Shapira Scroll
The scroll consisted of fifteen leather strips, which Shapira claimed had been found in Wadi Mujib (biblical Arnon) near the Dead Sea.
Contemporary reports show Dr. Philip Brookes Mason displayed the "whole of" the scroll at a public lecture in Burton-on-Trent on March 8, 1889.
[c]Another is contained within a handwritten letter from Shapira to Professor Hermann Strack of Berlin on 9 May 1883:[5] In July 1878 I met several Bedouins in the house of the well-known Sheque Mahmud el Arakat, we came of course to speak of old inscriptions.
Several years ago some Arabs had occasion to flee from their enemies & hid themselves in caves high up in a rock facing the Moujib (the neues Arnon [sic]) they discovered there several bundles of very old rugs.
I heard the next day ... some men of his acquaintance had hidden themselves, in the time when Wali of Damascus was fighting the Arabs, in caves hewn high up in a rock ... near the Modjib.
"[11] Also in May 1883, Shapira showed one piece of the manuscript to Paul Schröder, then the German consul in Beirut, for a short time in poor light; he refused to authenticate it without longer study of all the fragments.
[e][3] In June 1883, perhaps having revised the text,[1] Shapira brought the scroll to Germany in an attempt to sell it to the Royal Library of Berlin.
Karl Richard Lepsius, then the Library's keeper, convened a symposium of leading Bible scholars in Berlin (Lepsius himself, Eduard Sachau, Eberhard Schrader, August Dillmann, Adolf Erman, and Moritz Steinschneider) to evaluate the scroll on July 10; these unanimously declared it a fake after a 90-minute inspection.
[f] In a separate German analysis in the first week of July, published August 14, Hermann Guthe and Eduard Meyer concluded the scroll was a forgery;[g] Theodor Nöldeke and Emil Friedrich Kautzsch were said to agree.
[11] The Royal Library offered to buy it at a lower price, to enable German students to study the forger's technique;[h][8] Shapira took it to London instead.
[16] The Museum designated Christian David Ginsburg to evaluate the strips, and he published transcriptions, translations, and facsimiles over the following weeks.
[1] The French Ministry of Public Instruction's Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau, who had earlier revealed Shapira's Moabite forgeries, arrived in England on the 15th, already harboring "most serious doubts."
[21] Claude Reignier Conder also declared them fake on the 18th,[j][22] and Ernest Renan,[23] Albert Löwy,[24] and Charles Henry Waller soon followed.
[25] By August 25, the Grantham Journal reported, "The official verdict on the authenticity of Mr. Shapira's manuscripts has not been given but the published evidence of experts who have examined them is unanimous against it.
"[26] On August 27, Christian David Ginsburg, who as the designated philological examiner of the British Museum had been given access to the entire scroll, published the same conclusion.
[21] Schlottmann, Delitzch, Strack, and Steinschneider, amazed at the ongoing situation in England, each published their July findings for the British audience in September.
[31] Shapira's widow, Anna Magdalena Rosette, had at least part of the scroll in 1884, as evidenced by a note in the Ginsburg file left by Bond.
[citation needed] In 2011 Australian researcher Matthew Hamilton identified the actual owner of the scroll, the English doctor and natural historian, Dr. Philip Brookes Mason.
Contemporary reports show Dr. Philip Brookes Mason displayed the "whole of" the scroll at a public lecture in Burton-on-Trent on March 8, 1889.
[37] They were covered in dark glutinous matter and had a faint odor of funeral spices or asphalt, known in the nineteenth century for their use in Egyptian mummification but not later found on genuine dead sea scrolls.
[7] Ginsburg and Clermont-Ganneau suggested that the material was identical to the leather of the medieval Yemenite Torah scrolls in which Shapira had dealt in the preceding years.
The scroll is written scriptio continua except in the Decalogue, a style never discovered in other Hebrew manuscripts but widely assumed by Shapira's contemporaries to have been the original form of the text.
[14][40] André Lemaire authored a recent paleographic analysis (1997):However, the letter shapes do not correspond exactly to any known ancient West Semitic script.
The scroll contains several apparent misspellings, ungrammatical phrases, and words from later Hebrew, which featured prominently in the negative assessments of its authenticity.
[48][8] Mansoor's conclusion was immediately attacked by Moshe H. Goshen-Gottstein and by Oskar K. Rabinowicz,[49] but J. L. Teicher and others argued the scroll could be genuine.
