Hobby Lobby punked by fake Dead Sea Scrolls

I am SO FUCKING LAUGHING, as I tweeted, over confirmation that a set of 16 alleged Dead Sea Scrolls fragments at The Museum of the Bible, owned by Hobby Lobby prez Steve Green, are forgeries.

And crude ones at that.

Ancient leather. Yeah, it's ancient, but leather, not parchment.

Modern ink.

Some purchased from William Kando, son of the primary discoverer of the actual scrolls. Others may trace back to him indirectly. The independent researchers hired by the museum in 2017 to investigate believe, but aren't sure, that all the forgeries were created by the same person or persons.

I've mentioned it elsewhere as the "BAR effect."

That's as in Biblical Archaeology Review, which promoted Holy Land-itis among evangelical Christians and has long run a thriving display advertising service for antiquities, as well as running puff pieces on things like the fraudulent James Ossuary.

Evangelicals with big bucks were easy marks, as the Greens have proven on stolen antiquities looted from invaded Iraq, as well. As the National Geographic piece notes, the landscape changed after 2002. The invasion of Iraq was part of that change. And it wasn't just the Greens who bit.

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I will have a more technical piece on this story, including comments by the museum's chief curatorial officer, Jeff Kloha, whom I know personally, at my second blog.

Josephus made up the Essenes

So says Israeli scholar Rachel Elior, who teaches Jewish mysticism at Hebrew University.

Then, who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?

The Zadokites, after a rupture in the priesthood, whether before or after the Maccabean revolt.

The Zadokite idea isn’t that revolutionary; a lot of modern scholars of that era postulate some rupture, with a set of “puritan” priests separating themselves from temple worship. And, many of those scholars agree that most scrolls probably weren’t written at Qumran, contra James Charlesworth’s mention of “inkpots” in the story.

That said, Elior’s claim that the Zadokite split was while the Seleucids still controlled Palestine IS less of a consensus view; other scholars who postulate such a rupture put it after the Maccabees’ success, and some of their later priests became more corrupt. And, yet others say the DSS relate to an early Christian split, with followers of Jesus’ brother James writing about Paul as the “man of lies.”

But, I’ve not seen Elior’s main point pushed forward before, that Josephus invented the Essenes as a counterweight to anti-Semitism.

Read the full story for details of her theory, including how she explains references to Essenes by Pliny, Philo, etc.