyrus tucked inside jars in caves in what is now the Palestinian West Bank.
The collection included about 900 manuscripts and 50,000 fragments. It took scholars six decades to excavate and publish the texts.
They offered a version of the Hebrew Bible that was almost 1,000 years older than the earliest known example.
Most of the pieces are held by the Israel Antiquities Authority, which displays them in Jerusalem. Only a few pieces, some of those sold by the shepherds to a local antiquities-dealer, entered private hands. That changed in the early 2000s.
New fragments began appearing on the market and the trade expanded rapidly, fuelled in part by wealthy, evangelical collectors with a thirst for bible artefacts.
As a result, many experts have warned that the new pieces were exactly that: new.
Joel Baden, co-author of Bible Nation, a book about the Greens, said the family might have failed to check the authenticity of items they were buying.
“They made it widely known that they were buying everything,” Mr Baden told CNN. “Every antiquities seller knew the Greens were buying everything and not asking questions about anything.”