About Dead Sea Scrolls

by nitr0gen_

I heard that the Dead Sea Scrolls from Washington museum are forgeries. Does that mean that all 100.000 Dead Sea Scrolls are fakes? Or only those from Washington?

badskeleton

No, not all of the Dead Sea Scrolls are fakes. You are probably referring to the 16 fragments owned by the Museum of the Bible in D.C. Even if these had been real, they weren't very important; they had no new textual information because they were simply copied from older editions of (real) scrolls. In fact, one of the ways they were ID'd as fakes is that the forger copied over a footnote marker from the edition he used. These scrolls had no provenance (meaning no one knew where they came from) and were written on a very different material than the other, authentic scolls.