The EconomistMarch 21st 2020 United States 41agers, whom they have since adopted.
In family-oriented communities like
Cheyenne, folks sometimes expect the ma-
ternity ward to follow quickly after the
church aisle. “It’s like you get to a certain
age round here and you should be having
children,” says Kevin Ogle. Locals never
asked him and his boyfriend, Shawndae,
whether they wanted to have children until
they got married, in 2011. “Then they were
like ‘well, are you guys going to start a fam-ily?’ That’s the next step.” They met their
surrogate, in Georgia, through a Facebook
page. Their daughter, Charlotte, is now five.
Mr Caswell reckons he and Mr Hardy
have more in common with straight par-
ents than with other gay people who are
not raising children. “We’ve never been to
Mykonos,” he says, referring to a Greek is-
land popular with gay tourists. “We teach
our children that taxation is theft and that a
big government is a bad government.” 7W
hen the Museum of the Bible
opened in Washington,dcin 2017, it
boasted an exhibit to make archaeologists
salivate: fragments of the Dead Sea scrolls.
These 2,000-year-old scraps of parchment
include the oldest known transcripts of the
Old Testament—and the museum had 16 of
them. Except that it didn’t. In 2018 five of its
fragments were revealed to be fakes. Last
week, the museum announced that all 16
were forgeries, probably created in the
20th century out of ancient leather, per-
haps from old shoes.
The revelation is an embarrassment for
the museum, which has sought to present
itself as an academically rigorous institu-
tion worthy of its location just off the Na-
tional Mall, where the Smithsonian’s fine
museums are located. The museum was
founded by Steve Green, a prominent evan-
gelical Christian and president of Hobby
Lobby, a chain of craft shops which in 2014
persuaded the Supreme Court that it de-
served a religious exemption from a federal
requirement under which employers pro-
vide their workers with certain contracep-
tives. It has rebuffed criticisms that it is an
expensive advertisement for fundamental-
ist Christianity. The museum has several
respected biblical-scholar consultants and
a breathtaking collection of biblical texts
and artefacts. They include a Gilgamesh
tablet from the second millenniumbcand
sections of the Gutenberg bible.
The museum’s Dead Sea fragments are a
less impressive acquisition, apparently
bought without looking too closely into
their origins. The real things, most of
which are in the Israel Museum in Jerusa-
lem, were discovered in caves in what is
now the West Bank in the 1940s. The
“scrolls” Mr Green snapped up, part of a
group of 70 or so, came to market after- The researchers who studied them
say the clues to their forgery include indi-
cations that they were written on a bumpy
surface: parchment resembles leather after
2,000 years but it would originally have
been smooth. They are also coated in ani-
mal glue to mimic the waxy sheen that de-
velops when collagen in parchment breaks
down over time to form gelatine.
This is not the first time the Bible muse-
um has been embarrassed over its acquisi-
tions. Last year it emerged that Hobby Lob-
by had bought 13 fragments of ancient
papyrus texts, which had been sold by an
Oxford professor who has been accused of
stealing them from the collection he over-
saw. The museum said the acquisitions
were made “in good faith” and promptly
handed them back.
It appears to have been similarly
upright and transparent about its Dead Seamis-purchases. Last February, it commis-
sioned an independent team of research-
ers, who spent six months studying the
fragments. Their 200-page report is dis-
played prominently on the museum’s web-
site. Jeff Kloha, the museum’s chief curato-
rial officer, says he hopes the techniques
used by the researchers will be helpful to
other buyers of other such scrolls. Though
Mr Green has not disclosed how much he
paid for his, the group from which they
came are estimated to have sold for up-
wards of $35m.
Yet purchasing and then displaying
such artefacts without first establishing
their provenance is no way to run an insti-
tution that presents itself as an authority
on the Bible. The error is indicative of a
wider lack of academic rigour at the muse-
um. Though its display of biblical artefacts
is impressive, with fact-based descriptions
of how the Old and New Testaments were
gathered and translated, elsewhere, in-
cluding in a walk through the stories of the
Old Testament, the museum tends to elide
biblical stories with historical fact in a way
that makes many biblical scholars uncom-
fortable. Given that America’s division of
church and state means few people have
the opportunity to learn about the history
of the Bible, this seems unfortunate.
Yet the museum may be evangelising to
fewer people than it had hoped, even be-
fore the novel coronavirus led to its tempo-
rary closure this week. In its first year,
when entry was free, it received a million
visitors. Since late 2018, it has charged an
entrance fee. Though it will not say how
many visitors it has welcomed since, it
seems likely that fewer tourists, visiting
the free museums on the Mall, have been
swinging by to see its treasures. 7WASHINGTON, DC
Fake scrolls, just off the National MallThe Bible museumA load of old cobblers
It’s only rock and scroll but I like it2