NEIL ALTMAN'S FELLOW "RESEARCHER" Peter W. Pick is profiled in the Petaluma Argus-Courier and comes up with predictable misinformation and conspiracy theorizing. Excerpt, with my comments interspersed:

Your research is leading you to believe that the Dead Sea Scrolls, or at least some of them, did not all come from the time originally proposed, which was 300 B.C., before the birth of Jesus. This is revolutionary?

The Dead Sea Scrolls are generally dated between the third-century BCE (not 300 BCE) and the first century CE on paleographical and radiocarbon-dating grounds

"Journals will not accept articles written about an alternative date for the scrolls. There's a conspiracy. Not only was the material kept away from the public for a long time, there is not an open and free discussion [now].

When crank research is rejected by peer-review journals, the crank response is to cry "conspiracy!" The simple fact of the matter is that the ideas Altman and co. are peddling are so poorly supported that they are not even in the ballpark of what is publishable in a serious journal. Hence their appearance in gullible newspapers instead.

What has your research shown? "The dating of all of the manuscripts is not pre-Christian, but has medieval, Middle Age indications or signs, everything from numbers to Masoretic vowels [in Hebrew] which only came in the fifth and sixth century, A.D. We're finding a lot of medieval material, whether it's numbers, foreign languages, or Masoretic vowels. That is the most important discovery we've made.

What we're pointing out is that these scrolls traveled, because they had foreign languages on them, and they traveled as far as central Asia, if not China, and had Chinese words on them.

For responses to these claims, go here and follow the many links in that post and the links in the linked-to posts. Briefly, no one who specializes in these areas accepts these claims and Altman is in the habit of publishing seriously distorted accounts of interviews with specialists to give the misleading impression that they do accept them.

The 800 or so manuscripts, all in relatively fragmentary condition, weren't just written in Hebrew, as Jewish scribes would write them. They had Aramaic in them, and also Greek and Arabic, and a number of other languages. And they were not all sacred texts, but had astrological information and so forth.

This is very misleading. Jewish scribes regularly wrote in Greek and Aramaic as well as Hebrew, in this period and long afterwards. They also wrote other things besides sacred texts (as one would expect) and some of them had some interest in astrology. Comments like these from the Altman circle are one of the best indicators that they don't know what they are talking about.

As for the Arabic, I believe that one or two much-later Arabic texts were found in the Judean Desert caves, but these are separate finds from the Dead Sea Scrolls. This may be what Pick is thinking of. Or it may just be made up. Most of the Dead Sea Scrolls were written in Hebrew, some in Aramaic, and a few in Greek.

And the caves, everyone thinks were just across from [the Qumran settlement, upon which the pre-Christianity dating is based]. But there were also caves four miles away that were put under that same rubric, and people still insisted that this was all a homogeneous collection.

I don't know what he is talking about here. According to this map of the Scroll-bearing cave sites, Cave 3 is the farthest away from the Qumran site, perhaps a mile and 1/8 north of it.

Now ideas have come up that this collection was put there to shelter it from the Roman attack of 70 A.D., and the destruction of the Second Temple, a repository, a safe place for texts, supposedly. That's not the accepted theory, that's the new one that finally braved its way, after 40 or 50 years, into the thinking of scholars."

This is not very clearly expressed, and is what most scholars actually think; that the people who lived at the site, perhaps with co-sectarians from elsewhere in Judea, hid the Scrolls in these caves in advance of the Roman invasion. But perhaps Pick is alluding in a very unclear way to Norman Golb's theory that the Scrolls come from literary archives in Jerusalem rather than from the inhabitants of the site of Qumran. Golb has been publishing this theory for many years, so it is hardly new. In any case, neither theory has anything to do with Altman and Pick's preposterous ideas about the medieval origin of the Scrolls. Their idea was in fact suggested in the early years after the Scrolls were discovered and it was properly discredited many decades ago.

Altman and his friends are making fools of a good many journalists and newspaper editors, who don't have sense enough to vet their claims independently with real specialists.