David Aaronovitch: Fake news? It’s not all bad
The discovery of parts of the Book of Twelve Prophets brought some rare good news this year – so good I almost forgot how gullible we become when we want to believe in something...
IT’S BEEN a rubbish year, but at least they have turned up some new scrolls. It was reported last week that a big recent survey of the caves at Qumran, conducted as part of anti-looting drive by Israel’s Antiquities Authority — a kind of AC 12 of the artefacts world — discovered lots of new (by which I mean very old) material. I love a good scroll, even if it is usually in small fragments. In a sweep of 500 caves, the grave rozzers discovered what appear to be bits of the Book of Twelve Prophets — apparently also known (rather slightingly, I feel) as the minor prophets — plus some coins, a basket and the bones of a child.
On dating it, it turned out that the basket had already been in the cave for 4,500 years (roughly the period between today and the era when the second tallest pyramid at Giza was built) by the time the girl was laid to rest there. And she had been there for 1,500 years before that same pyramid, and 4,000 before various ancestors began copying out the words of Zechariah and Nahum that others deposited in the cave. In other words, those caves were in use for a very, very long time.
So that news really cheered me up.
But then I was reminded by one of those Netflix we-think-you-willlike-this email prompts of a case in which I first became interested 20 years ago. It was for a series about the murderous Mormon forger
Mark Hofmann. Hofmann, a resident of Salt Lake City, was in some ways almost exactly like our own “Bolton forger”, Shaun Greenhalgh. From boyhood, he became adept at using materials and techniques to manufacture art and artefacts, starting with altering coins to
make them appear rarer than they actually were, and then creating false provenances for them. Hofmann could create almost anything, including what appeared to be genuinely new Emily Dickinson poems.
But he came to specialise in making historic documents for an expanding young church that was horribly short on historic artefacts of its own. Hofmann, under the guise of an antiquarian and collector, would uncover increasingly remarkable discoveries supposedly written by the founders of Mormonism themselves. And these he would sell to a grateful church to display.
After that, he began forging documents that were more undermining of church doctrine, with an eye of having these bought too — except this time definitely not for display.
It all went wrong and when it did, Hofmann blew up one associate and another’s wife with pipe bombs, killing both, and then managed to blow himself up as well, though not fatally. Thirtyfive years later, he is still in prison.
The Netflix series is disappointing because it is far more interested in the murders than the forgeries. Anyone can kill other people – not many can create a 19th century letter from the mother of the (very unminor) prophet, Joseph Smith. And I am far more gripped by the way in which the Mormon church was fooled, partly because it so wanted to be. And that thought reminded me of something I read in National Geographic magazine almost exactly a year ago. This was a story that linked to the Dead Sea Scrolls and concerned the new Museum of the Bible in Washington DC, an enormous and rather beautiful building just south of the Smithsonian museums and galleries. When the billionaire animating spirit behind the Museum project, an Evangelical multi-millionaire called Steve Green (the president of the Hobby Lobby chain), was beginning to create a collection, he cast his net enthusiastically to catch biblical artefacts. Much of the material he bought was good, but some of it was looted in Iraq and some of it was even stolen from Oxford by the disgraced papyrus expert Professor Dirk Obbink.
Among the early treasures were 16 fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, supposedly kept in a Zurich vault by the family of Khalil Eskander Shahin, the original middleman for the 1947 Bedouin finders of the scrolls. But three years ago, after suspicions were raised about the authenticity of the pieces, the museum itself initiated an inquiry led by an art fraud investigator called Colette Loll. Her team reported last year that all the fragments were fake, as was – almost certainly – anything that was not part of the original trove.
Someone made a lot of money out of someone else’s desire for artefacts. And, as I rediscovered when rereading during lockdown Robert Harris’s wonderful book on the Hitler diaries fraud, it is amazing what supposedly intelligent people will be led to believe.
As Loll herself said, “When you have a deceiver and a believer, it’s an intimate dance.” Even so, when it comes to the minor prophets, I’m hopeful.
When you have a deceiver and a believer, it’s an intimate dance’