1.11 Kipp Davis - Forged Scrolls, Antiquities Trafficking, & Modern Relic Hunting

When I started on YouTube last year, I quickly became familiar with the name Dr. Kip Davis. I confess I'd never run into Dr. Kip before, as far as I can remember, in the Academy, but he is a fellow Canadian and also an awesome Dead Sea Scrolls expert. And one of the things I think is the most fascinating about Dr. Kip's story is how he ended up working on some fake Dead Sea Scrolls and became a bit of an expert in spotting fake Dead Sea Scrolls, which I know he certainly never set out to do. In this conversation, we talk about the Dead Sea Scrolls, how to spot a fake, and a little bit about how modern Christianity's obsession with documents as almost sort of relics came to lay the groundwork for so many people to be tricked by manuscript forgers. Please enjoy. Welcome to Footnote Famous. Conversations with the world's top scholars of the Bible and Christian origins, with your host, Chris Cornthway. Dr. Kip Davis, thank you very much for joining me today. It is my pleasure. So nice to meet you and finally after kind of bumping into each other in the comment section of YouTube videos for a while. Yeah, we're all great friendships start in the comment sections of YouTube videos. That's what the minds start these days, honestly. No, I'm glad you could join me. And I think we have a lot of similar shared interest around apologetics. We're going to get, I think, into some of that stuff later in the conversation. But this is going to be maybe a two or maybe even three part conversation because one of the things I was most interested in from your work and your history was your work in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but especially in particular, your work on Dead Sea Scrolls forgeries. And I think some of my audience will probably have heard you talk about it before, but I very greedily wanted to have some time to talk to you myself about it. And you know, some people are probably hearing about this for the first time. So people have probably heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that. You know, I was talking about it yesterday and my daughter said, what are the Dead Sea Scrolls? Yeah. I thought Dead Sea Scrolls. And then I realized that the guy who did Veggie Tales also did a cartoon called the Dead Sea Scrolls, which I've never seen. Actually, yeah, I had no idea. I looked it up because I was like, that rings the bell and I looked at him. Yeah. So my kids are, my kids are grown now. Yeah. But when I, when I started my PhD, my oldest was, was in grade, it was either kindergarten or grade one. And I was, I was picking them up from school one day. And his teacher actually asked me this question. And like that, she's like, she's like, so yeah, Dead Sea Scrolls, they actually squirrels. And I'm, yeah, it's very cute. Kids do it. That's hilarious. I was like, by Dad's and expert in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Yeah. That's like some kind of really, really unique biologist. That's cool. Okay. Well, I don't do start, let's start by talking about the scrolls. Maybe I don't want to do too much background to the scrolls themselves because that's like its own topic. But maybe could you talk a little bit about how you came to be working on Dead Sea Scrolls. And when you kind of started to realize that what you were working on wasn't real, like give us some of that context because I think it's fascinating and people haven't heard about manuscript forgeries and this whole market. Like we're going to get into a lot of interesting stuff. Yeah. I'll let you kind of set the scene. Yeah. For sure. So, and there's scrolls, not squirrels. And I got quite by accident, honestly. I like you started my post-secondary career with intentions of going into some sort of professional pastoral ministry. And in the early stages of my education, I was at Trinity Western University right at the same time that they launched the Dead Sea Scrolls Institute, which was founded, which was basically Martin G. A. Bag and Peter W. Flint. Excellent. The leap. Peter W. Flint. Excellent. Highly regarded. Even Geh-L-E-Cole, Biblical scholars and scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And so I had no idea what the Dead Sea Scrolls were at the beginning of my education. Just being at Trinity at the time when the institute was founded, just working in Biblical studies. I got a ton of exposure to it. And over time, by the time I got into my graduate studies, it became clear to me, especially because I went on to do an MA at Trinity after I graduated with my bachelor's degree. And we were given as graduate students back in like the late 1990s. Sort of an unprecedented opportunity to work on a lot of primary material. So we spent a ton of time working with effects and lies of the individual manuscripts, which was not common at that level. That's usually the kind of stuff you don't get until you're at the PhD level. And I did my MA thesis on a collection of fragments from, I picked a papyrus manuscript, which was a bad choice. But it just sort of naturally moved me into working with manuscripts, with Biblical manuscripts. And it just kind of snowballed from there. And I became fascinated with questions of, I was always fascinated with the Bible. I was always fascinated with questions of authority and of Canon as a Christian. And these sort of naturally led to, well, I mean, what do we actually have? What is the material evidence for this kind of stuff? How did these affect our understanding of the questions and the answers to those questions? And in my PhD work, I spent quite a bit of time on this question of, you know, how to understand modes and venues of authority and how those are applied religiously, how those are conveyed through texts in antiquity and in a world where it doesn't look like there is a Bible. How does all of this work, right? So I spent a lot of time exploring those sorts of issues. So it just kind of stayed there for the duration of my career. And as a result of that, it's since I started my PhD really, put me in some fairly confrontational positions with Christian apologetics because so much of Christian apologetics is grounded in this idea of both the you know, locality of scripture and certain ideas regarding that the history of the biblical text and its fidelity. So which is all, you know, it's all not aligning with the reality of how these things appear. So like approaching the Bible with a certain presupposition as to like what you're actually doing and what these texts are for. Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, I often tell people. So there are, and because it's most recently been in the news, I mean, it's been a year now, but the so-called great Isaiah scroll sort of pit some of this stuff into public consciousness fairly recently. I often remind people there are 21 copies of manuscripts that contain text of what looks like just exclusively the book of Isaiah in them just in the the the scrolls from cumeron, no two manuscripts of those copies look alike. And huge numbers of them. I have some pretty dramatic differences in them. So it's such a rich and a complicated landscape. So just to remind viewers though that that was the moment on the Joe Rogan interview in West Huff, is that what you're referring to in West Huff? That's what I'm referring to. We literally push back our understanding of Isaiah a thousand years. And the thing that really shocked scholars, like I said, this isn't for all the Dead Skulls, but one of the things that shocked them about Isaiah was that it was word for word identical to the masquerade of texts. Word for word. Wow. The copy of the great Isaiah scroll at cumeron was identical to the Westminster lending grad codex, which was like a thousand years later just in factually incorrect. And also even those manuscripts from Korean, so Korean from Korean have differences between them as well. Yeah. And part of this whole thing too is on just a more macro level, right? When it comes to talking about like this. There's a whole book published. You know, what my mentor is Marty and Peter, along with Eugene Ulrich, a number of years ago, published in English translation called the Dead Sea Scrolls Bible. And, you know, the base text for the book of Isaiah is one Q Isaiah A. Why? Because it happens to be, it happens to be the one intact copy that we have, but not because it's the most faithful to the original or something. And it's not, it's probably not even, you know, the one they thought was the most important. We don't really know how they thought through a lot of these things. Lots of scholars are making guesses, educated guesses about, you know, what's there materially and how we interpret that in terms of trying to get into the head space of these people in antiquity. So, you know, it's, it's, the deck is kind of, the deck, the deck is kind of stacked, sorry, that's how I talk today. Well, I just, it's not a brand instead of a Kumran. So, we're off to get through. That's true, you do. Yeah, it's very, it's still pretty early for me. So, the deck is kind of stacked in favor of this conclusion. And, you know, by a number of, I would say, accidents of discovery. The scrolls were discovered in, in '19, between 1947 and 1953. And this was at a time, you know, at a very politically tumultuous time in Palestine and Israel. This is right around the founding of the nation of Israel. This happened right at the time when, you know, they basically fought a war with the Arab states surrounding them, further independence. All that was happening at the same time in the midst of this massive discovery, there was just, I think people don't, don't often appreciate just the volume of material that was discovered all at once. We're, you know, talking possibly eight or 900 individual manuscripts in, you know, in the, they survived now in the form of like tens of thousands of fragments that, you know, came from individual scrolls of which there were probably eight or 900. It was so much material all at once. And it all came from, you know, this period, from at least the early second century. Some, some manuscripts might go all the way back to the late third century BCE to, you know, the first century CE. So it, very, very old, compared to all of our other biblical manuscripts. So this was, this, this was a, a, a massive deal. And systems and rules and procedures for, for conservation were different. Back then, a lot of this stuff was kind of in its infancy. And, and there was a whole bunch of stuff that was learned through trial and error, using the Dead Sea Scrolls. All of this stuff contributed to the, the ongoing and then later scholarly and public conversations about the Dead Sea Scrolls, that, that affect the ways in which we think about them relative to questions about the Bible. [MUSIC PLAYING] If there are modern Christian readers or Christian scholars for that matter, scholars at Christian institutions, there can be a tendency to zoom in on the things that match with our modern biblical canon. But of course, at the time, we're dealing with a Hebrew Bible that was not a fixed canon. And we're dealing with a lot of things they likely read as scriptures. Can you give us a quick overview of like what they were reading and what, like what the scrolls are made up of in terms of content? We've talked about Isaiah a lot already, but there's all sorts of great stuff. So there are, in terms of there, about about 30% of the entire collection is comprised of individual scrolls that were just an individual book of the Hebrew Bible. There are a handful that contain maybe two. We see this, there's a couple of Torah manuscripts, so there's a manuscript that has Exodus and Leviticus on it, or Leviticus and Numbers. There's possibly a few other manuscripts that have multiple biblical books on them, not many, though. So these are each individual copies of individual books of the Bible, as we know it. So that's about 30% of the entire collection. The rest of it is comprised of all sorts of literature, early Jewish literature, lots of texts that we knew of already, some of the most prominent are aromatic copies of the book of Firsteanok, which is significant because we didn't know of Enoch apart from what survived in Ethiopia, Conslovonic, had Coptic II, I think, and maybe Greek. No, definitely Greek, but maybe Coptic as well. I'm sure it's pronounced. And then of course, there's parts of it. The parables weren't at Cumran, and there's a few parts of the book of Enoch. Lots of this is-- every way-- scholars always knew that Enoch originated in Aramaic, because you can tell through the translations, but now for the first time. Ta-da. We have Aramaic copies of Enoch that stretch all the way back to the second century BCE. Amazing, right? Copies of the fragments from the Book of Jubiles, fragments from the Testament of the 12 patriarchs, or the Aramaic Levi document. Like things that scholars were aware of from early Judaism, but then a whole bunch of things that nobody had ever seen before. So things like-- there's a very popular text in the Dead Sea Scrolls that scholars have called Instruction, which is like a wisdom text. So it's a lot like the Book of Ben Sirah, or the Book of Proverbs from the Bible of wisdom sayings, and lessons for how to live a productive, honoring ethical life, a life of purity. So there's a work that was popular with these people that none of us had ever seen before. There's a lot of that kind of stuff there. And then finally, there's some manuscripts that look like they were written by the people who collected this material as rules for their own living situation. We have things like the Saraka Yakkad, which is the community rule, or a text called for QMMT, some of the rules of the Torah that they observed. A manuscript that's commonly called the Damascus document, because a much later copy was discovered in the Cairoganiza while we have quite a few fragments of this same text in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And it's a rule text. These are the rules for living in our community. And the people who were all collected these fragments appear to have been most closely associated with the Yisines. They were probably a sect of the Yisines. They were living in a sort of an ascetic lifestyle out in the desert, apparently awaiting the end of the world. They're waiting for Yahweh to come back and to smite the Romans. And then all their enemies within other sects of Judaism as well-- that's a whole other thing with them. But they were observing these really strict rules of purity. They had some very interesting ideas about cosmology and the ever-presence of divine beings, like angels, and demons and other gods. So they had this very active-- I hesitate to say spiritual life, but kind of like that. And they were convinced that the world was going to end any day now. I remember when I visited, I visited Come Round a while back. And one of the first things is you go in and you watch this movie, and they tell you about how John the Baptist maybe came to come. Oh, right. Yeah. There's no evidence for it all as far as I know, but forms an interesting connection for their many Christians. Oh, I agree. Yeah. It's up within the air at the time, I guess. They were obsessed with forms of ritual purity and John baptized people. Yeah, there you go. In the Jordan Valley, even though there were quite a ways farther south of that. But you know. Yeah. OK, so you gave us a really good context there. So we have this world in the end of the last century, and even in the beginning of this one, where you have tens of thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls over time. And we're going to probably have to skip over. most the history of this. But like over time, the antiquities market starts to realize there's a real kind of, there's a real capitalist agenda here. Like basically these things are worth money. And eventually they become worth more and more and more and more money. And when things are worth a lot of money, when manuscripts are worth a lot of money, there's more and there's more of an incentive for people to collect them in ways that are kind of sketchy. And there's more of an incentive for dealers or people to forge these manuscripts. So you were working on a collection of these scrolls. You're working on manuscripts and you started to realize that the stuff you're working on was probably forged. Can you take us there and tell us a little bit about what that was like, that how that all came about? Yeah, for sure. So just in terms of like short little bit of background, over the course of the discoveries starting in 1947, the newly founded nation of Israel started amassing all the material and nationalizing it so that it was state property. Right. So fairly quickly, any antiquities markets for these, for these sorts of materials started to tighten up by 1967, you just weren't allowed to buy or sell anything unless it was already in your possession by 1967. Those are the international rules, right? That's what UNESCO has said in place. That's the Israel Antiquities Authority's position on this. So at the same time, and because of the volume of material, there was a small team working on publishing, sorting through organizing and publishing the Dead Sea Scrolls. The first volume came out of the series that all this material was published and came out in 1952 and then a few volumes fairly faithfully in the intervening seven or eight years and then things just kind of stopped. And there was a growing scholarly frustration about this happening at the same time from like the late 60s up until the 1990s or the 1990s. And at the same time, there were enthusiasts kind of in the background in the 1980s and the 1990s who knew, who had heard about fragments that were floating around that could potentially be available for private sale, even though there was nothing happening at this time, like in the in the 1980s and the 1990s. And then all of a sudden, starting around 1999, Martin Skoyin, who is a collector in Oslo, was able to purchase a couple of certainly authentic fragments. Tiny little piece, got a tiny little piece of the community rolling a tiny little piece from the Genesis Apocryphal and that literally had flaked off the original manuscripts and were were capped by two of the scholars who were working on them. Skoyin managed to convince their heirs to sell these tiny little pieces to him. So he was kind of the first public figure to first figure to publicly be able to purchase Dead Sea Scrolls Fragments for his private collection. And at that point, Herschel Shanks, who was the editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, shortly after wrote up an article about Skoyin and his collection, and essentially said in that article, look, if you happen to be in possession of fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls, Martin Skoyin is in the market and looking to buy. So you can you can get in touch with him and and and sell your stuff. And kind of from that point on, the market started to open with a few principal figures Martin Skoyin, yes, there were some antiquities dealers and booksellers in the United States. A few of these these people had managed to acquire also Dead Sea Scrolls Fragments and started to exhibit them around the United States, mostly in like churches and at Christian schools. They they developed this very strongly even gelical Christian sort of narrative around their their acquisition of these fragments. So from from this period of time in this period of time from about 2002 to 2008 2009, some 50 fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls ended up making their way into private collections. Most of them were being purchased by people like these private collectors like like Skoyin, but then also Christian institutions as well, eventually, you know, as a Pacific University, ended up purchasing a selection of fragments. There's a fragment or a couple of a cluster of fragments that's owned by Mark Leneer at the Leneer Theological Library. There are fragments owned then of course by by the museum of the Bible. So this this it clearly started to become kind of an even gelical project. You're listening to Footnote Famous with your host Chris Gornley. If you haven't yet, please subscribe to Footnote Famous on YouTube or wherever Fine Podcasts are downloaded. Cool. So you've given us the kind of context where these things start to be purchased. I guess one thing like I want to go down this this whole rabbit hole in a minute of like okay, how the world that we both came from really ended up really being very amenable to forgeries and black market antiquities and things like that. But before we get there, how do you spot a forgery? Like can you walk us through a little bit of that? As you're working on manuscripts? So first of all, I need to point out that we shouldn't have to do the work to try and spot forgeries just because unless something has been been discovered at an actual archaeological dig, has been properly documented and tracked by professional archaeologists, unless these procedures are in place. The best practices among most scholars is that you should just not handle those material. This has been a learning experience for a lot of scholars in the course of the last last 20 years or so. The fragments that we were dealing with in the Dead Sea Scrolls were all non-provenenced, which means that there was no paper trail from their discovery in archaeological context to the sellers or any kind of perceived paper trail was extremely dubious and highly questionable. But then we were foisted into this position where this is what we have, so we need to do our best to sort out what's real versus what's not. And in the early stages, because all the fragments came from the same source, because they all were connected directly to this gentleman from the original discoveries by the name of Iskander Shahin. Otherwise known as Kando, Kando was a cobbler in Bethlehem and an antiquities dealer who basically broke all of the sales between the Ta'amidah Bedouin people who were finding most of them in the Kumaran caves and the archaeologists who were conserving and publishing them. Kando was the go between, so most of the material from the Dead Sea Scrolls, I've heard figures of up to 95% of everything in the collection of Dead Sea Scrolls passed through his shop. As a result, the assumption was made in the early going that so long as it can be connected to at least this person, to Kando, that it must be authentic, which is pretty naive in the first place. It's a pretty naive assumption and it's one that scholars were guilty of for a long time. What we started to see, though, in the fragments and the ways in which you spot forgeries after the fact, if you don't have a paper trail that you can depend on because Most of them are small. They only preserve a couple of lines of text. The way text works in antiquity is usually a manuscript is ruled. So they'll take a straight edge and a dry pan to scratch out lines on the ladder so that they know where to write. So they'll do that first and then they'll write following the straight line. So the lines all tend to be parallel. One of the dead giveaways on these fragments are that the text will not always follow a parallel line, but will actually then creep onto the edge of the contours of the fragment. So you'll have a line that's straight for a little while, but then when the edge of the fragment hits, then it'll start to slip down. So it's subtle in a lot of cases, but then once you see it, it's obvious. Then the other things that you start to see because they're quite small and somebody's working on a not quite a microscopic level, but pretty close, a magnified level, certainly. Because of that, you'll start to see some strange spots where ink is pooling in places where it shouldn't be on the surface of the fragment. So these are not strokes that you're making in the fashion that you would if you're writing naturally. Sometimes if you're mimicking the end of a stroke, you have to put a dot of ink on there, which just looks distinctly different if you're-- Yeah, yeah. So-- and then the surface of the fragments themselves, too, was very, very strange in the first place. Unlike almost all the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are quite smooth, quite well prepared, proper parchedments. And most of the fragments in the private collections were scraps of leather. The physicists who've worked on the material have said that these are properly leather and not really parchedments based on their preparation. And because of the preparation, they're not scraped to the same level. They're not stretched. As finally, they don't undergo quite the same chemical bath that parchedments would in antiquity. And what happens then over time is these types of material, the leathers tend to dry out more quickly. They develop creases and cracks on the surface. They become really rough. The surface of them is quite rough, very, very difficult to write on. And then that becomes more readily apparent when you're looking at them after the fact. Well, the paleographers we were working with, originally started classifying scribble hands like the skill of individual scribes as very rudimentary as someone who's learning their craft. Over time, we started to think through this a little bit more carefully and discovered, well, no, the reason these scripts look so bad in a lot of places is just because the surface of the material is so rough, which is very strange. And then there, something else that we also came to discover are some-- what I would call paleographic anomalies, paleography is how we date manuscripts on the basis of handwriting. Handwriting styles, formal handwriting styles in scribble cultures will change over time. And you can track these broadly to give you a basic sense of the time period in which a text was written, in which a manuscript was written. And what we saw were anomalous, I guess, mixing of-- like you would have a Hebrew letter, let's say you have a vaude which is consistent with a later perodian period right next to a lombid that looks early as manian. These sorts of anomalies that aren't easily explained and don't occur naturally at all. And then finally, the text itself had a tendency in some instances to line up with published editions of these texts, and-- Looking and trying to copy it out of a-- Yeah, and you could tell. And then we had a few of what I liked to call text critical smoking guns, which preserved some sensational readings. It seemed just a little bit on the nose. Like one of the most famous ones from Azusa Pacific's collection is a small fragment of Deuteronomy. It's either chapter 27 or 28, the blessings and the curses, which preserves in place of Montabal, where Montabal is the mountain of the curse. So in place of Montabal, it's Galmongerazim. So the Samaritan reading at the Dead Sea Scrolls, Samaritan reading at the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is not unheard of, right? But it's like-- And it's kind of a dead giveaway because it's a small fragment, and there's text on like three lines. Maybe there's a little bit of a fourth one. But the only complete word on the fragment is right in the middle of the fragment is Haggara Zim. The mountain of the garrison-- Haggara Zim, the mountain of the garrison. And there's all these other features about the fragment that's sort of make you go. So trying to make a fragment more valuable by making it more interesting on those three lines. There's another one of these. There's a fragment from Jeremiah chapter 3 in the Scoyan collection, which preserves a textual variant in Hebrew that is not attested in any of the versions, but was offered as a suggestion. I don't know. People may not be familiar with this, but there are times even in our critical editions of manuscripts of texts like in Bibliahibreakas du Katencia, which was the standard edition of the Hebrew Bible, scholarly edition up until the more recent publication of BHQ, Bibliahibreakas Quinta. In BHS, the editors would occasionally offer editorial suggestions of what they think the text should read, even though they don't have any manuscripts, which preserves this clear reading, they will occasionally make these suggestions. There's one of these instances in Jeremiah chapter 3. There's an editorial suggestion in the notes and lo and behold, here you have a fragment that preserves this editorial suggestion by the BHS editors. I tend to think sometimes that we weren't maybe in the early stages, it feels like we should have caught on to some of this stuff a little earlier, but our first instinct, mine and some of my colleagues was, "Oh my God, this is amazing." We've got this. We've got the intended effect, I guess. Yeah, it did, but then afterwards we'd have been it. It's too good to be true. It feels a little bit too good to be true. What happens, so these institutions with big collections of the Dead Sea Scrolls start to realize that a lot of their collections are forged? What do you do with that? Where do you go from there? Right. Now, this is the bugaboo in this, because these institutions have invested considerable amounts of money into their private collections. They're not under any legal obligation after they've actually come into legal possession of their materials. They're not under any legal obligation to share the contents of their private collections. They can just hold on to that for themselves. So in many ways, scholars are dependent on the good will of collectors to want the world to know about what they've got and its significance to the study of antiquities. Now, what happens? I worked for two separate private collections. I worked for the Scoyan Collection, and I worked for the Museum of the Bible. And the approaches, both of these private collectors had to their fragments when the question of forgery was raised was, I'll just say what they ended up doing was right away when we had suspicions of scholars on the basis of some of these things that I've suggested. They wanted some form of more tangible, scientifically robust proof of this. Now I need to clarify that you can't prove that something is authentic or forgery. You can properly scientifically show that it's most plausible one way or the other. And this is all on a spectrum. Some things look to be almost certainly to forgeries, can't prove it, but there are a number of features and factors which indicate these are almost certainly forgeries. Scholars can be suspicious of, but there's just not enough evidence to say one way or the other. So these private collectors wanted to know, they're like, well, which are these actual forgeries? Are there ways after the fact, are there physical tests that we can conduct to show that they are or they are not? So for both the museum of the Bible and for this going collection, I worked with a group of scientists, some scientists from Berlin as well as a group of scientists working with a company and an art fraud company called art fraud insights in the United States. And they developed physical tests to try and see if we can gain a clearer perspective on whether these match the features, the physical features of manuscripts from the period or if there's things on them that don't work. So for example, one of the fragments in the Schoen's collection is a papyrus fragment with text from the book of Enoch on it. When this was taken in for physical testing to Berlin, they detected the presence of quite a bit of salt, salt crystals on the surface of the fragment, which is expected because it was sitting for supposedly sitting for thousands of years in this dry, very salty environment near the Dead Sea. When you look at fragments that under a microscope that do have salt crystals embedded on the surface, they tend to like the salt crystals themselves tend to look fairly distinct. They look like naturally occurring salts. But what we saw under what the physicists saw under the microscope when they looked at this particular fragment were granules of table salt, which was not, the table salt is a refined form of salt that was not invented until I think the 14th of the 15th century C.E. Right. So that's kind of a dead giveaway. One could say, well, maybe some scholar was putting salt on his fries while he was working on the. And that's how it got on there, which sure that could also be an explanation. But then under microscope, we also saw ink on the salt crystals on the fragment. So this is one of the sorts of physical tests that were conducted. One of the things that we saw quite a bit of was ink in places where it shouldn't be on the surface that you can only detect with a microscope. So parchment in particular will. will delaminate over time, meaning that as they deteriorate and as they damage, the surface layer will start to flake off. The inks don't penetrate that layer. So when that top layer flakes off, the ink is gone. The text is gone. There are a few instances that you can see under microscope where the ink is slipping onto the under layer, onto the layer below the delaminated portion of the fragments. And then there are some parts where there are cracks in that top layer. They're not completely flaked off. There are cracks. And there's ink that's actually. yeah, it's crossing the crack altogether and it's slipped into inside the crack. So there are quite a few fragments that look like that under microscope. So some of those are the physical features of forgery that look like. this is almost certainly something that was an ancient fragment that has already suffered deterioration that has been written on after the fact is what these are. You are still listening to footnote famous. If you like this work and want to see it grow, please consider supporting us on Patreon. And if that's not something you can do right now, no worries, just enjoy the show. I want to talk a little bit about the world that gives rise to this because you and I both come from the same world, relatively speaking. And I think I was raised to believe that the Bible is the Internet Word of God. So presumably these are real physical things when we're talking about manuscripts, we're talking about in my world it's more of a pirey, but we're talking about real physical things that can be used against that argument or not against the right word, but that can be held up beside the argument that the Bible is the Internet Word of God and kind of test it. And this is where I mean famously we have all sorts of conversation, people mentioned like Bargurman books and things like that, which have made some of these debates famous. But it's interesting to me, like one of the earliest points, I was an academia and one of the points that I found out about this whole elicit world had nothing to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls, it was actually during a famous debate between Bart Irman and Daniel Wallace. And in that debate famously, maybe I'll put a clip in as a matter of fact, in that debate, Daniel Wallace stands up and says, we now have a copy of a first century gospel of Mark, and this is basically proof that this is going to be from the first century. The oldest manuscript of the New Testament is now a fragment from Mark's gospel that is from the first century. How accurate is the dating? Well my source is a paparologist who worked on this manuscript, a man whose reputation is unimpeachable. He considered him to be the best paparologist on the planet. His reputation is on the line with his dating and he knows it, but he is certain that this manuscript was from the first century. This papyrus fragment, just like the other new discoveries that we are preparing for publication, strongly confirms what most scholars have already said is the original text. And Bargurman is just like, what the heck, okay, I don't know what to say to that, we don't have manuscripts from the first century, we barely have manuscripts from the second century from the Christian manuscripts. And here this is a gospel of Mark from the first century, apparently, and what's wild eventually, it took years for all this to come out. It's eventually 2012. He said that. Yeah, exactly. He said 2012 and I think we just figured out what, like, it's just being published in the last few years. For years. Eventually we just covered three or four years ago. Yeah, yeah. So this, this was a real, this is a real fragment of the gospel of Mark. However, it's not a first century fragment, it's probably second or maybe even third century fragment. But apart from that, this fragment was from Oxford's paparology collection. It was illegally sold, ostensibly, to the Museum of the Bible by an Oxford professor who had no business selling it because it wasn't his, it's Oxford's papyrus. And this was my introduction to this world and it's so fascinating and this is where I have this book, I'll hold it up, or bird about the stolen fragments. Yeah, that depends on the whole bunch of this stuff. But I think at the heart what we're actually talking about is a whole world of black market antiquities and like a lot of evangelicals have been caught up and I'm not blaming anybody. It's just like, I think when your conversation is about the authenticity and authority of the Bible. inevitably you become more susceptible to this kind of stuff. Is that a fair, is that a fair assessment? Absolutely. And I'm just reminded of a few things that I've encountered over the course of my experience in this world with private collectors. I'll say at the outset here to one of the other very unusual features of the Dead Sea Scrolls forgeries. We need to keep these groups separate from the authentic actual Dead Sea Scrolls too often when I do these sorts of interviews. People walk away thinking that all the Dead Sea Scrolls are forgery. No, no, no, one thing is no. Yes, there are hundreds of authentic Dead Sea Scrolls, but there's a handful of forged fragments, tiny little forged fragments and private collections. One of the features of all of them is the inordinately high percentage of material that is so called biblical. Remember, I said early on that about 30% of the entire collection of Dead Sea Scrolls are copies of text from our Bibles. Almost all the fragments in private collections are fragments of Bible, which is strange. It's right away it suggests there's something different, there's something unusual about this. Not impossible, but it's just an oddity that doesn't match what we see evidenced in the Judean Desert. The other thing, something else that happened here in the course of this, something that Martin Scoyen revealed to us is that in the court, when he was purchasing material from private collectors, he would actually go to them and say, "It would be amazing if you could find for me like a fragment from first chronicles, Samuel, or Nehemiah, or "and lo and behold within a little while." Hey, look, we found this. We found it. There's all these things, but I think to your point, there's sort of a conditioning within even gelical culture that stems from this sense that there's something unique and special about the Bible as God's word that makes the material somehow more significant than, you know, like fragments from Safo or from like Herodotus or so of these, you know, actual other ancient writers. So I think this plays a great deal into that and it's always been that way. You know, one of the reasons why the Dead Sea Scrolls attracted so much attention is because of their biblical content. There's like a huge cache of Greek manuscripts from Herculaneum. Herculaneum? How do you say it? Yeah. For Herculaneum, that's a huge cache of manuscripts that I'm willing to bet. Most people have never heard of. They haven't been published yet in large part because all of this takes money. It requires funding. One of the. Yeah, I is helping them figure it out. With the burned layers of it. Yeah. Yes. So, you know, it's as a result of that, you know, all of this plays into just the central feature that the Bible has within. I would say particularly like American Christian culture. I think this is very much kind of an American phenomenon. And then, you know, somehow capitalism. Yeah. I think there's something about ownership that separates. separates it from. That makes it. If you can own a piece of this, it somehow. It just increases that on. on. on. on. on to another level. Now, I'll just share a couple of things that. that. that I'm reminded of thinking through this. So, there was. at this time when. when the. Daniel Wallace was announcing the existence of first century mark, which turned out to be third century mark. Josh McDowell, also very famous, you know, published a. a video lecture that went viral, in which he showed slides and pictures of him, you know, working with a. he doesn't say who, but like. a conservator, an archaeologist, we don't know, but somebody with. with antiquities, you know, he's. he's showing pictures of pulling fragments out of mummy masks, which is big no-no. You're not supposed to do that, but. And as he's talking about this stuff, he says some very interesting things. One of the things he says is, as this is happening on the screen and, you know, actual archaeologists and actual conservators, as they're watching this, are all, you know, having anxiety attacks about what's happening. He makes this statement about how. how much scholars hate that were able to do this. But, you know what? He says, we own them. We can do what we want to them. It's this sort of prevailing attitude. At the time, I'm. another story I'm thinking of here. At the time, that Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary purchased their eight fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, all of which. I believe they have also determined our forgeries. At the time that they purchased their collection of fragments, they. they built an exhibit around them, and that was on for several days. They showed some other actual authentic antiquities and had, I think, a couple of other fragments from the actual Israel antiquities authority on display, along with their forgeries. They did a lot of. the people who were organizing the event did a lot of the. a lot of media for it in a. in a newspaper interview. One of the directors said that one of their fragments, which is a copy from. of text from. from Levedicus, which is very odd. It contains text from Levedicus chapter 20 in a couple lines, in the first two lines, but then it follows with text from Levedicus chapter 18 in a couple lines just below that. And these are texts about. about punishing same-sex sexual relationships in the book of Levedicus, right? It's a very odd arrangement of text in the first place. This is another one of these that's just kind of on the nose, because if you know anything too about the period about the time, nobody was, you know, especially concerned to ask questions in, you know, first century Palestine about same-sex relationships and what to do with homosexuals. It just wasn't a talking point anywhere. At this time period, so it's very odd that you would have a. what looks like a collection of proof texts about, you know, the biblical position on homosexuality is essentially how this fragment came to be interpreted. And in a newspaper interview, one of the directors of the exhibit disclosed to the reporter that the seminary had actually paid quite a bit more for this one fragment. Then they had for other fragments in their collection. And the reason for it, according to him, was because, and I believe this is a direct quote, this fragment attests to an eternal truth God's word. So there's a strange combination of ownership, of this sense of the word of God and the specialness of Scripture and being able to hold on to actual tangible pieces of that from this bygone era. There's, it does something to people. I've likened to this in a couple of my own publications about it to modern-day relic. - Collecting. - Yeah, I agree. Yeah, right, that's a great way to put it. You know, in the medieval churches, I was come in place for churches to collect, you know, have like the neibone of a saint or something. - Yeah, yeah. - Nails, nails, pieces of the actual cross, four skin, there's, I think there's four skin. A lot of, a lot of, I think there's one about Jesus' four skin, if I'm not mistaken. - Yeah, so it's, yeah. - You know, relics essentially. - These were van der rei. - That's such a, it's such a good way to put it because, I do remember being in this world. And I mean, same thing, I started into seminary and like I started getting interested in this stuff and I was still under the, you know, I thought that all of it lined up with my, you know, sort of pre-existing beliefs that the Bible's in there and I didn't really think too much about it. But I remember like something coming to my church that had a few, like, I don't think it was nothing as sensational as a piece of the day. - Like scrolls, but like it had. - Like a pattern. - Yeah, or like here's an old lamp from the time or something, and it was like that kind of stuff. And then there's a wild story that I started hearing too. And I first heard it at SBL at some point, that we started hearing among scholars that at Baylor University, they were scrubbing down mummy mask. So basically just for people who don't know, mummy's like at some points they're made of wood, you know, like the painted faces on, that would sit on the top of the sarcophagi. But some of them in later periods would be made of paper mache. And when you use ancient paper mache, what are you doing? You're taking paper and creating a mummy mask out of like essentially, but I'm saying paper is papyri, but essentially you're creating like a paper mache. And there's these stories at Baylor University of taking these like ancient mummy masks and putting them in a sink with some like dawn soap or something and scrubbing it and pulling up like these manuscripts and like amazing, look at this, like this. There's, it's a maze, the stories that came and the whole thing is it turns out later on, and we didn't know this at the time, but the whole thing was actually stayed and then it was used to basically trick people. - Yeah. - But the idea of like, like what you just said, like scholars are horrified by this, conservationists are like, why would you destroy a mummy mask? But if you're thinking, well, what else matters from the ancient world other than these tax texts that vindicate my pre-existing conclusions that I'm just so confident or certain it never even occurs to me that I should be more careful. Like it's just, it's so, it's such a wild thing of like, when I think about it now and as I know you do this too, because we're both engaging with Christian apologists, we're both engaging with this culture of misinformation. And I think it just doesn't even occur to people often that they're wrong. I think people are just like, well, what? Like the manuscripts are gonna justify what I think, right? Like this is the truth. It's like, there's no, there's no questioning it. - Exactly. So yeah, no, it's, that's, and there's video also floating around of the mummy mask deconstruction. - Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, I can find and share the link with you for that, if you're interested in seeing it. - Okay, I love that. - This, yeah, it raises to mind another. This is also in, there's a video lecture by Weston Fields, the late Weston Fields who was the director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation. The Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation was a private organization that raised money to award funding the publication, the official publications of the Dead Sea Scrolls. So it was like a philanthropic organization, not a scholarly organization. They, you know, there's scholars on the board and there were scholars helping out. But Weston Fields once gave, and Weston Fields did a PhD in Hebrew Bible at the Hebrew University. So, you know, he's got credentials. But he gave a lecture at the Linear Theological Library back in 2010 or 2011, I think was 2011. All about the Dead Sea Scrolls. And during the question and answer period, somebody had asked him this question about why, it was the first question I believe. About what, what is the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls for Christianity? It is a question that comes up a lot because they come from sort of that same time period when Jesus lived and died, and when the church sort of emerged. So it's an interesting question. He gives a lot of the same sorts of answers. You know, there's a fair bit of overlap, theologically in terms of some of the things that you see in New Testament theology with some of the things that the people at Kumaran who collected the Dead Sea Scrolls thought. There's been advances in Palestinian air and may from the first century, which I've provided some insights into some of the language, potentially some of the language behind some of the texts of the gospels. I know not everybody buys that, but I think there are some scholars who still take that seriously. But it's these sorts of things. And then he says something kind of amazing. And you can see him, he sort of pauses and then he goes, you know, he says, I'm not saying, this is Western talking. I'm not saying that this is the case, but let's just imagine for a moment, we've got this big manuscript, one Q Isaiah, the great Isaiah Scroll, the most famous one that everybody likes to talk about. We've got this manuscript that comes from, you know, same time period as Jesus. From around about the same place as where Jesus lived. He's like, I'm not saying this happened, but let's just suppose. He says, suppose there was a way to extract fingerprints from the back of this manuscript. And suppose we could even detect like the DNA attached to these fingerprints on the back of this manuscript. You see where this is going? I'm not saying, he's like, I'm not saying this is the case, but you never know when Jesus opens this scroll and maybe from the Gospel of Luke, I can slough chapter four where Jesus reads the, reads the scroll of Isaiah and the synagogue. He's making this direct connection, right? He's saying, maybe there's a chance that, I mean, of course, all of this is ridiculous. I mean, how will we know Jesus fingerprints, even if we have the more his DNA and even if we have it? We just, it's nonsense, but people hear this kind of stuff and they're making personal connections through the manuscripts, through the fragments, to this person. I've called it in other places because you just don't know the potential is there for this to be the Bible that Jesus read, the actual text themselves. That now puts these things on potentially another level. And I think part of the mystique there and the fact that there's just no way to show or to demonstrate any of this in the first place, scientifically, academically, these are all nonsense questions. But the fact that it's totally unfalsifiable, I think it promotes ways in which people can lean into this without being overtly dishonest, I suppose, about what these fragments actually are, what they do represent. It's about what we want from them to and what we want to need from history that we're not just looking objectively. It's like, these are deep. And I mean, I'm not, I'm not actually opposed to this. I think like this is how religion works. Like we do form attachment to these stories. And but to some extent, there's a point that to do critical scholarship, we have to detach a little bit and say, like we're being kind of duped here in some cases by antiquities dealers who see our desperate need to have these stories and are taking us for millions of dollars, frankly, not me thankfully, but taking some people for millions of dollars because they are so desperate to have this story and these connections and to uphold this narrative about what the Bible is and where it comes from. - Yeah. It's interesting. Like one of the things that the museum of the Bible is doing, they have an ongoing project. One of the things that they, as part of their acquisitions phase, they just were buying up. They have, I believe it's over 5,000 individual copies of like medieval to more, well, not medieval. They more early modern Torah scrolls, like from the 1516, 1718th centuries, which have become kosher because they've been retired from active use within a synagogue. There are strict religious procedures in place for retiring Jewish manuscripts. You can't just throw them away. You can't destroy them. They have to be properly stored and they're effectively out of use at that point. and the Museum of the Bible has purchased thousands of these. Which don't really, like these don't really serve a text critical. They don't have any obvious text critical value, anything this late. They are religious artifacts and there's something really sensitive about this as well. In the view of a lot of Jewish communities, this is akin to digging up your dead ancestors and collecting them in a museum. There are all sorts of questions surrounding this and like I bring it up just to say, you know, it doesn't seem to serve a purpose beyond exhibit in some respects and making connections for people who don't know any better. To something that they imagine in their heads that's just not real and is potentially, you know, ethically problematic. Yeah. It's all so interesting and I think we could have spent a couple hours but I appreciate this as like an interview or an overview of a primer. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about your book as we show? I think it leans really nicely into what we're talking about is the sort of ideology that can come behind our collection. So I have my most recent book that I've just published is "Goth's Propaganda, pulling back the curtain on what the Bible wants you to see." So this is an exploration of the to a deeper period. This is an exploration of the culture, the religion and the history of the early Israelites as they transitioned out of the earliest forms of their religion into later forms of Judaism. So what the Bible has to say about it and how the Bible has been used by various groups who have collected and transmitted the text to say things in service of their own ideologies and their own religious and cultural programs. The book is based on an undergraduate course that I used to teach for years called "Israelite Religions." And so I spent a lot of time talking about the questions about who God is, who Yahweh is, what the world looks like, how religions were practiced, where the people of Israel actually came from and who they were. So some of their institutions like marriage and the temple institution and the royal institutions and those sorts of things. So it's a large overview of this culture and this time period within just the book itself. So if you're interested in that kind of stuff, then I'll leave the links to it down below. We're going to get back together in the New York. I think at some point I'm going to talk about that too because it's equally fascinating subject. I see parallel things actually in the development of the New Testament as well. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Good conversation. Yeah, cool. Where can people find you? So my YouTube channel is my name, Kip Davis. And that's where I am almost the entire time. I don't do Twitter much anymore at all. And I'm occasionally on Blue Sky. But I also have a patron if you're interested in supporting the kind of work that I do more directly. I'm, you know, I spend all of my time trying to promote critical biblical scholarship, trying to increase public awareness of what the Bible is, how fascinating it is as a text from an historical critical perspective. And, you know, the ways in which I think it continues to be potentially useful but also dangerous in our modern world. If these are the sorts of things that that you're interested in and you're passionate about, you can support me on my Patreon or directly. But otherwise come and come and watch my, I've got a bunch of videos about the Dead Sea Scrolls about about. I like those. Yeah. Yeah. I do live streams weekly on various topics. And yeah. So cool. I'll link to all a bunch of that's up below your Patreon. I enjoy your live streams. Can I just say I have to hang out on a Saturday or Friday or Saturday. Watch your live streams. They're always fun. So yeah. Well, thank you so much. Dr. Kip, thank you so much for joining me today. Pleasure. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Dr. Kip Davis. I will leave a link to Dr. Kip's YouTube channel below as well as his book that he talked about a little bit at the end. And hopefully I will have him back some time to talk in more detail about that book. If you enjoyed this podcast and want to help other people find it, please consider giving it a five star rating on your favorite podcast platform. You can always find me at YouTube CJ cornthalade over at YouTube where I do these interviews. You can always watch a video of these interviews and some of my own videos too. I am also on substack now. You can find me on CJ cornthalade at substack as well. I guess I'm just about everywhere these days. But yeah, thank you so much for taking the time to listen. And I as always will see you next time.