An unorthodox scholar uses technology to expose Biblical forgeries
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
One could end up thinking all Dead Sea Scrolls are fakes. They are not. The Dead Sea Scrolls are real, but some fragments, sold as originals for millions of dollars to rich collectors, are modern forgeries.
And bad fakes too. Dead Sea Scrolls are made of parchment; the fakes are from leather. Both come from animal skin but parchment is stretched and dried while leather is tanned: mixed with vegetable astringent compounds that cause the skin to contract and harden. The fakes, possibly made from "ancient Roman shoes" (!) were coated with animal glue, and written upon with modern ink that followed the creases and tears of the leather. (Obviously when someone writes on a new piece of parchment that later becomes cracked and torn, there would be no writing inside the cracks).
Now I'm no scholar and I gathered the above from various online articles, but it seems it the deception was pretty obvious, and in fact once someone started doubting all experts agreed and there was no controversy.
I find the world of forgeries fascinating because it speaks of the human mind, how our desire to make something real blocks our perception and any kind of critical thinking. I wish the article spoke of that more rather than the various talents and life history of Mr. Langlois.
Here is where I expressed my confusion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34253597
Also, you say parchment; should it not be papyrus? Parchment doesn't get cracked.
Sources I could find all say the Dead Sea Scroll are in parchment, not papyrus, but as I said I'm not a scholar or an expert on this. It seems the problem with parchment is that it doesn't absorb ink, so that sometimes the mere rolling or unrolling can crack the ink out of the surface, even if the surface itself stays intact.
Also, many fragments are torn apart, and in that case there should be no ink at the tear, whereas the forgeries were written all over, from side to side.
Not just forgeries but modern claims like Salvator Mundi were legitimized by a small circle of experts and whales that wanted headliners.
Fine art is very much like crypto, a wildly speculative asset controlled by a small inner market that is prone to criminal activity.
That's most fascinating thing about this whole field. Supposedly smart people who no doubt consider themselves critical thinkers, many of whom have been wildly successful at business, keep getting tricked into spending millions on obvious forgeries.
I watched this documentary on wine forgery and it was the same thing there. People were paying $100+k for bottles that a simple 2 minutes google search would prove fake. Things like vintages from several years before the vineyard was founded, completely incorrect labels for the wine and vintage they where claiming and wines from years when that particular wine wasn't made.
It's clear that for most people the actual authenticity of the items in their collection means absolutely nothing to them. All that matters is that it's convincing enough that they can fool their peers (and themselves). As long as you never let an expert verify your collection, everything in it is in fact authentic. And once the scam was uncovered their anger wasn't so much directed at the people who scammed them but at the experts butting in a ruining everything.
Yes, among many other religious texts (whole Orthodox Biblical canon + a bunch of pseudoepigraphical works, most of the Buddhist canon, Taoist and Hindu works, some ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts, Quran, etc...). Got way too sidetracked in University. It's interesting though.
> Also, Genesis does not merely reference Enoch, it introduces him
Of course he was a character mentioned in Genesis but references to things from the book of Enoch (Nephilim/Giants/half-god humans) are more interesting.
Genesis authors had to retain all the old myth imagery in order to be taken seriously as an origin story, but stripped off the meaning to lay their own on top.
Noah and the dove are also from much older origin myths about where the Earth came from.
Cain and Abel, and also Esau and Isaac, recycle origin twin myths. One twin kills his brother and makes the world out of his body parts, and becomes the first priest.
So Genesis is largely a big mishmosh of origin-myth imagery with a narrative overlaid.
The imagery shows up in Vedic hymns, too, tracing to the same original source, with of course a different narrative overlaid.
I figured "giant" could be a metaphor, after all it's in a collection of traditions of pastoralists, wherein God rejects the agriculturalist's offering, who then kills his sheep herding brother.
Then the farmer builds the first city, and his descendents are the first blacksmith, the first musician, the first dancer (debateably), and the first animal farmer - who also often conflicted with semi-nomadic herders.
Great metaphor for the Iron Age equivalent of the Range Wars.
And IIRC, Neanderthal were far stronger than us.
Mind you, could be that they're where folk memory of dwarves arises, short, strong, like living underground.
Maybe elves were Homo floriensis?
I love speculating like this because it's entirely unprovable, much like evolutionary psychology.
No one seriously imagines Adam, Noah, or Moses as historical, flesh-and-bone, people, any more than we imagine that of Paul Bunyan, Slue-foot Sue, or Hamlet.
Jesus, too, BTW. Everything written as if of real events came at least two generations after the cult began.
“Thus all the days that Adam lived were 930 years, and he died.” (Genesis 5:5, ESV)
“Thus all the days of Seth were 912 years, and he died.” (Genesis 5:8, ESV)
“Thus all the days of Enosh were 905 years, and he died.” (Genesis 5:11, ESV)
“Thus all the days of Kenan were 910 years, and he died.” (Genesis 5:14, ESV)
“Thus all the days of Mahalalel were 895 years, and he died.” (Genesis 5:17, ESV)
“Thus all the days of Jared were 962 years, and he died.” (Genesis 5:20, ESV)
“Thus all the days of Enoch were 365 years. Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.” (Genesis 5:23–24, ESV)
“Thus all the days of Methuselah were 969 years, and he died.” (Genesis 5:27, ESV)
“Thus all the days of Lamech were 777 years, and he died.” (Genesis 5:31, ESV)
The Bible only describes one other human, Elijah, as leaving Earth without having died. (Even Jesus died!)
Despite this, the Book of Enoch and other rejected books do appear in some Bibles, with a warning about how they are apocryphal. Just because they aren’t inspired though (officially-speaking) doesn’t mean they can’t be interesting.
To everyone who is interested in the texts and backgrounds of the apocrypha of the New Testament, I can highly recommend the two volumns of Wilhelm Schneemelcher: "New Testament Apocrypha" (or for German speakers: "Neutestamentliche Apokryphen"): vol. I: "Gospels and Related Writings" and vol. 2: "Writings Relating to the Apostles Apocalypses and Related Subjects". They include a lot of texts, many in complete translations, and provide excellent philological introductions to each text. However, the Apostilic Fathers are not included. For this you must look for other editions.
Given the pejorative connotations of "apocrypha", Catholics don't accept that term for the books in their OT canon which are rejected by Jews and Protestants – they say the appropriate term is "deuterocanon" ("second canon"). Catholics do use the term "apocrypha" for books of similar antiquity (such as Enoch) which ended up being rejected from the Catholic canon. Many Protestants prefer to call those later books "pseudepigrapha", to avoid confusion with the books of the Protestant apocrypha / Catholic deuterocanon; however, in the strictest sense of the term, that's not entirely correct, since "pseudepigrapha" literally refers to false claims of authorship, and while most of these texts do make such false claims, some of them are instead anonymous.
So, for me, the question of forgeries is interesting because if forged texts were used someone had an interst in doing it. If a text is not a "forgery", it doesn't mean the text states objective truths so.
You're overgeneralizing. The Bible is effectively something like an anthology compiled from texts written in different styles over thousands of years. The character of Genesis is quite different from, say, the New Testament Gospels. While Genesis is not intended to be a scientific text, the New Testament does describe events in a historical kind of manner.
> they are closer to pure propaganda pieces.
I have no idea what that means. You should probably revisit your assumptions.
Can I ask - are you a biblical scholar? Reading a different bible each year us impressive
So is a text from, say, 200 B.C. that changes some things from an older version from 300 B.C. a forgery? Or is it just a different version of the same story and is neither more authentic than the other (the 300 B.C. version may not be the true original either)?
It seems to me that something is only a forgery if, say, someone in the year 500 invents an entire new text whole-cloth and then tries to pretend it's actually from 200 B.C. But if it originates from the same culture and traditions as the Hebrew bible then it's one version of an authentic text.
And even someone invents something whole-cloth – like, say, claiming to find golden plates with Egyptian hieroglyphs in the US – then can we define this as a "forgery"? It quickly becomes a matter of faith.
When in reality it is very hard to know truth, even in the present time, even in one's own experience.
So, if that is the case, why make such an outlandish claim?
Well, there is value to someone if they can say 'I have the truth' and other people believe them.
The initial lie, once believed, takes on a life of its own thanks to the belief that becomes invested in it, especially when it is under someone's external control.
>> Take the story of a group of fallen angels who descend to earth to seduce beautiful women. Using his new technique, Langlois discovered that earlier scholars had gotten the names of some of the angels wrong, and so had not realized the names were derived from Canaanite gods worshipped in the second millennium B.C.—a clear example of the way scriptural authors integrated elements of the cultures that surrounded them into their theologies.
The priests from the new religion wrote a text portraying the ancient gods as "evil". Sounds like an efficient use of propaganda to me. And that is something that makes historical research of religious texts very worthwhile.
For example, early Canaanite texts assigned territory to tribes according to their number of gods. In a later text, it was by their number of tutelary angels. In current texts it is unspecified why they got their allocation.
Oldest Canaanite texts have a goddess Asherah, equal to YHWH in importance (and always shown with a cake), involved in important rites. Nowadays they use a stick in her place, which appears to suffice. They clearly would have preferred to do away with her entirely, but weren't willing to abandon the rites that needed her.
Religious rites were indistinguishable from magic spells, and the ancients didn't care who they came from, if they seemed to work. They were swapped around like coleslaw recipes. You can see how they were thought of particularly in Numbers, where it clearly doesn't matter who uses them: if you say it, it works, priest or no.
For most of the known text we have a pretty good idea about where the earliest written copy comes from and serious academic is careful about ascribing truth to anonymous late 1st and 2nd century greek texts written in modern day Turkey and describing events happening decades earlier.
Christian theologians and biblical scholars however kind of have to take 2nd century anonymous texts from people who could not have been direct witnesses to the events described as gospel value because without those accounts there is no new testament.
Likewise, scholars generally agree that at least two of the gospels copied parts wholesale out of another (generally that Mathew and Luke copied from Mark and changed elements of his story). See the synoptic problem for more information about this. And that after they were written, others came along and changed or added elements. The ending of the gospel of Mark, for instance, is generally thought to have been a later addition, and at least some prominent scholars think the nativity story in Luke is. But again, we don't use the term "forgery."
For a more recent example, you don't see the term used to describe The Book of Mormon, which is purported to have been written two millennia before non-Mormons think it was written.
I suppose the term isn't used when matters of faith are the focus. The article uses the term to describe items created with the secular purpose of earning more money, even though they're religious in nature.
I think there are some good reasons why we don't call them "forgeries".
One is that people in the ancient world had different understandings of authorship from what people do today. Today, if you are copying a text written by someone else, either you copy it verbatim, or you very clearly mark your changes, so no one mistakenly thinks they were the work of the original author. In ancient times, people didn't necessarily think there was anything wrong with "improving" a text while copying it, and not failing to note the changes.
Nowadays, it sometimes happens that an author dies with a work unfinished, and a close friend or colleague is called upon to finish it off. However, we'll make it very explicit that's what going on, and to fail to do so is seen as unethical. In the ancient world, it was quite common for students to add stuff to texts written by their late teachers, based on their oral recollections of what the teacher said – or even just their opinions on what the teacher would have said – and few thought it necessary to explicitly note that they were doing it.
As these particular texts came to be seen as holy, intentionally changing them began to be seen as sinful. However, there was likely a lengthy period – possibly measured in decades – between the first drafts, and when they came to be seen as too holy to intentionally alter any further.
Finally, "forgery" generally implies something done to be intentionally deceptive, and we don't have any evidence that the authors of these texts were intentionally deceiving anyone. Even if they wrote falsehoods, for all we know, they honestly-yet-mistakenly believed they were true.
> For a more recent example, you don't see the term used to describe The Book of Mormon, which is purported to have been written two millennia before non-Mormons think it was written.
Part of the problem with calling it a "forgery", is that could be interpreted as making an assumption about Joseph Smith's psychology – that he was a conscious charlatan. While non-Mormons aren't going to believe he was a genuine prophet, genuine prophet and conscious charlatan aren't the only two options – is it possible that he was deluded? That he honestly, however falsely, believed that God was revealing stuff to him? Even if he was "making stuff up", was he consciously aware he was doing it, or was it unconscious creativity, which he subjectively experienced as coming from outside of himself, even though in truth it didn't? One of the reasons why scholars don't call it a "forgery", is it allows them to avoid that debate except when they specifically want to delve into it.
But this is like asking “well clearly Romeo and Juliet was a fictional story, who cares if we find out that Shakespeare didn’t write it”.
How many people care deeply about the works of Shakespeare or Homer, enough to think about the meaning and autorship of the texts (for example, to know that the story of the trojan horse is actually mostly told by Virgil, or that probably Homer, if he ever existed, didn't write both the Iliad and the Odyssey)? I think fewer than that. Is that a good reason to dismiss all research on it? That was the original implication, to which I was trying to answer.
Admittedly I overly estimated the number of people to make a point, but I'd still say there's more people who care about the Bible than Lisp, yet we don't see many comments like "ugh, new article on Lisp, who cares? It's a dead language anyway"...
Many people would be surprised at the realisation that Christianity is a eastern religion (having originated in what we call “the Middle East”).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_the_Bible
Imagine you are trying to assemble a history of Ancient Rome. You have inscriptions, 5% of the literature (a patchy mix of non-fiction and fiction, and the non-fiction is open to a lot of interpretation), and various secondary sources that summarize and write about primary sources that are lost to time. You also have archeological digs.
Now apply that same scientific mind to the Bible. A group of people decided what was in and what was out. If you can prove what they thought was valid because so-and-so apostle or a related person wrote it, and we can determine they did not, it’s certainly interesting even without the religious element.
It isn't, according to my Catholic upbringing. It's the word of God, which he dictated through the people who originally wrote it. There are supposedly 1.345 billion Catholics. So, I think there are many people who care.
The forgeries are fake fragments made in the late 20th century of the very real, authentic and ancient Dead Sea Scrolls.
See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34258102
Michael Langlois is quite a Renaissance Man: a working musician, 3 master's degrees, 1 doctorate, a techie good enough to create a new technique to digitize ancient texts, and the youngest member of Institut de France.
A single such observation may raise doubts, but is usally (exceptions exist) not enough to be sure that a forgery is present. However, the more there are, the more certain one can be.
If you need more context, this one article that is mostly a personality profile won't contain it. But there are hundreds of books and thousands of research papers written about the dead sea scrolls.
You can find forgeries everywhere in the antiquities trade. Some of them are modern productions, but many (see all pieces of the true cross in churches around the world) are old enough to be historical artifacts in their own right. One of the things that makes it difficult to know if objects of uncertain provenance are legitimate is that it's very common for locals to find materials missed / never seen by archaeologists or to simply loot from excavations in-progress. The dead sea scrolls were found over decades by many different groups, so they're particularly susceptible to this. Forgers take advantage of that. Good forgeries can fool even scrupulous buyers and are mainly given away by things like incorrect radiocarbon dates or the forger's unfamiliarity with the details of the source material like the article.
There are all kinds of materials used for forgeries. Ranging from cheap ones sold to tourist on contemporary papyros (or even banana leaves) made contemporary ink to highly sophisticated ones on original Ancient papyros (you either remove the old handwriting of a not so "valuable" text or use blank Ancient papyros).
> How are all of these fragments not in one place under guard?
Just an anecdote: I once visited a papyrological institute at the university I studied with a group of fellow students to receive an introduction into papyrology. All the tables in the seminar room were pushed together and on them lay a lot of papyros fragments, each fixed between two sealed panes of plastic. Among them were also the highlights of the collection: A small fragment from Qumran and a Septuaginta fragment from the 7th century. Everyone was allowed to take these sealed plastic storage frames (I don't know the professional term for it) into her or his hand and have a close look at it from both sides.
The Bible was created by the accretion of fake stories. Why do people have an objection to the addition of some fakes over others? That is why make a distinction between the original fakes vs the later ones?
The article concerns what some scribes who lived 2000 years ago wrote in their own hand - not the veracity of their beliefs. Something is fake if they didn't write it but it was passed off as theirs.
Best scholarship today says there was no person who walked around Judea telling the parables related in the gospels. It all seems to have been made up two generations after the cult started.
Congregations demanded a person to have told the parables, and a narrative about where and when they were told. "Mark" is that narrative, with the other three gospels cribbed from it adding doctrinal "corrections" favored in different places. ("Mark" etc. names were pasted on centuries later; nobody knows who wrote them.)
The only otherwise-plausible bits of evidence of such a person, in Josephus, are transparent later insertions. Pliny and Tacitus, often cited, only repeat what they had been told Christians believed.
Third-century Church authorities were thorough in destroying all documents they controlled but what they chose to put in the Bible. In later centuries they fabricated industriously. So almost everything claimed to be contemporaneous is transparent fakery, Paul excepted. Pauline material is cut'n'pasted freely, and often doctored, sometimes even accidentally.
See Richard Carrier, "Why Invent the Jesus?".
Here is one piece of evidence for the existence of an actual historical Jesus: Paul claims to have confronted Peter in person in Galatians, which is one of the Pauline epistles considered to be genuine. This is solid evidence for Peter being a real person. Peter is supposed to have been one of Jesus's disciples. So how can we plausibly claim that early Christianity did not have a Jesus? This is the same level of evidence for many Greek philosophers being real people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Carrier#Reception_and_...
For example, a rant in Thessalonians excoriating Jews for executing Jesus is transparently Eusebius, by several different lines of evidence.
Somebody named Peter could easily exist and be written about without need for a physical Jesus. Lots of cults of the time "had" a Jesus/Yeshua. It was more or less required. Having a live Jesus, and that Jesus actually saying and doing what was very clearly made up decades later, are not the same.
Wikipedia is notoriously unreliable about current scholarship, being heavily 'curated' by retired professors with nothing left to do but defend what they picked up in grad school against new information.
Reading this snapped me out of my Gell-Mann amnesia.
They don't care, and why should they? They're so much used to Photoshop the name has become a verb, and just want to get things done.
It is not the end of the world that GIMP is being compared to as a Photoshop "knockoff". Many would also agree that to get users to even consider or migrate to using GIMP, it would need to look more like Photoshop and be compatible with it.