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           The following article is presented for research use only.
                  The Boston Sunday Herald, December 29, 1991

                   'ANCIENT' BIBLICAL WRITINGS MAY BE FRAUDS

                                 By Neil Altman


                    Copyright 1992 The Boston Sunday Herald
                              All Rights Reserved

     The Dead Sea Scrolls have been considered the archaeological find of the
century:  purportedly containing most of the Old Testament and non-biblical
writings about the daily life of a 2,000-year-old Jewish community.
     But more than 40 years after the discovery of the texts in Middle Eastern
caves, evidence now seems to show the Dead Sea Scrolls were written much later.
     Some may date from the medieval period and some even may be 20th Century.
     After a point, it comes down to this:  There is too much.  Too many
scrolls, to many coincidences, too much contradictory evidence.  And some of it
-- the "Copper Scroll" for example -- is too well preserved to have lasted
through the centuries.
     The actual scrolls have been available -- until now -- only to a closed
circle of scholars.  Only a fraction have been photographed and published.
Since their discovery in 1947, the keepers of the scrolls have given us four
decades of subterfuge and maybe outright lies.  Translations of scrolls that
have been released are at times so contradictory they are meaningless.
     That is about to change.  The monopoly was broken this year with the
release of theoretical reconstructions by computer of unpublished scroll texts,
the opening of the Huntington Library in Los Angeles, where secret microfilms
of the scrolls were stored, and the publication of new photos of the scrolls.
     But I believe that what has already been released points to the need to
revise radically what we've understood the Dead Sea Scrolls to be.
     The evidence in the actual scroll texts include:

        * ideas and written characters not common until at least the 10th
          Century A.D.
        * an "ancient" scroll made of copper that somehow didn't greatly
          corrode in the Dead Sea's salty air and, like many of the
          scrolls, contains suspiciously medieval, if not modern, writings.

     Another clue is the clay jars that supposedly held many of the parchment
scrolls -- jars that couldn't have fit through the original entry of Cave I
and, just as telling, of a kind in use when archaeologists arrived on the
scene.
     In all of this, there is a lot at stake:  the undermining of Judaism and
Christianity by some who hold the scrolls to be ancient, vested interests of
those who control the actual scrolls, and possibly millions of dollars invested
in the scrolls.

                               Some History

     The scrolls, after their "accidental" discovery by a shepherd boy, were
eventually pulled from 11 separate caves in an area east of Jerusalem, in what
was then the West Bank of Jordan.
     The scrolls comprise more than 800 different texts and 15,000 fragments.
     Jordanian authorities set up an institute in Jerusalem to piece them
together, using an international team of scholars, surprisingly none of them
were Jewish, even though they were dealing with Hebrew documents.  But after
Israel's successful 1967 war, the scrolls were put under the control of the
Israeli Antiquities Authority.
     Ironically, it was not until 1985 that the international team permitted
any Jews to be involved.  The release of scroll material moved at a glacial
pace for 35 years until this year, when some new photographs of the scrolls
became available, ending decades of academic blackout.
     Even before the scrolls were made more widely available, problems and
inconsistencies began to emerge.

                  First Problem:  The Shepherd-Boy Story

     Hammed Adh-Dhib, the Arab boy credited with discovering the scrolls in
a Qumran region cave, gave two completely different accounts of how he found
them.
     His first story:  Adh-Dhib stumbled on Cave I while fleeing Jordanian
customs officers, who sought hi for contraband goods.
     His second story:  He was looking for lost sheep with a friend when they
noticed a small hole in the side of a cliff three-quarters of a mile west of
the Dead Sea.  He threw a stone in and heard something break.  Two stories
already raise some doubts.  But ore important is the size of the cave opening.
The boy said he had to squeeze through to get in.  If that's so, how did the
jars that were said to hold the scrolls get in, since some were larger than the
tiny cave entrance?
     Adh-Dhib claimed that only one of the eight jars he broke contained all
the scrolls.  Scholars claim the key to the preservation of the scrolls as
whole units was that they were in closed jars, but the width of some of the
scrolls was wider than any of the eight reconstructed mouths of the jars from
Cave 1.
     The murky history of the discovery got even murkier once the scrolls
passed into the hands of middlemen, dealers and governments.

                             Clues in the Text

     The scrolls are filled with oddities in the written characters -- often
ignored or glossed over -- that seem to show they were written much later than
commonly believed.
     Two of these anomalies -- the Greek or English word "KeN" from the Copper
Scroll and the appearance of Chinese characters in other scrolls -- are
analyzed in separate stories here [See related files, FAKESCR2 and FAKESCR3].
But there are many other examples.
     In medieval texts, letters that had vertical lines were occasionally
turned into crosses. Dots were used for corrections, as well as for patterns
that helped match documents for verification.  Signs and markings peculiar to
the medieval period and micrographic (tiny) letters, numbers, etc., were other
medieval conventions.  I found all of these and more in examining the scrolls.
     For example, in both the Copper Scroll and Psalms Scroll, some Hebrew
"L's" had crosses, and in one place in the Psalms Scroll, a cross was inserted
between the first two of the four Hebrew letters that spell "Jehovah."
     In margins and between lines in the Isaiah Scroll, as well as in fragments
from Cave 4, the cave with the largest cache of scroll material, I found
micrographic letters and numbers.  Interestingly, the numbers are our modern
numbers, which originated in the 11th and 12th centuries A.D.
     Further scrutiny confirmed more anomalies:  letters within the Dead Sea
Scrolls that match those in medieval manuscripts.  Specifically, the "L" in the
Copper Scroll matches the formation of medieval English "L's" as seen in Samuel
Tannenbaum's book "The Handwriting of the Renaissance."  A similar "L" from a
scroll taken from Cave 4 appears oddly in the letters "LSD."
     Also apparent are a capital "A" followed by a lower-case English-style "b"
that originated no earlier than the 5th century A.D.
     Even more significant was discovering two unusual-looking Hebrew letters
that appear in fragments fro Caves 1 and 4.  These letters _exactly_ match
Hebrew letters in a 1535 AD manuscript from Lorzweiler, Germany.  Within the
Dead Sea Scrolls are other supposedly ancient Hebrew letters that match those
in this and many other medieval Hebrew manuscripts.
     Equally important, if not more so, is my discovery of a major anachronism
in the scrolls somehow overlooked all these years.  Fortunately, John Trever
and William Brownlee were wise enough to photograph the Isaiah Scroll
immediately before they or any scholars looked at it, thus preserving its
accuracy.  As a matter of fact, they were so excited, they began to study the
text even as the negatives were being developed.
     Careful inspection last summer of Trever's photos of the Isaiah Scroll
enabled me to find not only micrography, vital to dating the scrolls, but
amazingly, Masoretic vowel-pointing that strangely, like the Chinese symbol,
has gone unnoticed and, to my knowledge, unidentified.  Masoretic vowels, which
appear under Hebrew letters as dots, lines and the like, enable a reader of
sacred Hebrew texts to pronounce words correctly.
     Rabbi Alfred J. Kolatch, in the book "This Is the Torah," wrote, "Before
the 5th Century (AD), vowel-points ... were not found under or above Hebrew
letters in texts of the Bible used either for synagogue or for study use."
     To confirm my startling discovery of vowel-pointing, I contacted Dr.
Stephen Reynolds, professor emeritus of Hebrew at Gordon-Conwell and Faith
Theological seminaries.  In a detailed letter to me, Reynolds identified the
vowel-points as "the 'Tiberian' type of vowel points ... [which] first appeared
after the beginning of the 10th Century."
     After examining portions from the Isaiah Scroll, including the tiny
numbers between the lines, Reynolds observed, "The original owners [of the
scrolls] or members of their community put the marks [vowel-points, numerals,
and Chinese characters] on them before sealing them up.  These original owners
or their successors may have had among their number a convert who was
acquainted with the type of Chinese found on the Manual of Discipline," which
is part of the non-biblical scroll material.

                         Ideas Ahead of Their Time

     Also telling is the use of ideas ahead of their time -- about 10 centuries
ahead in some cases.
     There are, in fact, several concepts in the scrolls that would have to
mark them after the time of Christ.  For example, having more than one wife at
the same time is a practice that was not incongruous with the history and
customs of Judaism prior to the New Testament.  In fact, the Mishnah, written
in the 2nd Century A.D., still allowed for it.  Yet in the Zadokite Document
(or Damascus Document) of the Dead Sea Scrolls, monogamy is extolled as the
will of God.
     Also the "Teacher of Righteousness," mentioned in the scrolls, has been
shown by scholars to be a term coined by the Jewish sect of Karaites, who lived
in the 10th century A.D.
     After studying a number of texts from the scrolls I sent Ruth Felder, an
Orthodox Jewish scholar, she reported the following:  "The flow of words in
these documents shows little familiarity with the Hebrew language, certainly
not the pure Hebrew of ancient texts.  The sentence structure and spelling in
most of the texts are very poor.  There are also whole sections taken from the
Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) and Prophets that are grossly
misquoted."
     She further states that in places where the name of God is used, an extra
letter has been inserted and then crossed, the symbol of Christianity.  Felder
said, "Certainly it is understood that nothing truly Jewish would have a cross
in it."
     How could these ideas and written characters have appeared in the scroll
material?  If some characters that appeared only from the 10th century onward
are present, the scrolls clearly can't have preceded that era.

                              Other Evidence

     Why have these anomalies been ignored?
     The motives for this scholarly secrecy can't be known with certainty.But
some scholars have suspected that the scrolls were suppressed because
theologians working on them found something that contradicted Christianity.
     Another reason they were suppressed might have been that they contradicted
some of the scholars' own negative feelings about the Judeo-Christian heritage.
     The Oct. 7 issue of U.S. News & World Report revealed a secret unpublished
scroll text that states, "...and by his name shall he be hailed (as) the Son of
God, and they shall call him Son of the Most High."
     This revelation may have been an embarrassment to those who do not hold
Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God -- and perhaps one of the reasons the
scrolls remained unpublished for decades.
     The scrolls are no longer in the exclusive hands of archaeologists and
theologians.  They are now being brought to the attention of scholars in other
fields who have no vested interest in the scrolls and are as much the scholarly
property of classicists and Sinologists.
     Re-examination of former conclusions and new computer technology to scan
existing photographs are as much a priority now as direct access to the actual
texts and their publication.

                             About the Author

     Neil Altman, 51, of suburban Philadelphia, is a freelance writer and
amateur scholar who has been puzzling over the Dead Sea Scrolls for two years.
     Altman, an Orthodox Jew, said he decided against a career in higher
education because of what he called the inherent bias against evangelicals in
academia.
     Part of his quest to debunk the traditional view of the scrolls, he said,
stems from that same kind of bias in the official committee appointed to
translate, analyze and -- until now -- selectively release the Dead Sea
Scrolls.
     Altman already had a solid working knowledge of Hebrew and biblical
studies when he dug into the scrolls.
     He supplemented that by contacting a wide range of independent scholars to
analyze peculiarities he turned up.
     When, for example, apparently Greek letters appeared in the text, he
enlisted scholars of that language to comment on his findings.
     Some of his findings on Chinese characters that appeared in the margin of
one of the scrolls were printed in the Washington Post earlier this year.
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