Dead Sea Scrolls as Forgeries

Kipp Davis:
[5:09 PM]Papyrus manuscripts represent fourteen percent of the Qumran corpus of Dead Sea Scrolls. Recently published Judaean Desert fragments belonging to private collections contain no papyri, but there are several papyrus fragments in The Schøyen Collection and the collection housed at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Ft. Worth TX. The SWBTS fragments—including two papyri—are still being vetted for publication, but it has been recently revealed that the three scraps of papyri in The Schøyen Collection are likely modern forgeries. These fragments have been determined to be forgeries from a battery of elemental and multi-spectral analyses, which confirmed suspicions of the manuscript editors that were based on scribal and codicological anomalies. The situation this presents suggests an increased probability that other unprovenanced Judaean Desert papyri in other private collections could also be forgeries, but this is based on an impressionistic survey of the scribal features in the Qumran papyri. This paper will put forward a codicological analysis of these fragments in close conversation with observed features from the entire collection of papyri in the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls. EDIT I have updated this paper on the basis of small corrections provided by Torleif Elgvin appearing on pp. 2–3.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCqsWyvOHfw&pp=ygUeZGVhZCBzZWEgc2Nyb2xscyBoaXN0b3J5dmFsbGV5

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