ALTMAN AND CROWDER MENDACITY UPDATE: In June of last year I evaluated a Kansas City Star article about Neil Altman's ridiculous idea that the Dead Sea Scrolls are medieval. I established at the time that Altman misrepresented the views of Qumran scholar James VanderKam. In the first post I quoted the following from the article:

�If it is true that these scrolls display writing techniques that are from a later period, then they become historically interesting.�
Erik Heen of the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia

I commented:

Also, I hope very much that Erik Heen was misquoted or quoted out of context in the header above. But just to clarify, here's a news flash: these scrolls are already historically interesting.

My guess was spot on. Erik Heen ran across this post and e-mailed me yesterday. I quote his letter with his permission:

I notice on your blog that there has been some discussion on the very unfortunate article, "Casting doubt upon the Dead Sea Scrolls" (Kansas City Star):Appearance of Western letters and numbers raises eyebrows" By Neil Altman and David Crowder. I am quoted in this article as saying: "If it is true that these scrolls display writing techniques that are from a later period, then they become historically interesting." Let me set the record straight. Altman approached me (via fax) with some photographs and material he had gathered from different sources about the scrolls. I begged off from comment because, I told him, I was not an expert in this area and my comments or opinion would mean nothing. I also told him I thought the late dating of the Scrolls was unfounded. He kept after me through repeated calls. Finally I gave him something similar to what was quoted (the original article was for an in-house Lutheran publication). What is missing, of course, is the exactness of careful wording and my expressed intent behind the statement. First of all, I put it into a conditional statement ("If...then."). More exactly, my comment is placed in a "contrary to fact" conditional statement. That is, "the truth" of the claims of a later dating of the script is assumed for the sake of an argument. The intent of my comment (expressed to Altman at the time), was to indicate the opposite of how the comment was used in his article. My intent was to suggest that if (a) peer-reviewed recognized experts in the field were to agree that some of the handwriting in the scrolls seems to stem from periods that have been traditionally dated as originating at a later time, then (b) the received tradition of the dating of the various "hands" might have to be revised. That is, it may be that the dating of the script types might not be as "set" as he (Altman) assumed. If so, this new data (re the dating of script types not the dating of the scrolls) becomes "historically" interesting. Again, I told Altman that the issue lies outside of my field of knowledge. Altman, of course, disregarded all of this and quoted me as an another "expert" who cast doubt on the pre 70 CE dating of the Scrolls. For the record, I do not. Altman simply quoted me out of context for his own purposes.

In other words, what Heen said was, if it were true that scholars found the scripts of the scrolls to be much later than originally thought (and they don't), that fact (which actually isn't true) would be of interest to historians. Hardly the impression give by Altman's quotation in the Kansas City Star article.