All 16 Dead Sea Scroll fragments in DC museum are clever fakes
By Laura Italiano
New York Post
March 13, 2020
Holy scraps!
All 16 of the Dead Sea Scroll fragments at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC are cunning forgeries, independent researchers have confirmed.
“We’re victims,” the museum’s CEO, Harry Hargrave, said Friday in announcing the forgery finding.
“We’re victims of misrepresentation, we’re victims of fraud.”
The crumbly brown fragments had been among the most prized exhibits at the museum; some of them had been billed as scraps of the oldest known surviving copies of the Hebrew bible.
The forgeries were created out of ancient leather, but the ink was applied in modern time, the museum admitted in a 200 page report first obtained by National Geographic.
The quality was so good, some of the world’s leading scroll scholars were duped.
There are still 100,000 verified, nearly 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scroll fragments at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
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