Museum of the Bible's Auguean stables:Have fun on cleanup, old classmate Jeff Kloha

I blogged a few months ago about the breaking of the Dead Sea Scrolls scandal at Hobby Lobby-owned Museum of the Bible, and how the man dealing with the fallout is old seminary classmate Jeff Kloha, who now prefers the full Jeffrey.

Update, July 27, 2021: The Gilgamesh Dream Tablet has Hobby Lobby back in the news. See my update at the bottom of the piece, including noting that Hobby Lobby is far from the only villain in the drama.)

Said blogging included disagreements between this now-secularist myself and the still-fundamentalist wing of Lutheranism Kloha about whether or not the DSS confirm a pristine transmission of the text of the Old Testament or Tanakh (they don't, Jeff) and whether or not they're "inarguably" the most important biblical discovery of the last century (they're arguably not, and if we focus on Christian development and diversity, Nag Hammadi is arguably MORE important).

But I digress.

NPR has a new piece about all the cleanup work that Kloha, the museum's chief curator, has on his hands.

He said it's looking at returning a bunch of items to Iraq, some of which likely came from its national musuem. That said, he doesn't know for sure:

"All we have is paperwork, and very vague paperwork," says Kloha, a former professor of the New Testament at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. "Obviously, there are multiple sources for items from Iraq over the past 30 years. So we have no way of knowing where these came from." 

Part one of the fun.

Part two? The Green family bought 5-10 percent fakes among the 8,000 items up for return. Schadenfreude is a bitch.

Part three? Items it has already promised to return are still in the U.S., because the Greens are too cheap to pay insurance. They're hoping to send them back on an Iraqi embassy plane.

Part four? Schadenfreude can spread wide, like diarrhea. Christie's sold a Gilgamesh to the Museum of the Bible, and didn't adequately check provenance. An Afghani Jewish prayer book was likely trafficked by the Taliban.

Kloha told NPR the "few bad apples" story.

"It seems to have been just one or two individuals who were acting as agents and purchasing things for what was, at that point, just the idea of a museum," he says. "It was a handful of advisers who would literally travel the world, make contacts, find things, and then bring them to the Greens for acquisition."

 Not quite, sir.

Part five? Schadenfreude sometimes degenerates into fuck-you privilege. Steve Green, Hobby Lobby patriarch, was flagged by Customs in 2010 for importing an ancient manuscript Bible without documentation. Read the story for details.

And, per this site, let us not forget the Green family's dirty hands on Dirk Obbink's apparent papyrus stealing.

I don't think Jeff is lying. But, it sounds like he needs to get more up to speed on the Green family.

===

Update, 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.

Now, some of this is not new, and some of this on the political side is a #BlueAnon dogpile on the Green family. Hobby Lobby surrendered it a nearly a year ago, after federal authorities ruled to that end. Let's ALSO note that Hobby Lobby supports its return to Iraq. The actual court ruling is more icing on the cake than anything, though it gives the feds leverage if there's anything Hobby Lobby tries to keep its hands on.

In fact, it's arguable that Christie's (yes, THAT Christie's) is at least as big a villain as Hobby Lobby.

Christie's, the international auction house from which Hobby Lobby bought the item, previously told CNN that "any suggestion that Christie's had knowledge of the original fraud or illegal importation is unsubstantiated."

Christie's can use the weasel word "unsubstantiated" all it wants. And, yes, "weasel word" it is.

Re Hobby Lobby, Christie's and looted Iraq, there may be plenty of people who aren't hard-right conservative Christians who willingly bought larger or smaller sums of ill-gotten booty pilfered from Iraq, and some of it may have sifted through Christie's hands.

Related to that? I want to hear NOTHING from American do-gooders claiming we should hold on to it because ISIS will just destroy it. First, that would be yet another form of thievery. Second, that's why much of the rest of the world hates American do-gooders. Third, destruction of antiquities has been happening since the rise of civilization. Fourth, Christians have done this in hte past. The Iconoclastic Controversy. Worshipers, led by ex-priest pastors such as Karlstadt, shattering stained glass in the early Reformation. Some "Mark of the Beast" types (generally ignorant) destroying things related to that alleged mark today.

So, the idea, from one apparent BlueAnon do-gooder on Twitter, that it would have been better had it been stolen on the QT, is laughable.

No, really! The "HL" in his Tweet, part of a thread from a now-muted person, goes exactly down that rabbit hole. 

C. Is the same point I'm making. For one, DOJ wouldnt know about it if HL didnt declare it. It could've easily ended up in the hands of a private collector that kept it secret.

— Edward Davis (@Mag_neto_) July 28, 2021

Besides, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? That's true on everything from antiquities to importing exotic plants and animals to a new country or continent. I tweeted back to the guy exactly on that line:

So, now you're advocating that thievery is fine as long as it's on the QT? Gee, that's what organized crime says. Keep extending the rope to further hang yourself.

— Crushes Xi Jinping Thought Kool-Aid peddlers 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) July 28, 2021

Twitter's non-literalists claimed that the words above were inciting self-harm and locked my account until I deleted that. I of course did a screenshot.

And yes, IMO, that's what it boils down to. I thought of Juvenal's maxim shortly after that. And, see what I said above about Christie's. They may have sold Iraq antiquities to other buyers who made exactly that argument. Or, Christie's senior staff, with their attempt at plausible deniability, may have internally made that argument themselves, that selling these items got them out of Iraq.

No, per the Wiki link, the phrase doesn't come from Plato's "Republic," though the idea behind it is raised indirectly. Plato's answer on how to guard them? The heart of the fascism behind the "Republic" — mind control through the Platonic Noble Lie. No thanks, as I've said about St. Anthony of Fauci, on masks and herd immunity. I don't even consider his "gain of function" a Platonic noble lie. More like a Jesuitical one, or just a plain old grubby one.

As for the value of Gilgamesh? It's at least partly behind the tales of Moses' birth and similar birth stories around the ancient Near East, as well as some documents from Qumran (which tie back to Hobby Lobby's larceniousness as well as to why Kloha was hired) and to the Iliad and Odyssey. Arguably, it's connected indirectly to just about any later epic tale in the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean.

 

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?

Arise, O Lord, against this Luther

This is another in a serious of posts examining facts, legends and more related to Martin Luther and early Lutheranism on the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation.

So, Luther had forced Johann Eck to admit that popes could err, and that good works could only "act" after faith — a sola fide faith — had enlightened and sanctified a person.

So, we got?

A committee.

Why not.

The papal curia was, and still is, a bureaucracy like any secular state.

So a committee of about 40 sat down to fine-tooth comb Luther's writings. Among the group was not only Eck but Cardinal Cajetan, rebuffed by Luther the year before Eck was refuted.

The committee eventually led to Pope Leo X "calling bull" on Luther, with the papal bull Exsurge Domine, translated at the start of the header.

Cajetan wanted to take a nuanced approach of ranges of possible church discipline to different writings and comments of Luther's while Eck, more openly humiliated, wanted to bulldoze over him.

Result? Eck won.

The committee, similar to how Hus was treated a century earlier, just drew up a laundry list of what was wrong without saying why it was biblically wrong or how wrong it was.

Just as Rome and Constantinople were asunder long before their mutual anathemas of 1054 (he Slavic missionary competition in the 700s shows that, and the crowning of Charlemagne as emperor [NOT "western emperor"] in 800 in the secular side backs that up), so were Luther and Rome officially asunder when the bull was received by him, months before his excommunication and two years before the imperial pressure cooker of the Diet of Worms.

For Luther, the lack of imperial action — related to imperial succession issues — only emboldened him.

Richard John Neuhaus: A Lutheran con, like Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod on abortion

Richard John Neuhaus was a rising theologian within the late 1960s and early 1970s Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, at a time when the denomination was "schizophrenic" by its own standards.

In 1969, the body elected J.A.O. Preus, perceived as a conservative, as its new president, and him defeating an incumbent perceived as a bit more moderate. But, at the same time, it entered full "altar and pulpit" fellowship with the moderate-conservative, but not full conservative, American Lutheran Church. That was modified four years later into "fellowship under protest" even as the LCMS worried about "liberalism" in theology taking over its main seminary in St. Louis. That ended with the "Seminex" walkout, which failed to oust Preus from the presidency. (Bringing things to a full boil in the 1973-74 academic year, AFTER Preus had been re-elected to a second term and the "fellowship under protest" had been adopted, was the height of bad politics.  And, yes, churches are all about politics.)

Neuhaus supported Seminex, but at the same time, moved more conservative politically because of Roe v. Wade.

I came across this via the "Slacktivist" blog on Patheos. The writer, a liberal evangelical, was refuting David French in his claim that before the 1980s, the rising Religious Right didn't care about abortion. And, contra mythos of my LCMS days, teh Google to its own website tells me Lutherans for Life wasn't officially founded until 1979, and only claims some activity starting 1976. (That said, contra pro-life Catholic mythos, it's arguable that pre-Roe, abortion wasn't big on the Catholic radar screen either, contra Humanae Vitae.)

Anyway, Neuhaus was a sort of a neocon. He was also a paleocon, even more at times, per his affiliation with the Rockford Institute.

And, per Slacktivist, he is kind of full of it on other things.

If one truly does believe in historical-critical methodology, first, then "Jesus is Lord," with which he starts his blast, is always subject to human trimming.

Second, Christianity is compatible with non-democratic governments, human rights abuses, slavery and more. For the first, read Romans 13. For the second? More Romans 13 isn't bad. Nor is 2 Corinthians 11:24-25. For the third? Galatians 3:28. For all of the above? Any good Lutheran (or Catholic, for other reasons, perhaps) theologian would know of this book called "The City of God."

Third, any good non-Catholic would look at least a bit askance at going too far down the road of natural law for human rights. A good secularist would look hugely askance.

Fourth, despite his dipping one foot into theological liberalism or what passed for that at the LCMS of his salad days, it's laughable to be like National Affairs and paint him as a liberal. What he really was, was a neocon. (That's probably part of why Rockford booted him.) First Things magazine itself, in its encomium obituary, tells the truth.

I will say that, when he came by Concordia Publishing House in the early 1990s, he was well received among staff, even by the ordained minister who oversaw copyediting there and was more theologically conservative.

He struck me as a bit erudite and urbane. In hindsight, that probably comes from him being born in Canada.