Over the last few years, I have had a number of occasions to mention The Lying Pen of Scribes, a project on the Dead Sea Scrolls funded by the Research Council of Norway. In fact, it may not be quite right to say “project on the Dead Sea Scrolls.” While the Scrolls have been the focus of the project, it has touched many wider issues: the trade in antiquities, fakes and forgeries, the relationship of the physical sciences to manuscript studies, and more.

The funding period of The Lying Pen of Scribes is now coming to a close, and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the importance of the project and to appreciate its architect. As a discipline, we all owe a large debt of gratitude to Årstein Justnes of the University of Agder. Årstein will deflect any credit with a self-deprecating joke, but I’ll proceed anyway and point out that he did an enormous amount of work organizing and facilitating a large and complicated project that has produced very important results. If you looked only at the publications emerging from the project, that would be impressive in itself.

But The Lying Pen has, I think, had an impact that is broader than its publications. Over the life of the project, there has been a marked shift in the field’s thinking about issues of the materiality of manuscript artifacts, and The Lying Pen was one of the moving forces behind that shift. Even before the project officially received RCN funding in 2019, many of the team’s members were already busy uncovering the fake “Scrolls” in several collections. These discoveries rightfully received a lot of media attention, but the reach of the The Lying Pen extends beyond exposing these scandals. The provenance research that the project supported, the bridges built with the natural sciences, the conversations fostered among scholars and journalists–all of this contributed to creating an environment for thinking differently about manuscript studies. It’s a great achievement.

On a personal level, the project inspired me to think much more critically about my own work on early Christian manuscripts and issues of provenance. And finally, I’m grateful to the project for bringing me back to the Dead Sea Scrolls. I had studied the Scrolls pretty intensely in graduate school, but my research moved off in other directions over the years. The Lying Pen provided a welcome opportunity for me to revisit the Scrolls from the angle of provenance questions and the fascinating narratives surrounding some of the characters involved in the discovery of the Scrolls.

So, thank you to the Lying Pen team and to Årstein for making it all happen.