Read down to the end of the story to learn where the “Jesus Wife” fragment is now:
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Ariel Sabar’s Veritas: Some First Reactions
Thanks to Doubleday for sending along an advanced copy of Ariel Sabar’s new book, Veritas. I really didn’t know what to expect with this book. Sabar’s detailed article on the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” in The Atlantic in 2016 was so full of blockbuster revelations regarding the owner of the papyrus and his concocted backstory, I genuinely wondered what a book-length treatment of this episode could add to the discussion.
A lot, as it turns out.
The book is written in Sabar’s usual engaging style, so from that perspective, it’s a very easy read. But the content of the book is pretty devastating. I had to put it down on a few occasions just to collect my thoughts and absorb the impact. Veritas reveals things about our field that we, as scholars, don’t like to think about or talk about. But Sabar, a journalist with an outsider’s viewpoint, clinically dissects the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife episode in a way that reflects pretty poorly on parts of our guild.
The first half of the book proceeded much as I expected, expanding on many of the details of Sabar’s Atlantic article. If you needed any further convincing of the importance of investigating the provenance of (allegedly) ancient manuscripts that appear for sale on the antiquities market, this first portion of the book should be required reading.
The second half of the book, however, took what was for me an unexpected turn. It is a deep dive into the career of Karen King, the Harvard Divinity School professor who published the papyrus in 2014, and into the politics of Harvard Divinity School itself.
I’ll preface my comments by saying that Karen King has been very kind to me on the occasions that we’ve met. I don’t know her well, but I know a lot of her students who are themselves excellent scholars. Her book, What is Gnosticism? (2003) was a very thought-provoking read for me when I was a graduate student and has influenced the way that I approach the use of Christian heresiologists as historical sources. All of this to say: I admire Karen King, and reading this part of Veritas was at times difficult.
Sabar’s research is extensive (340 pages of text and an additional 40 pages of notes). I want to focus on one of the (many) points that Sabar identifies at which this whole thing could have been avoided before the papyrus was ever published in Harvard Theological Review. I think we all suspected there was something a little odd about the peer review of this article, but Sabar’s investigation lays out this process in all its grim detail, pointing out multiple layers of conflicting interests that began with the initial submission of the article in 2012.
Some of these conflicts are to be expected: A Harvard Divinity School professor submitting work to HTR, also edited by Harvard Divinity School professors, seems a little awkward, but a quick glance at the CVs of Divinity School faculty shows a good number of publications in HTR (although I would be curious to know how often the editors of HTR reject an article submitted by a faculty colleague).
The problems really begin to arise in the peer review process. Sabar was able to identify the three “blind” peer reviewers of the original article. Two very negative reviews came from a pair of the world’s premier Coptologists, Bentley Layton and Stephen Emmel. Layton told the editors of HTR that publishing the fragment “would be very embarrassing for the Harvard Theological Review.” And Sabar reports that Emmel’s review clearly identified the papyrus as a fake and pointed out “nearly every sign of forgery that would surface over the next four years.”
The third reviewer, somewhat surprisingly, was the papyrologist Roger Bagnall, whose advice King had sought before submitting the article to HTR. Bagnall identified his earlier involvement with King and the papyrus, writing to the managing editor of HTR “I wouldn’t want there to be any illusion that I’m in any way an outsider in the way that referees typically are,” but the editors of HTR solicited his review anyway. In my experience this phenomenon is not that uncommon. I’ve been sent materials for review that I recognized as the work of colleagues. I flag this to the editors of the journals and as often as not, the editors will ask me to go ahead with the review as long as I believe I can be objective in my evaluation. So, having Bagnall as a reviewer is not that surprising.
What is surprising is the subsequent actions of the editors of HTR. Rather than accepting the advice of the two expert Coptologists and rejecting the article, the editors allowed King to assemble a team to conduct technical tests on the papyrus (analysis of materials, ink, and AMS radiocarbon testing) to try to “scientifically” prove its authenticity. Sabar’s investigations, however, reveal that the materials and ink teams were in fact headed by personal friends of King and Bagnall, conflicts of interest that were not revealed to the journal. But before letting HTR off the hook, Sabar points out that “the journal didn’t peer review the lab studies” (p. 297), and as far as I can tell, King’s revised article also seems not to have been given a second review. This seems to be a complete abdication of duty on the part of the editors of a major scholarly journal. Incidentally, these editors (Kevin J. Madigan and Jon D. Levenson, both professors at Harvard Divinity School) seem to have ceased to be the editors of HTR at roughly the time the review copies of Veritas were mailed out. Here’s the header for the front matter for the July 2020 issue:
And here’s the editorial info at the Cambridge Core site today:
It’s interesting timing for a change in leadership.
In any event, the peer review process at HTR failed badly in this instance. And if there are heroes in Sabar’s story, they are those people who subjected the papyrus to the scrutiny that King herself failed to apply before the papyrus was published. In this connection, Sabar gives an excellent summary of the clever work of Andrew Bernhard and Christian Askeland in finding the smoking guns that exposed the papyrus as a forgery for all to see. It should be noted, though, that the community of Coptologists doubted the fragment’s authenticity from the start, as outlined in this post from Hugo Lundhaug and Alin Suciu (and the thread of comments) made just days after the Rome conference at which King announced the existence of the papyrus in 2012.
Sabar’s book is a gripping read, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the study of early Christianity or ancient manuscripts. What are the takeaways? For me, it’s definitely a cautionary tale. At one level, of course, the lesson is to thoroughly investigate provenance when working with artifacts, and here Sabar’s investigative reporting really shines. But at a more general level, the lesson is this: Be able to admit when you’ve made a mistake. Accept justified correction with humility and grace, and just move on.
Upcoming Talk on Coptic Books
For those who might be interested, I will be giving a lecture on early Coptic books on 6 August at 6 pm (Berlin time).
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Trever’s Photos of the Cave 1 Scrolls Freely Available Online
[[Update 22 July 2024: I see that this book is among the many that have ceased to be available on archive.org since the decision in Hachette v. Internet Archive court case.]]
I’ve written before on this blog about the dispersion of libraries, and I have another instance to report. The Claremont School of Theology has begun the process of merging with Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. As a part of this process, the Claremont library has donated some 250,000 volumes to the Internet Archive. Some of their materials have already been digitized and are available online for download. These include (as the title of the post indicates), the 1972 edition of John Trever’s photographs (taken in 1948) of three of the Cave 1 Scrolls–the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa), The Community Rule (1QS), and the Habakkuk Pesher (1QpHab):
More recent images of these scrolls are available online at The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls, but Trever’s images made in 1948 preserve bits of the scrolls that have were lost during their travels to the United States and back to Jerusalem. The donation to the Internet Archive also includes some important early works in Scrolls studies like John Allegro’s The Dead Sea Scrolls (Penguin, 1956). Additional useful books will no doubt be forthcoming from this venture.
I understand that this donation also included the materials held at “The the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center” formerly housed at Claremont. One part of this collection is of particular interest to me at the moment, namely the “John C. Trever Dead Sea Scrolls Collection” of photographs. I have not yet been able to figure out if this material was included in the donation. An email query to archive.org frustratingly resulted only in a completely uninformative auto-response. It would be good to know what is the fate of this important material.
For the full story of the donation, see the Internet Archive’s blog post.
Qumran Cave 1 Questions, Part 6: 1QSa and 1QSb
As I continue to work through the Cave 1 scrolls to try to sort out the purchases from the excavated materials, I spent some time today with the lists of photographs in Tov and Pfann, Companion Volume to the Dead Sea Scrolls Microfiche Edition (2nd rev. ed; Leiden: Brill, 1995). One of the descriptions mentioning a series of photos caught my eye: “Qumran, cave 1 mss, from excavation, Feb. 15-Mar. 5, 1949”:
But after looking at most of these photos (the ones available online), I don’t think this description can be right. The detail “from excavation” and the 1949 dates seem to be (incorrect) extrapolations on the part of the editors. The handwritten photo log for these numbers is even more sparse:
To the right of the last of this sequence (040.077) is written simply, “M. Harding Dead Sea Scrolls.” The date, 4 March 1950, is clear. These are not excavation photos from 1949. The photos do, however, help to contribute to a solution to a mystery. This sequence of photographs seems to exclusively involve a well-defined set of manuscripts as follows:
| PAM # | Contents |
| 40.059 | 1Q28a (1QSa), bottom half of col. 1 |
| 40.060 | 1Q28a (1QSa), bottom half of col. 2 |
| 40.061 | Image not online? |
| 40.062 | 1Q28a (1QSa), top half of col. 2 |
| 40.063 | 1Q8 (1QIsab), frag. 3 and frag. 5 |
| 40.064 | 1Q28b (1QSb), col. 4 and 1Q28a (1QSa), col. 1 |
| 40.065 | 1Q8 (1QIsab), frag. 1 |
| 40.066 | 1Q8 (1QIsab), frag. 4 |
| 40.067 | Image not online? |
| 40.068 | 1Q20 (1QapGen), frags. 2-5 |
| 40.069 | 1Q28b (1QSb), col. 5 |
| 40.070 | 1Q28b (1QSb), col. 1 and col. 5 |
| 40.071 | 1Q28b (1QSb), cols. 2-4 |
| 40.072 | 1Q20 (1QapGen), frag. 1 |
| 40.073 | 1Q28b (1QSb), bottom of col. 3 |
| 40.074 | 1Q20 (1QapGen), frags. 6-8 |
| 40.075 | 1Q28b (1QSb), col. 1 and col. 5 |
| 40.076 | 1Q28b (1QSb), col. 1, col. 4, and col. 5 |
| 40.077 | 1Q28 (1QS title) |
All of the items photographed in this sequence belong to 1Q8, 1Q20, and 1Q28, exactly the set of items singled out by the editors of DJD 1 as a discreet purchase:
“parmi les fragments édités ci-après, les ensembles nos. 8 (Isaïe), 20 (Apocalypse de Lamech), et 28 (Annexes à la Règle de la Communauté) ont été achetés à un marchand d’antiquités de Bethléem” (DJD 1, p. 43)
“Tous les fragments que nous groupons sous le n°. 28 appartiennent certainement au même ensemble que 1QS. En effet ils ont été vendus au Musée Palestinien en 1950 par le marchand d’antiquités de Bethléem en même temps que des fragments de ‘l’Apocalypse de Lamech’ (publiés ici sous le sigle 1Q20) et de l’Isaïe de l’Université Hébraïque = 1QIsb publiés ici sous le sigle 1Q8)” (DJD 1, p. 107)
So these items were bought by the museum from “the Bethlehem dealer” (Kando) in 1950. If the date in the photo log reproduced above is correct, then we have a terminus ante quem for this purchase: 4 March 1950. So, this is a small victory.
There is just one loose end that has been driving me nuts for the past couple weeks. In a footnote in The Untold Story of Qumran, Trever says the following in passing:
“A small piece of 1QSb (Col. II) also was sifted from the debris” (p. 203, note 2).
Trever is normally quite careful about this kind of thing, but I can’t find any corroborating evidence for this claim anywhere. And it’s already slightly suspect because Harding specifically said that the soil from Cave 1 was not sifted (“sieving was not possible,” DJD 1, p. 7). I’m not sure where Trever got this information. If anyone has any leads, I would be grateful to hear them.
Posted in Antiquities Market, Dead Sea Scrolls, Khalil Eskander Shahin (Kando)
Tagged Dead Sea Scrolls
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The Capitoline Sappho
In the wake of the controversy over the “Newest Sappho” papyrus in the last few years , I’ve read more about the Greek poetess Sappho than I ever thought I would. In doing so, I realized that I have a pretty firm mental image of Sappho, and it’s the marble bust in the Capitoline Museum in Rome.
But of course, this is not a portrait of Sappho. In his catalog of the sculptures in the Palazzo dei Conservatori (1926), H. Stuart Jones unenthusiastically described it as follows:
“Dull Roman work from an original of the early fifth century B.C. sometimes combined with the bearded Dionysus and therefore perhaps Ariadne” (p. 60).
Jones goes on to note that the inscription below the head and the base on which the herm sits are modern.
So, when did this anonymous head become Sappho? Around 1564. Maybe.
The inscription below the head (ΣΑΠΦΩ | ΕΡΕΣΙΑ), Sappho Eresia, has been published multiple times. It was published in 1844 and apparently regarded as an ancient inscription (CIG 6106). It was published again in 1890, but this time it was taken to be a clearly modern inscription (IG XIV 253*). It was described as suspect already in 1845 (“eine weibliche Herme mit Namen Sappho in einer sehr verdächtigen griechischen Inschrift,”) by Platner and Urlichs, Beschreibung Roms, p. 237. The most informative publication is Huelsen 1901, which notes that the inscription shows evidence of erasure of letters under the letters ΣΑΠ. And indeed, this can be seen quite clearly:
But none of these publications offer a guess at when the inscription was added.
Jones notes that a drawing of the herm was published by by Jacob Gronow (1645-1716) in his Thesaurus Græcarum antiquitatum (1698):
The caption names the source of the drawing as Pirro Ligorio, but the more proximate source is clearly Giovanni Pietro Bellori’s (1613-1696) illustration in Veterum Illustrium Philosophorum Poetarum Rhetorum et Oratorum Imagines (1685):
The ultimate source for these images is indeed a manuscript at the Vatican Library, BAV Vat Lat 3439, an album of drawings on sheets that have been repaired and rebound. The drawings were prepared at some point in the 16th century (probably before 1570) and are based on drawings by Pirro Ligorio (1513-1583).
Here is a closer look at the Sappho herm in the Vatican codex:
The images in the Vatican manuscript are isolated and without context. The source for these deptictions is generally agreed to be a drawing in one of Ligorio’s manuscripts in the National Library at Naples, Codex XIII.B.7, p. 412. Here is the relevant image of the Sappho:
The drawing is accompanied by a short note. Mandowsky and Mitchell point out that “the drawing and commentary are late insertions into the manuscript” (probably between 1564 and 1570), but it nevertheless seems that Ligorio’s drawing in this manuscript is the earliest record of this sculpture with this inscription. Unfortunately, the note does not provide much help with the history of the artifact itself:
“Sappho Eresia è quella poetessa che scrisse gli Enigmi jambi, et epigrammi et oltre opere, fu contemporanea all’ altra Sappho Mytilenea, viveano ambedue sotto il regno di Tarquinio Prisco in Roma. La Sappho Mytilenea trovò la poesia lyrica [ms.: illyrica], et si precipitò in mare per amore di phaone, furono ambedue dell’ isola di lesbo l’una di Ereso città, l’altra di Mytilene. La Eresia hebbe il borbozzo ò vero mento grossotto.”
So, Ligorio was under the impression that there were two women from Lesbos named Sappho. One (Sappho of Eresos) was a writer of enigmas and epigrams and the other (Sappho of Mytilene) was the lyric poet. Here, then, we get no details about the sculpture itself. For that, it seems we have to look to one of Ligorio’s manuscripts in Turin (Cod. a.II.10.J.23, p. 76). In the course of describing a herm of “Philemon,” Ligorio writes that it
“fu portato in Roma nella villa di papa Julio terzo, et dindi è stata tolto come molti altri ritratti, et posto nel palazzo Vaticano dà papa Pio quarto, et parte egli ne donò et parte ne dedicò nell’ hemicyclo dell’ atrio di Belvedere, dove erano queste effigie di Platone, Isocrate, di Aristide Smyrneo, di Diogene, di Socrate, di Ierone, de Alcibiade, due testa della celeste Vergine, due di Ariadne, l’effigie di Sappho Eresia, et una testa di Serapide; delle quali nella sedia vacante alcune ne furono tolte, altre portate in Capitolio, et quel ritratto che fù più raro fù di Minicio Cippo tolto dalla villa di Horatio.”
So from this note, it would appear that “l’effigie di Sappho Eresia” was among those pieces that Ligorio sourced to decorate the Cortile del Belvedere at the Vatican (1564-1565) when he was papal architect under Popes Paul IV and Pius IV. These sculptures decorated the area only briefly, before they were given to the people of Rome (that is, sent to the Capitoline and other locations) in 1566 by Pope Pius V, who was less of a fan of pagan statuary.
I assume that this quotation is also the source of the association sometimes made between the Capitoline Sappho and the Villa Giulia, but I’ve been unable to find any other connection between this piece and the Villa (I would be grateful to learn if anyone does know other sources that make that attribution explicit). But the sculptures that decorated the Cortile were acquired from all over Rome and the surrounding regions. How can we really know if this piece came from the Villa Giulia?
Mandowsky and Mitchell have an alternative theory. They point out the similarity of a number of the pieces that decorated the Cortile del Belvedere. Herms of Socrates and Alcibiades that stood with the Sappho also consist of ancient heads on modern shoulders. In all three cases, Mandowsky and Mitchell suggest that “the concoction” is probably the work of Ligorio himself.
In addition, the three herms, which have all ended up in the Capitoline Museum, have inscriptions bearing very similar lettering:
Mandowsky and Mitchell reach a similar conclusion regarding these inscriptions: “All three of these inscriptions seem to have been cut by the same hand–very likely Ligorio’s own” (p. 95).
This all seems plausible, but it’s not the only possible story of this Sappho. According to some scholars, Ligorio’s Sappho is not the one in the Capitoline. Gisela Richter (The Portraits of the Greeks, 1965, p. 70) described Ligorio’s Sappho as follows:
“A herm inscribed Σαπφω Ερεσια is illustrated in Bellori, Imag. 63, and in Gronov, Thes. 11, 34, but has now disappeared. She wears a headdress consisting of a sakkos bound twice round her head, and thick shoulder supports. Apparently not ancient.”
This opinion was followed by David A. Campbell’s 1982 Loeb edition of Sappho (p. 13, note 1). So, if they are right, then the origin of the Capitoline Sappho is still a mystery.
Sources:
Huelsen, Ch. “Die Hermeninschriften beruehmter Griechen und die ikonographischen Sammlungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts.” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archaeologischen Instituts, Romische Abteilung. Bullettino dell’Istituto archeologico germanico, Sezione romana 16 (1901), 123-208 (at p. 199)
Jones, H. Stuart. A Catalogue of the Ancient Sculptures Preserved in the Municipal Collections of Rome: The Sculptures of the Palazzo dei Conservatori. Oxford: Clarendon, 1926.
Mandowsky, Erna and Charles Mitchell. Pirro Ligorio’s Roman Antiquities: The Drawings in MS XIII. B 7 in the National Library of Naples. London: Warburg Institute, 1963.
Ernst Platner, Ernst and Ludwig Erlichs, Beschreibung Roms: Ein Auszug Beschreibung der Stadt Rom. J.G. Cotta’scher Verlag, 1845.
Online record on the website in the Capitoline Museum
Qumran Cave 1 Questions, Part 5: The Strange Case of 1Q5 Fragment 13
1Q5 is a collection of dozens of fragments reassembled into 20 or so more substantial fragments representing one of two copies of the book of Deuteronomy associated with Cave 1 (1QDeutb). The fragments of 1Q5 were edited in DJD 1 in 1955. My interest is with the piece the editors labelled fragment 13. Its history is a little complicated.
The editors make the following remarks about the provenance(s) of the different parts of fragment 13: “The fragments published in the Appendix as well as the central part of f. 5 13 are the remains of the clandestine prospecting of the Syrians (les restes de la prospection clandestine des Syriens)” (p. 43). So, the “central part” of fragment 13 of 1Q5 belonged to a purchase that the editors here associate with the items published in the Appendix to DJD 1 (1Q71, 1Q72, 1Q19bis, 1Q34bis, 1Q70bis), which are the pieces that were at that time in the possession of Mar Samuel in the United States. Those pieces were said to have been acquired by George Isha’ya around August 1948. The editors add in a footnote that two small parts of fragment 13 of 1Q5 were excavated at Cave 1 by de Vaux’s team: “The fact that f. 5 13 could be completed by two small fragments from the excavation of February-March 1949 provides an additional argument for the identical origin for the various lots (Le fait que le f. 5 13 ait pu être complété par deux petits fragments provenant de la fouille de février-mars 1949 apporte un argument de plus à l’identité d’origine de ces divers lots).” This all seems straightforward, but there are a couple problems.
First, the Mar Samuel items in DJD 1 were published without photographs (because the pieces were in the US), but DJD 1 does include a photograph of 1Q5 fragment 13. Second, John Trever, who later published photos of the Mar Samuel fragments, doesn’t mention any bits of Deuteronomy in that context. In his popular account of the discovery of the Scrolls, however, Trever does provide some information on this topic, but it complicates the picture. Trever twice mentions the purchased Cave 1 Deuteronomy fragment. The first time he does so, he associates it with a different purchase, the 1950 lot bought by the Palestine Archaeological Museum from Kando that included 1Q8, 1Q20, and 1Q28:
“The story of [director of the Palestine Archeological Museum Yusuf] Saad’s efforts to make the acquaintance of Kando, and finally (in 1950) to secure the mass of fragments which the cobbler and his associates had dug from the cave, reads like a Sherlock Holmes detective adventure. It was then that fragments of the Hebrew University Isaiah Scroll (1QIsb), some from the “Genesis Apocryphon” (1Q20, now 1QApoc), several large pieces (including two almost-complete columns) from the Manual of Discipline (1QS) and some fragments of a scroll of Deuteronomy (1QDeutb) were secured for the Department of Antiquities, but only after payment of the large sum of £P1,000 ($2,800)” (Trever, The Untold Story, p. 146)
So, here the fragment is part of the 1950 purchase. But again, there is a problem. Harding had already written about the purchased fragment in an article in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly that was published in 1949. He wrote, “Some other fragments in the square script, which have been acquired from an outside source, are of the book of Deuteronomy.” That he is referring to our piece seems clear from the accompanying photograph (which is reproduced below). So what is going on? Trever’s second statement about the Deuteronomy fragment might provide a clue:
“The excavators…also found small pieces of the larger Deuteronomy fragment, part of which was reported to have come from Isha’ya and part from Kando” (Trever, The Untold Story, p. 203, note 2).
So, here it seems like we have three sources for the fragment: de Vaux’s excavation, and two separate purchases, one from George Isha’ya and one from Kando. It may be possible to get a better sense of things by comparing photographs. We can begin with the fragment as published in DJD 1, plate X (published in 1955):
The image looks composite, with a couple pieces added in (identified here with small red arrows). Might these be the pieces excavated by de Vaux? Compare this image to PAM 40.531 taken in 1953, in which our piece is framed together with 1Q5 fragment 8 (top left) and 1Q33 (top right), the fragment of Sukenik’s War Scroll found by the excavators in Cave 1.
Notice the absence of the two smaller fragments that are present in the published plate and the clearly different (lighter) color of the large fragment on the right. Now compare both these photos with the image Harding published in 1949, which again has something of a composite look about it.
To me, this image looks like it has three main pieces, left (made of several fragments), center, and right (again, a slightly different color). So, is it the case that this whole piece was bought in 1949? Or was only the “central part” bought and the other parts excavated? (in which case, where did the small “extra” fragments in plate published in DJD 1 come from? excavation? another purchase?) But to confuse matters more, the editors of DJD 1 make it seem as if this image was one of Harding’s photographs of excavated fragments: “During the excavation, Mr. Harding took photos of all the finds (de tout le lot trouvé). That of f. 5 13 was published in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly (lxxxi, 1949, pl. XX. 3).” So, it is unclear whether this image is showing an excavated piece, a purchased piece, or some combination of the two. If anyone knows the full story of this fragment, I would be grateful to learn it.
In any event, it is interesting to see that the Museum was already purchasing fragments in 1949 and apparently in the early part of the year.
Qumran Cave 1 Questions, Part 4: Sukenik’s Isaiah Scroll
Before diving in to this post, a quick note: The conference that was the proximate cause for me trying to organize my thoughts on the topic of the Dead Sea Scrolls said to come from Cave 1 took place a couple weeks ago (“On the Origin of the Pieces: The Provenance of the Dead Sea Scrolls”). My presentation is now available online at the Lying Pen website, along with all the other presentations. If you do watch my paper, please keep in mind that I view talks like this as an opportunity to raise questions and think through issues, and not necessarily as presenting final conclusions to any particular problem.
Now, back to the questions. In this series of posts (see part 1, part 2, and part 3), one of the questions I have been trying to answer is: Which of the purchased scrolls that we call “Cave 1” pieces can actually be connected with the material recovered from Cave 1 in controlled excavations by de Vaux and his team? Today I want to look again the scroll of Isaiah bought by Eleazar Sukenik (1QIsab).
The scroll was one of three purchased by Eleazar Sukenik from the dealer Faidi Salahi in 1947. It was published in 1955. Seven additional small pieces of the scroll were published in DJD 1 as 1Q8. These pieces are sometimes described as having been excavated by de Vaux’s team. For instance, the editors of DJD 32, the re-edition of the Cave 1 Isaiah scrolls, made the following claim in 2010:
“While Sukenik was working on the main part of 1QIsab, those seven additional fragments were found during excavations in Cave 1 by Lancaster Harding and Roland de Vaux, under the auspices of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities. They were published in the first volume in the DJD series in 1955.” (p. 22)
But the editors of DJD 1 are quite clear that these fragments, collectively published as 1Q8, were not excavated. They were purchased in 1950:
“…parmi les fragments édités ci-après, les ensembles nos. 8 (Isaïe), 20 (Apocalypse de Lamech), et 28 (Annexes à la Règle de la Communauté) ont été achetés à un marchand d’antiquités de Bethléem.” (p. 43)
The Bethlehem dealer would no doubt be Kando, to whom this purchase is attributed by John Trever.
In more recent times, other fragments of 1QIsab have been identified in photographs from the Shrine of the Book (identified as “SHR” in these discussions). In 1988, Emile Puech identified a small portion of Isaiah 44 from Sukenik’s scroll among these photographs. In 2002, Eva Jain made a new reconstruction of Sukenik’s Isaiah scroll and identified several more fragments from the scroll among the pieces recorded in photos in the “SHR” series. So now a couple questions: First, I assume that the pieces in the “SHR” frames were part of the batches of material obtained by Sukenik in November and December of 1947, meaning that this “new” material was also purchased and not excavated. Is this correct? And second: Are these SHR series photos available anywhere online?
In 2009 Peter Flint and Nathaniel Dykstra identified several more such “SHR” fragments and placed them in position in the roll as reconstructed by Jain. These authors also placed one PAM fragment from the frame 40.543. But this piece had already been published (but not placed) as fragment 7 of 1Q8, and thus was also part of the 1950 purchase from Kando. So, again, unless I am missing something, there is no connection between Sukenik’s Isaiah scroll and the material excavated by de Vaux’s team.
Sources:
Barthélemy, Dominique and Józef T. Milik, Qumran Cave I, DJD I (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955).
Flint, Peter W. and Nathaniel N. Dykstra, “Newly Identified Fragments of 1QIsab, Journal of Jewish Studies 60 (2009), 80-89.
Jain, Eva. “Die materielle Rekonstruktion von 1QJesb (1Q8) und einige bisher nicht edierte Fragmente dieser Handschrift,” Revue de Qumrân 20 (2002), 389-409.
Puech, Emile. “Quelques aspects de la restauration du Rouleau des Hymnes (1QH),” Journal of Jewish Studies 39 (1988), 38-55, at 55, note 40.
Ulrich, Eugene and Peter W. Flint, Qumran Cave 1, II: The Isaiah Scrolls, Part 2: Introductions, Commentary, and Textual Variants, DJD XXXII (Oxford: Clarendon, 2010).
Posted in Antiquities Market, Dead Sea Scrolls
Tagged Dead Sea Scrolls, qumran, Qumran Cave 1Q
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A Question About the “Initial Text” of New Testament Documents
This past semester, for the first time in a long while, I taught a few sessions on New Testament textual criticism. I tried to refresh myself on some of the changes in the field in the last couple decades. I’m well aware that I don’t have an especially strong grasp of the details of the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM) that is being used by the Institute for New Testament Textual Research to produce the Editio Critica Maior of the books of the New Testament. So, I wanted to take the opportunity to brush up on this somewhat technical methodology.
The predominant textual flow diagram for non-fragmentary witnesses in the Catholic Epistles; image source: Peter J. Gurry, A Critical Examination of the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method in New Testament Textual Criticism (Brill, 2017), pp. 60-61
First off, let me offer a hearty endorsement of Tommy Wasserman and Peter Gurry, A New Approach to Textual Criticism: An Introduction to the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (SBL Press, 2017). Concise, clear, and really, really useful for those of us struggling to get our heads around this approach. I still have some questions, but I feel a lot better having read this book.
One of the confusing things about the CBGM is the definition of terms. A major point on which I still lack clarity relates to the Ausgangstext, the “initial text” that is the outcome of the application of the CBGM. In Wasserman and Gurry’s helpful glossary, the “initial text” is defined as “the hypothetical witness from which all the extant witnesses derive.” To me this sounded quite similar to what we would call the “archetype” in classical textual criticism (although in the framework of the CBGM what is at issue are immaterial witnesses rather than material manuscripts). But I see now that Klaus Wachtel draws a sharp line between the “initial text” and the “archetype” in the following way:
“…the definition of the term ‘initial text’ must be carefully distinguished from the archetype of the tradition, on the one hand, and from the original text of the author, on the other. The archetype of the tradition was a real manuscript, the copy by which the transmission started that put forth the manuscripts we have―and many more that are lost. The original text of the author predates the manuscripts we have by more than a century in most cases. The initial text is the hypothetical reconstruction of the text as it was before the archetype of the tradition emerged. The initial text is the result of methodical efforts to approximate most closely the lost text of the author based on all relevant evidence, not excluding any trace of transmission predating the archetype.” (“Conclusion” to The Textual History of the Greek New Testament: Changing Views in Contemporary Research, SBL Press, 2011)
I think I understand what is being argued here, but I am not quite clear on–I’m not sure exactly how to say this–how far behind(?) the archetype one can go with “traces of transmission that predate the archetype.” I suppose it would depend upon the quality of the “traces”–in this case references to NT passages in the texts of early Christian authors (which, themselves have material manuscript histories with which we must deal). If I understand correctly, then, the “date” of the initial text will vary from book to book (or even from passage to passage?) in the New Testament, depending on the quality of (the texts of) the available manuscripts and “traces of transmission preceding the archetype.”
Gurry has a very informative dissection of Wachtel’s chapter and other contributions to the Textual History volume in his more detailed monograph, A Critical Examination of the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method in New Testament Textual Criticism (Brill, 2017, see especially the third chapter,”Recovering the Initial Text”). And he comes close to addressing the issue that is nagging me:
“…the solution to the misunderstanding about the use of the term ‘initial text’ is to distinguish the meaning from the referent. The term means ‘that text from which the extant tradition descends,’ a definition which allows it to refer to any number of historical entities including the author’s original text, the archetype, or some editorialized text subsequent to both. The benefit of this understanding is that it may allow those with differing opinions about the referent to nevertheless agree on the editorial text itself.”
I think I like this distinction, but I miss a definition of “tradition” in the sense that Gurry uses it here [[see Update below]], which seems different from the use of Wachtel, who refers to “the archetype of the tradition” in direct contrast to “the initial text.” For Gurry, it would seem that “tradition” also includes “traces of transmission predating the archetype.” But maybe I am missing something?
I wonder if it would be helpful to think in concrete terms: 2 Timothy. I think the earliest surviving material manuscript of 2 Timothy would be Sinaiticus (generally assigned to the fourth century), although I guess the earliest surviving immaterial text might be considered 1739, perhaps pushing things back to the time of Origen. Would the initial text of 2 Timothy that we could produce through the CBGM then be considered a text supposedly extant in the middle of the third century, with the exception of those passages cited in Clement of Alexandria, for which we could then say our initial text dates to closer to the end of the second or the beginning of the third century (on the assumption that our critical text of Clement is sound)?
Or am I misunderstanding something in the method?
Update 10 June 2020: Gurry elaborates via e-mail:
“Regarding what I mean by ‘tradition,’ I would include the entire extant textual tradition—so, yes, patristic and versional sources are included. That’s perhaps one distinction from the classically conceived archetype where a stemma codicum is usually limited to manuscripts as such. (Though there is discussion among classicists about how to deal with variants from outside the stemma.)
Re: 2 Timothy, I think you’re right. Although I think Mink would say that unless we have reason to think there is some disjunction between the author’s text of 2 Tim and our 2nd or 3rd century initial text, we are probably fine to assume they’re the same. But this is precisely the point on which the text critic needs to be explicit rather than implicit. The definition of ‘initial text’ does not prejudge the matter in the way the term ‘original text’ or ‘authorial text’ obviously would. That’s what I see as it’s main benefit though, frankly, I sometimes think the whole term is more trouble than it’s worth.”
Posted in Textual criticism
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Forgeries, Inks, and Writing Surfaces
When I was writing God’s Library, I was constantly confronted with how little I knew about several domains of knowledge that are important for the study of ancient manuscripts. One of these areas is the more technical chemical make-up of writing surfaces and inks.
This branch of manuscript studies has come into the news in the last few years in relation to cases of forgery, such as the “Jesus’ Wife” fragment and the fake Dead Sea Scrolls at the Museum of the Bible and other collections. One aspect of the media coverage of these episodes that has been troubling (to others and to me) is the rhetoric of “science” having detected the forgeries, when in fact a combination of various skills and bodies of knowledge contributed to the detection of the forgeries.
Over the last week, I went back through the Final Report (hereafter “the Report“) on the Museum of the Bible “Dead Sea Scrolls” produced by Art Fraud Insights. I wanted to think more about Emanuel Tov’s objections to the Report, briefly summarized in the National Geographic article that announced the findings:
“I will not say that there are no unauthentic fragments among the MOB fragments, but in my view, their inauthenticity as a whole has still not been proven beyond doubt. This doubt is due to the fact that similar testing has not been done on undisputed Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts in order to provide a baseline for comparison, including the fragments from the Judean Desert sites that are later than Qumran. The report expects us to conclude that abnormalities abound without demonstrating what is normal.”
I still do not agree with that (triple-negative!) first sentence. I have been convinced that these pieces are forgeries, but it is not because of the “testing” provided in the Report (the chemical analyses and so forth). Rather, again, it is the combination of several factors, starting most crucially with the lack of secure archaeological provenance. Beyond that, it is the kinds of arguments that Kipp Davis, Michael Langlois, and others have put forward about the irregularities in the script, suspicious correspondences with modern printed editions, the ink being inscribed on top of sediments on the writing surface, the ink falling into damaged surfaces or over the torn edges of fragments, etc. That is to say, it is not so much the chemical make-up of the ink or the accretions on the writing surfaces as it is the cumulative arguments about scribal activity and the unprovenanced nature of the fragments that makes the case for forgery. Nevertheless, there is an important point in the last sentence of Prof. Tov’s statement: We should have a better idea of “what is normal” when it comes to the materials analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The authors of the Report seem to have been relatively cautious when making comparisons between the MOTB fragments and the main corpus of Dead Sea Scrolls (“consistent…with other studied DSS fragments,” p. 110; “have been identified in a study of a Qumran scroll,” p. 122, etc., my italics). That is to say, they have not made broad generalizations but instead referred to specific studies. The studies cited in the Report vary in terms of their sample size.
For the skins themselves, there is a foundational study that is based on a reasonably broad set of evidence:
- J.B. Poole and R. Reed, “The Preparation of Leather and Parchment by the Dead Sea Scrolls Community,” Technology and Culture 3 (1962), 1-26
I have not found a statement of exactly how many samples the authors used in their study (at one point, however, they mention “forty scroll and leather fragments from Cave 4”). Reed had been given at least 51 small pieces of Dead Sea Scrolls skins that were thought to be uninscribed (just a few days ago Joan Taylor has reported her team’s discovery that some of the fragments were in fact not blank but contained legible text). There are perhaps about 900 different Scrolls represented among the surviving Dead Sea Scrolls fragments (though some of these are papyrus), so the Reed fragments are a small but not insignificant group. Reed’s collection of fragments has also served as a partial basis for several other subsequent studies:
- Ira Rabin, “Archaeometry of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Dead Sea Discoveries 20 (2013), 124-142 (this study also included the Scrolls at the Shrine of the Book)
- Marina Bicchieri, Armida Sodo, Ira Rabin, Anka Kohl, and Giovanna Piantanida, “New Results in Dead Sea Scrolls Non-destructive Characterisation: Evidence of Different Parchment Manufacture in the Fragments from Reed Collection,” Journal of Cultural Heritage 32 (2018), 22-29
- Ioanna Mantouvalou, Timo Wolff, Oliver Hahn, Ira Rabin, Lars Lühl, Marcel Pagels, Wolfgang Malzer, and Birgit Kanngiesser, “3D Micro-XRF for Cultural Heritage Objects: New Analysis Strategies for the Investigation of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Analytical Chemistry 83, 16 (2011), 6308-6315.
- Timo Wolff, Ira Rabin, Ioanna Mantouvalou, Birgit Kanngießer, Wolfgang Malzer, Emanuel Kindzorra, and Oliver Hahn, “Provenance Studies on Dead Sea Scrolls Parchment by Means of Quantitative Micro-XRF,” Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry 402 (2012), 1493-1503 (this study also included materials from the Shrine of the Book)
When it comes to other specific aspects of the skins and the ink of the Scrolls, however, it seems like we have a much more limited basis for comparison. These are the studies of non-disputed Dead Sea Scrolls cited in the Report (I have added the sample sizes for each study in bold):
- Michele Derrick, “Evaluation of the State of Degradation of Dead Sea Scroll Samples Using Ft-Ir- Spectroscopy,” Book and Paper Group Annual 10 (1991), 49-65 (9 samples)
- Yoram Nir-El and Magen Broshi, “The Black Ink of the Qumran Scrolls,” Dead Sea Discoveries 3 (1996), 157- 67 (11 samples)
- Yoram Nir-El and Magen Broshi, “The Red Ink of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Archaeometry 38 (1996), 97-102 (4 samples; there are only 4 Dead Sea Scrolls fragments with red ink)
- Ira Rabin, Oliver Hahn, Timo Wolff, Emanuel Kindzorra, Admir Masic, Ulrich Schade, and Gisela Weinberg, “Characterization Of The Writing Media Of The Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Holistic Qumran: Trans-disciplinary Research of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls (ed. Jan Gunneweg, Annemie Adriaens, and Joris Dik; Leiden: Brill, 2010), 123-134 (1 sample, plus samples of modern materials)
- Harry Sobel and Henry Ajie, “Modification in Amino Acids of Dead Sea Scroll Parchments,” Free Radical Biology and Medicine 13 (1992), 701-702 (apparently 1 sample, cut into 3 pieces)
- Arie Wallert, “Deliquescence and Recrystallization of Salts in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Archaeological Conservation and its Consequences (ed. A. Roy and P. Smith; London: International Institute for Conservation, 1996), 198-201 (not available to me for consultation)
Clearly, we could have a larger basis of evidence for studies of writing surfaces and inks, as it seems the holdings of Dead Dead Scrolls by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) appear to be a largely untapped resource in this regard. I asked Ira Rabin of the University of Hamburg about the prospects for such a broad study. According to her:
“It is crucial to obtain an overview of the composition of the writing surfaces and the inks of the majority of the material found in the Judean desert. I hope that one day the IAA will allow it. Admittedly, it would be a laborious and time consuming undertaking because it requires specific high-resolution equipment, expertise to run it, and a lot of patience. On the other hand, the information we would gain is of such tremendous historical importance that recognition of the forgeries would be a mere by-product of such knowledge.”
It would be ideal to have a database containing materials analyses not only for the Dead Sea Scrolls but for all ancient manuscripts. Several non-destructive technologies are already being used by different projects. At the University of Hamburg, there is “Understanding Written Artifacts” cluster (especially the project History of Writing: Black Inks and Writing Surfaces). The project has already built up a good deal of knowledge about materials used in the production of Jewish manuscripts:
- Ira Rabin, “Building a Bridge from the Dead Sea Scrolls to Mediaeval Hebrew Manuscripts,” in Jewish Manuscript Cultures. New Perspectives (ed. I. Wandrey; Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2017), 309-322.
- Roman Schuetz, Janille M. Maragh, James C. Weaver, Ira Rabin, Admir Masic, “The Temple Scroll: Reconstructing an Ancient Manufacturing Practice,” Science Advances 5 (2019): eaaw7494
Another project, PAThs (Tracking Papyrus and Parchment Paths: An Archaeological Atlas of Coptic Literature), based at Sapienza University of Rome contains a component of technical ink research on Coptic manuscripts. Some of their results were published earlier this year:
- Tea Ghigo, Ira Rabin, Paola Buzi, “Black Egyptian Inks in Late Antiquity: New Insights on their Manufacture and Use,” Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences (2020) 12:70
The organized accumulation of this kind of data is a very welcome development for all of us who work on ancient manuscripts. Of course, as forgers grow in sophistication, a database like this could become an asset for producers of forgeries, a kind of guide book for making more convincing fakes. But this is the nature of the symbiotic relationship between forgers and scholars: As forgers produce more advanced products, scholars must respond with even more exacting examinations of unprovenanced pieces (if they wish to use unprovenanced materials at all, a question that is looming on the horizon for all students of ancient manuscripts).
Posted in Dead Sea Scrolls, Fakes and Forgeries, Green Collection, Ink
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Variant Readings 