NEIL ALTMAN, the self-appointed and bogus Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, is at it again. He has some articles in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette which promote his notion that the Scrolls are medieval, have Chinese symbols in them, etc. The links are subscription-only, and I somehow managed to access one, briefly, but couldn't get it back. Thus I haven't commented on the pieces. But now the Union, Trueheart, and Courtesy blog, run by Donna Bowman, has a post on the pieces with alternate, accesible links to two of them, along with relevant other links and trenchant commentary. Excerpt:

Well, thanks to our newspaper's decision to give him an unopposed forum for his Da Vinci Code-esque theories, a bunch of Arkansans who don't know squat about the Dead Sea Scrolls are going to think they come from 1200 and provide no information at all about first century Judaism, Gnosticism, and Christian sectarianism. Anybody who tells them otherwise is going to be dismissed as a puppet of the anti-Christian academic conspiracy. Sigh.

*Link to the stories uses the identical Northwest Arkansas News web version; Dem-Gaz website is subscription only. And this story appears nowhere else in the media. Apparently only Arkansas is interested/gullible enough to print it.

Unfortunately, other newspapers in the United States, Britain, and Canada have served their readers equally ill by publishing Altman's nonsense. Their continued irresponsibility and gullibility is breathtaking.

On the question of red ink in the Isaiah Scroll, last week James Trever, son of the late John C. Tever who took the photos, e-mailed me the following:

Something you might want to note regarding some of Neil's theories is that he points out red dots a various places on the photos in the 1972 "Scrolls from Qumran Cave I". I have the proofs Dad marked up for the printing of the 1972 color volume and he points all those out as something that should be removed, as they do not exist on the original transparencies. So they show up, somehow, from the process that the publisher used to print the color images. Dad was not successful in completely eliminating them, as the editor probably did not think it consequential. Unfortunately, controversy makes money and that is all these guys like Altman are doing.

Altman and his sometime collaborator David Crowder were informed of this, but they seem not to have accepted it.

I have commented at length on articles on the Scrolls by Altman and Crowder here, here, here, and here. And on a different topic here. Note especially that they cannot be trusted to report accurately the opinions of scholars they interview.

UPDATE: Perhaps it's worth reflecting a little on why it is that Altman's scholarship is bogus. We're told he has "done graduate work" at various places and that he has a Master's degree in Old Testament, but not that he has any training in the Dead Sea Scrolls. (Or, one might note, in Chinese!) A Master's degree will orient someone to some of the basic primary and secondary literature in a field and introduce them to some basic methodology, but does not prepare them to do original research in that field, nor is it meant to. (A minority do end up doing original work in a Master's thesis, but this is the exception.) The difference between Master's level work and the Ph.D. is that the Ph.D. is specifically designed to teach someone to do original research in a field and actually guides them through the production of a substantial project that makes an independent contribution to the field. They are guided by one or more specialists in the field who themselves publish original research in peer-review journals, monographs, and specialist conferences.

Having a Master's degree does not qualify one as a specialist in any field, let alone one different from the topic of the degree. Altman is not professionally qualified to do original research in the Dead Sea Scrolls, yet he not only thinks that he can make original contributions to the field, he thinks that all actual specialists in it are wrong in their central understanding of the data and that he can completely overturn the major conclusions of that field. This is the sort of gall displayed by someone who really doesn't understand what he is taking on.

Moreover, look closely at how he is making this supposed contribution. It is not by publishing articles in specialist journals or monographs in specialist series or presenting papers at specialist conferences. Instead he goes to the popular media and presents them with his notions (they don't deserve to be called theories) as though they were real research on the Scrolls. He also validates these notions by misconstruing conversations he had with actual specialists.

These concepts are not particularly difficult, but present evidence seems to indicate that they are beyond a number of newspaper editors. What is so hard about identifying a real specialist or two and vetting Altmanesque ideas with them? What is so difficult about contacting the specialists Altman quotes and asking them if he is reporting their views correctly? There was a day when I assumed that this was how newspapers operated. Long before I started this blog I had learned better, but maintaining PaleoJudaica for the last three years has really opened my eyes to how slapdash and irresponsible the media often are in my areas of expertise. And it is only reasonable to extrapolate that they are just as often equally careless and ill-informed when they report on things I don't know about. Altman is culpable for presenting himself as an expert when he is not, but these newspapers are doubly culpable for being unable to identify a real expert, mainly because they can't be bothered to undertake the most basic verification.