“We should not be too ready to dismiss unprovenanced objects...”
Professor Eric Meyers, Duke University, American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) Annual Meeting, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, 21 November 2013.
In March 2011, it was announced that a hoard of small lead books or codices had been discovered by an Israeli Bedouin. Apparently, the artefacts (referred to here as the Lead Codices) were found in a cave in Jordan, and experts from Britain and Jordan were quoted saying that the find could be as significant as the Dead Sea Scrolls in shedding new light on early Christianity.
The announcement triggered a variety of responses, ranging from newspapers wildly speculating whether the “diaries of Jesus” had been found, to sceptics swiftly denouncing the objects as fakes.
The affair has raised a dilemma common to archaeology, and one that biblical archaeologists feel only too acutely: what to do with unprovenanced manuscripts, coins, inscriptions, seals and other artefacts that are not unearthed in controlled excavations but are looted and come to public attention via Bedouins, dealers and collectors?
One approach is to imply such finds are fakes. That is the policy of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). The IAA adopts this policy not because it believes that unprovenanced artefacts are necessarily forgeries, but because it is a pragmatic strategy in the fraught context in which the IAA operates. Archaeology in the Holy Land is heavily compromised by politics, religion and money. Material remains that purport to date from biblical times can be exploited to support or undermine land claims by the State of Israel; they can also be used to enhance or discredit fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible; and finally, Bedouins, dealers and antiques collectors can make money out of archaeological discoveries – whether those finds are real or fakes.
The IAA, understandably, wants to discourage looting. And it realizes too that if it took every unprovenanced find seriously, it would drown under the effort and expense required to authenticate each artefact. So one can sympathize with a decision to accept for consideration only properly provenanced artefacts.
On the face of it, the IAA’s policy appears to be the only rational strategy. But is it? The most important biblical discoveries ever are unprovenanced artefacts. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Gospels came to world attention not from scrupulously controlled digs but thanks to looters and shady deals on the black market.
The Mesha Stele or Moabite Stone – the longest inscription on a monument found in Palestine and dated to biblical times – is the product of looting. So is the Gnostic Gospel of Judas. Robert Deutsch, a biblical archaeologist, epigrapher and numismatist, has convincingly exposed the folly of ignoring unprovenanced objects. He listed numerous looted artefacts that have transformed our understanding of biblical archaeology and demonstrated that such pieces constitute the majority of significant artefacts available to scholars.1 His revelation confirmed Swiss scholar Othmar Keel’s remark, “I don’t think we can write a history of the ancient Near East without relying on unprovenanced material”.2 That view was echoed in a recent collection of articles edited by Meier and Edith Lubetski, who approvingly quote Joseph Naveh, the dean of Israeli epigraphers: “The avoidance of publishing seals bought on the market cannot serve as a remedy for the looting of ancient objects … It is better to learn what these unprovenanced pieces can tell us than to have them disappear forever unseen.”3
If the IAA and those who endorse its policy had had their way, none of these finds would have been authenticated. Instead, the Dead Sea Scrolls – the IAA’s prized treasure – would still be languishing in obscurity.
The flaw with the approach that the IAA and other sceptics have taken towards the Lead Codices is that they risk suppressing a find that only time and study may tell whether they are as significant as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Worse still, the manner of the sceptics’ response violates the principles of an open exchange of ideas on which scholarly work should be based. The attacks have been vitriolic and betray a systematic effort to suppress such an exchange.
So what would constitute a more mature response? In an important intervention in August 2012, Israeli archaeologist Gabriel Barkay outlined a list of do’s and don’ts, a set of ethical guidelines to help scholars respond to unprovenanced finds.4
His first consideration is expertise. You need people with knowledge and experience to evaluate a find. Chapter 1, “Discovering the Lead Codices”, gives an account of what David and Jennifer Elkington did when they first came across the codices. They took advice and referred the discovery to the experts in the field.
Barkay then recommends that time be allowed for proper views to emerge. For a decade, the Dead Sea Scrolls were regarded as modern forgeries or medieval manuscripts. Chapter 2, “Forgery and the Bible”, admonishes those who have lazily dismissed the codices without any real understanding of what constitutes a forgery. Worse still, the dismissals have come before any proper scientific analysis has been carried out. Chapter 3, “Summary of Technical Analysis of the Jordan Codices” is the first such contribution – a comprehensive scientific examination of the hoard for signs of forgery.
Barkay also warns that no committee or court can establish the authenticity of an artefact. That would be an approach more congenial to totalitarian regimes. And yet, as several chapters show, this is exactly what the sceptics have tried to do.
Barkay reminds us too that while context and controlled excavations are the ideal, scholars must accept the reality on the ground, at least in the Holy Land. The duty of the scholar is not to suppress unprovenanced objects but to publish everything and thereby enhance knowledge of the artefacts in question. Chapter 4, “Those Codices”, gathers compelling evidence from the Mishnah, Synoptic Gospels, the Gospel of John, the Gnostic Gospels, the Book of Revelation, early Christian texts and the writings of the Church Fathers to enhance our understanding of these mysterious lead books.
Sceptics determined to denounce a new find as a fake will try every trick in the book other than rational argument. Barkay chastises those who dismiss artefacts on the grounds that they are “too good to be true”. Likewise, to say that an artefact has linguistic and/or palaeographic anomalies is no reason to dismiss it as a forgery. As Barkay points out, many an ancient inscription has some anomaly that doesn’t fit the rules of epigraphy or palaeography because it is the product of a human hand.
For Barkay, another key principle scholars should observe when confronted with unprovenanced objects is to make an a priori assumption that all scholars dealing with artefacts have personal integrity until proven otherwise. He says that spreading rumours about people who publish inscriptions is cruel and unjustified. Barkay is merely amplifying a well-known insight from logic, that ad hominem arguments – those based on attacking the credentials of the person – are deeply flawed ones. And yet, as shown in Chapter 5, “A Right to Reply”, flawed logic is just what sceptics have displayed. An unholy alliance of scholars (who should have known better and kept their own counsel), self-promoting “Bibliobloggers”, and broadcasters too busy to check their facts, have all jumped to conclusions about the codices based on irrelevant personal details, most of which are based on hearsay. Chapter 6, “Encounters with the Cyber Commentariat”, explores the motivation behind the trolling and its consequences.
Barkay advises the scholarly community to consider whether it is realistic or practical to assume that an unprovenanced artefact is the product of dishonest people. After all, a scholar is highly unlikely to have the craft skills to be able to forge such artefacts; equally, few forgers will have the scholarly knowledge to enable them to get the details so perfectly right. Only a team consisting of craftsmen and scholars could mount such a scam. However, the probability of success would be tiny. First, because of the high likelihood of a leak and, second, because the forgers would have to be superhuman. Barkay tried to draw up a list of people who could have forged some of the inscriptions currently being debated in Israel and he couldn’t think of anyone with all the skills. Chapters I, II and III demonstrate that the probability of assembling a team of forgers that could have forged the Lead Codices is vanishingly small.
Finally, Barkay cautions against making any rash judgements. Sometimes one has to wait until knowledge has advanced to a certain stage in order to make sense of a discovery. The chapters in this book are the first contributions towards that goal.
1 Biblical Archaeology Society, Chicago, November 2012.
2 Cited in Hershel Shanks, “What to Do with Unprovenanced Artifacts—Publish or Perish?” in Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol.39 No.2 March/April 2013.
3 Lubetski, Meier and Edith (editors). New Inscriptions and Seals Relating to the Biblical World. Society of Biblical Literature: Atlanta, Georgia, 2012. (Cited in Hershel Shanks, ibid.)
4 Gabriel Barkay, “Ten Key Points on Authenticity of Artifacts” in Bible History Daily, 2 August 2012 (www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/artifacts-and-the-bible/ten-key-points-on-authenticity-of-artifacts/).