A fool and his money are soon parted…
No surprise here.
You have to respect that the MOTB are not charlatans. They funded the research on these fragments and they are they ones that notified the world that they were forgeries.
The museum is also reevaluating the provenance of all the material in its collection, and it is prepared to return any stolen artifacts to their rightful owners. In 2018, the Museum of the Bible determined that a manuscript in its collection sold several times beforehand had in fact been stolen from the University of Athens in 1991. The museum promptly returned the artifact to Greece.
Christopher Rollston, a specialist on Semitic texts at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., welcomes the effort to set things right. “The Museum of the Bible did some really bad things eight to 10 years ago, and they were rightly criticized severely,” he says. “I believe that they’ve made a number of attempts in recent years to right the ship.
I want to point out that their good behaviour comes under Jeff Kloha, a friend of mine from STL.
Yep, it seems that these scrolls fooled a lot of people included some world experts. This also suggests that some other post-2002 fragments could be fake as well. So this is not necessarily MOTB’s “fault”, whatever you think of them.
If he came after the original management, that’s probably better.
He did.
I agree. MOTB should be applauded for their honesty and forthrightness. Early Christian writers and theologians, from Erasmus to Calvin, made quips about relics like the splinters from the Cross which were said to be so numerous that they could fill an entire ship, or that Jesus must have been crucified on an entire forest. Hucksters exist in all human groups, and finding them in your own ranks only proves that humans exist.
I’d also add that the fact that they bought all manuscripts on the market created opportunity for them now to return lost and stolen manuscripts to their rightful owners. This required a change of management, but it is to their credit that they realized a change was needed, and did so.