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Re: 4Q forgery?
David Crowder misunderstands several points in writing:
> There was a lot of concerns about forgeries back then and Allegro wasn't the
> only one who thought many of the DSSs to be fake.
There is not the slightest evidence that Allegro thought many of
the DSS were fake. Earlier, before Allegro was brought in to
work on the texts, there was a lot of concern about the
authenticity issue, as there should be with any new find.
That is a first, archaeological question. The issue is
not whether the question is raised but the evidence upon which
the question can be answered.
Trever expresses the concern
> repeatedly in his footnotes. Oddly, the forgeries seem to have disappeared when
> the prices went up. So too did some of Trever's most interesting footnotes from
This is a complete distortion of history. The idea of
forgery disappeared because of _evidence_. The scholars
(to whom the idea of forgery disappeared) had no financial
interest in the scrolls. Critical to the answering of
the (correct) question of authenticity was an early
radiocarbon test as well as the excavations in which
archaeologists--not Bedouin but archaeologists--discovered
the same kinds of texts in Caves 3 and 4 in ancient contexts.
The verb tense in reference to Trever above appears to
be misleading at the time of Trever's publication.
There is evidence for a whole lot of Qumran texts being
ancient and now evidence (it appears) for one Q4 text
purchase from an antiquities dealer being caught as
a forgery (if this is a
correct interpretion of the photo in the Allegro
Collection). This raises the obvious question of the
security of evidence for some other texts from Q4, but
would seem to be a separate issue from the original
questions over the scrolls from Cave 1 sold by the
Bedouin. Among other things, four of the original
seven scrolls from Cave 1 have been carbon-dated
and all four are confirmed ancient. Suggestions of
conspiracy and scholarly coverup on the authenticity
issue of the Cave 1 scrolls, and of the entire corpus
in principle, are in the world of hallucination rather
than evidence.
Greg Doudna
gd@teol.ku.dk