My personal academic tie to the Dead Sea Scrolls forgery story

The world of biblical scholarship was hit yesterday by 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 were purchased from William Kando, son of the primary discoverer, or at least the primary peddler, I should say, 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.

I have a personal tie to this, not the forgery itself, but the investigation. I know the Jeff Kloha mentioned in the piece.

Yes, per the link to Museum of the Bible chief staff, he's Jeffrey Kloha today. But I went to seminary with Jeff Kloha. And, per his picture, he's aged better than I have.

First thought is not about the forgery but about how did Kloha get to this position? He looked ensconced at Concordia Seminary and certainly comfortable there. I didn't even know he had left. Frankly, I had him fingered as a candidate for seminary president in the future. (He had started there in 1999, I believe, as an associate professor and then became provost a few years ago.)

On the other hand, already back then, Kloha was argumentative (he'd be arguing with me over this piece, now, for sure), and, to the degree I can recall across the decades, politically pretty conservative as well, though not as much so as classmate and later (and still) seminary professor David Lewis. I can see him as seeing this as an opportunity in other ways. (I also wonder how much he and Lewie talked when Kloha had the opportunity come up three years ago.)

When we were at Concordia a "few" years ago as fellow M.Div. program students, he and I both concentrated on what's known as exegetical theology — the study of individual biblical books, their formation and related issues. I started a petition drive for a class in textual criticism, which, shockingly, a theoretically academically strong seminary with doctoral degrees, not a fly-by-night Bible college, didn't have one of. Jeff was one of the first people I approached to sign, he did, and we got the class, taught by Jim Voelz, who, even more than Kloha today, probably, looked for the bits of wiggle room he could find within conservative Lutheranism. (He was big on oral transmission ideas, following on Albert Lord's work, and encouraged us in his class to see Stanley Fish at Washington University, back when Fish was just starting to hit the really big time. That said, he ignored the limitations of oral transmission theory on non-poetic works and also rejected Markan priority theory on the Synoptic Gospels. But I digress. A bit.)

Eventually, I read enough critical theology, accepted most findings, and did intellectual judo on my conservative Lutheranism. Following in the general track of James Voelz, our prof in that class, Kloha found the small bits of wiggle room he could within conservative Lutheranism and its confined school of biblical interpretation, shared with many other conservative Protestants, or so I presume, and went his way.

Update: That said, speaking loosely from some personal conversation with a good friend, also from those days, I think that even the bits of wiggle room he had found were too much for too many in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. He as provost along with the Seminary president were put on denominational hierarchy leashes on hiring decisions and more. So he bailed. Can't blame him. From the outside, I've been seeing the LCMS move more and more from conservativism to outright fundamentalism, like has happened with the conservative Presbyterian offshoot that left the PCUSA.

(Update to this update: Semi-wingnut LCMS jefe Matt Harrison is now facing a big legal [and ethical] imbroglio over the closure of Concordia University Portland.)

 

(Update, Nov. 26, 2024: I don't know whether he left on his own, or got kicked to the curb, but Kloha is no longer at the Museum of the Bible, per his LinkedIn. In a post, he says it was his decision, but, nonetheless, that could be a decision that was constrained or nudged in some way. Per this post from his new freelance life? It's interesting. Maybe he's less argumentative than in the past. That said, does his enlightenment about political discourse also apply to political discourse?)

Had I not been in a state of some sort of chronic low-grade depression once I made my "commitment," I might have followed the path of a Bart Ehrman, but that didn't happen. This all relates to my story of how I became an atheist, which starts here with part 1.

Anyway, I want to comment on a couple of Kloha's comments at the story, as they're comments that come from him making his choice within the Missouri Synod Lutheranism world. They're comments and observations with which I disagree.

Basically, this is the biggie:

“The Dead Sea Scrolls are inarguably the most important biblical discovery of the last century,” Kloha says. “That pushed our knowledge of the biblical text back one thousand years from what was available at the time, and showed some variety—but especially the consistency—of the tradition of the Hebrew Bible.”

This is a mix of not true and narrow construal of the scrolls.

First, on the textual side, the Dead Sea Scrolls confirmed that major Septuagint variants from the Masoretic Texas in the order and content of Jeremiah, a number of Septuagint modest-moderate variants in Joshua, Judges and First and Second Samuel and a few in the Torah, especially Exodus all had old Hebrew-original support. And, in a few cases, we found the DSS disagreeing with both the Masoretes and the LXX.

 

Beyond that, Kloha has an unrevealed "anchor" within his "consistency" claim. As a fundamentalist Lutheran, he believes that (with a few asterisked verses like his own death) Moses large wrote the Torah circa 1200 BCE, or circa 1,200 years before Qumran. So, "hey look at how authentic Moses is!" The reality, of course, is that the Torah only reached its final form under Ezra, and if you take a late, 400 BCE date for him, you've whacked two-thirds of Kloha's timespan away.

 

That said, the greater variants in books like the Former Prophets shows their lesser relevance to early Judaism or proto-Judaism. And, why not? They're mainly about rulership, irrelevant to Jews again until 164 BCE.

 

Continuing ...

Within the Wikipedia entry, I note it quotes the Oxford Companion to Archaelogy:

While some of the Qumran biblical manuscripts are nearly identical to the Masoretic, or traditional, Hebrew text of the Old Testament, some manuscripts of the books of Exodus and Samuel found in Cave Four exhibit dramatic differences in both language and content. In their astonishing range of textual variants, the Qumran biblical discoveries have prompted scholars to reconsider the once-accepted theories of the development of the modern biblical text from only three manuscript families: of the Masoretic text, of the Hebrew original of the Septuagint, and of the Samaritan Pentateuch. It is now becoming increasingly clear that the Old Testament scripture was extremely fluid until its canonization around A.D. 100.

Sadly, overall, Wiki's entry is very, very uneven. In this same section, it has Presbyterian scholar Millar Burrows and conservative evangelical Gleason Archer wrongly agreeing with Kloha's take. (But of course!) And, Wiki's own introductory paragraph makes the same claim. (Even worse, elsewhere in the entry, Wiki called BAR founder and antiquities-monger Hershel Shanks a scholar, as in a biblical scholar. He's not. He's a lawyer by training, and not a constitutional law scholar or any other type of legal scholar that I know of. I made an edit, and in my explanation, told Wiki not to reverse it.)

Did any of these variants have Yahweh called Satan or Judah called Edom? No.

But, within those books that form, in the Hebrew canon, the "Former Prophets," which includes First and Second Kings, they showed a number of discrepancies in details of alleged pre-kingly Israelite history. Such variations support critical scholarship's questioning of biblical historicity and to some degree, within that, support Copenhagen School-type radical questioning. And, they also show that broader textual fluidity that, in turn, would point to larger doctrinal and sectarian fluidity.

That leads me onward.

Outside of textual criticism? Here, Kloha is engaged in "framing," and a framing of the issue that's different than mine. (His comment about "Hebrew tradition" is referring to textual tradition, not the larger theological tradition, but that's where I'm headed next.) Framing is what he was doing earlier with his unspoken stance on who wrote what when.

The typical blue-haired lady pearl-clutcher in an upper Midwest conservative Lutheran congregation, just as much as the chic pearl-flaunter at whatever megachurch in Oklahoma City the Greens attend, probably think the Dead Sea Scrolls is all biblical stuff.

And, of course, it's not. And, of course, Kloha knows that.

And, when we talk about the totality of the DSS and the totality of the Hebrew Bible, and what the Scrolls are believed to show about the sectarians who are believed to have lived at Qumran, it's a different story.

Approximately 60 percent of the DSS is non-biblical scrolls, first. Of that, half is from what was not canonized for Jews, but was already known elsewhere. Some of this entered the Catholic and Orthodox Christian bibles as "deuterocanonical" material; the majority, though, is apocalyptic material like 1 and 2 Enoch. The other half of the non-biblical material, or 30 percent of the whole, was brand new, though. And it's this material that refutes Kloha's framing.

The Community Rule, the War Scroll, the Damascus Document (a DSS but discovered before the 1946 dam-breaker), the Son of God text and other documents show that Judaism at the turn of the eras was far, far more sectarian than previously believed, first of all. That, in turn, presents the rise of Christianity as one version of Jewish sectarianism in a new light. (Some elements of the Nag Hammadi corpus present the rise of Mandeanism, a sectarian competitor based on a non-Christian interpretation of John the Baptizer, in a similarly new light, and even more, shed light on Christian Gnosticism.) And, per the Oxford Companion comment, these other materials at Qumran were not just written before 100 CE, many were written before the change of eras and some may well have been written before 100 BCE.

And, tying that back to Kloha's comment? Certainly from a Christian-only perspective, rather than Judeo-Christian, the DSS are NOT "inarguably the most important biblical discovery of the last century," depending on what exactly one means by that phrase.
• First, Gnostic gospels like those at Nag Hammadi were Gospels for Gnostics, even if there never was an organized Gnostic church to declare a Gnostic canon.
• Second, similar holds true for second-generation and third-generation Gnostic Christian writings. Between points one and two, The Apocryphon of James, Apocryphon of Paul, Gospel of Truth, The Thunder Perfect Mind, and Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter are all major Gnostic works. Having nearly complete to complete copies of them allows modern scholarship to no longer have to read them through a lens of "orthodox" Christian church fathers. It also allows for improved dating of them, putting estimates on several of them at pre-200. 
• Third, as a New Testament scholar and exegete, he knows the discovery of the full Gospel of Thomas at Nag Hammadi was huge. (It gave underpinning to a theoretical "Q" source as part of a two-source theory of the synoptic gospels. [Side note: Twentieth-century proponents of a two-gospel theory of the synoptics claiming that independent writing was in part because of Deuteronomy 19:15's call for "two or three witnesses," I find laughable. Side note two: Independent transmission theorists' claims that the three synoptics really don't look that similar on closer inspection I find almost as laughable.])
• Fourth, which is itself a framing issue, Kloha doesn't mention that for reasons related in part to the formation of the state of Israel, only Christians (or lapsed ones) but no Jews were on the initial Qumran scholars group. Read this long and interesting interview of John J. Collins for more.
But conservative scholars can't spin Nag Hammadi. So, all you can do is try to lessen it. (Or, slam it as "heresy.") I know this is a strong reaction, seemingly, to what he's saying. But, I know Jeff Kloha's mind from decades ago, and there's a lot of vinegar behind that "inarguably." When connected with the "especially the consistency" claim about the Jewish Tanakh/Christian Old Testament, it can't go unchallenged by me. In other words, while LCMS wingnuts challenged even the relatively small wiggle room within historical-grammatical exegetical ideas, versus a flat-out "god revealed it," at the same time, I think Kloha, if that wiggle room wasn't challenged, was comfortable staying within it.

Besides questioning Kloha, on the provenance of these faked scrolls, I find this by Emanuel Tov simply laughable:

I will not say that there are no unauthentic fragments among the MOB fragments, but in my view, their inauthenticity as a whole has still not been proven beyond doubt. This doubt is due to the fact that similar testing has not been done on undisputed Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts in order to provide a base line for comparison, including the fragments from the Judean Desert sites that are later than Qumran. The report expects us to conclude that abnormalities abound without demonstrating what is normal.

First, the burden-shifting attempt is laughable.

Second, all major authentic DSS have had radiocarbon dating and he knows that.

Third, per his background, Tov is FAR from a disinterested observer.

I also am simply incredulous that as big a DSS scholar as James Charlesworth ever even halfway signed off on these scrolls' authenticity. This isn't quite as bad as Hugh Trevor-Roper and the Hitler diaries, but it's not that far off, in my opinion.

Update: A new blog post by me, discussing the details of Augean stable-cleansing work that Kloha faces, and wondering if he's fully up to speed on the Greens' history of ill-gotten booty.

Update to that, July 27, 2021: With the DOJ getting a court ruling today that Hobby Lobby must forfeit the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, sounds like Jeff Kloha has more Cleanup on Aisle 6 to do. Details? The tablet was shipped to the US in 2003 by Jordanian Antiquities Authority, without proper paperwork but with the claim it was found in miscellaneous rubble in 1981. In reality, like much other stuff the Green family got its mitts on, it was apparently looted from Iraq. There is no honor among thieves, and we'll see how much remorse there is. (I'll primarily update off that first update link.)