ROM's Dead Sea Scrolls: 2,000 years old, always controversialBackground here and here.
Posted: November 12, 2008, 4:20 PM by Adam McDowell
Art and Culture (National Post)
The Royal Ontario Museum could find itself unearthing old controversies when it opens its $3-million, would-be blockbuster Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition next June. A U.S. history professor has accused an earlier, related project in San Diego of deliberate bias, scholarly incompetence and suggestions that its curator, who is also assembling the ROM exhibition, was unqualified for the job.
Last October, University of Chicago Jewish history Norman Golb attacked the San Diego show by circulating a 24-page critique of the exhibition catalogue highlighting what he called “a great many factual errors and unprovable assertions presented as truths.
Though the upcoming Toronto exhibition will showcase a different set of 16 partially decayed fragments of paper, it will be curated by the same person, Risa Levitt Kohn, who organized a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition at the San Diego Natural History Museum from June, 2007, until last January.
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Be that as it may, this is interesting:
There is already one firm indication that Kohn and the ROM intend to present multiple points of view. Steve Mason, a professor at Toronto’s York University and an expert on first-century AD Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, said Kohn approached him to give a talk during the Toronto Scrolls project despite his doubts about the Qumran-Essene theory.Steve Mason's work is superb and I'm sure he will give an excellent lecture.
“My response was one of surprise, and I cautioned that I might speak on the problems of the Dead Sea Scrolls-Essene hypothesis,” Mason wrote in an email to the Post. “She [Kohn] seemed to think that was fine, though she also welcomed a talk on other issues, such as the Judaean War.
“I didn’t notice the narrowness of vision that others have charged the [San Diego] exhibit with,” he continued, “I only know that she has invited me, and I’ve happily accepted.”