Yesterday an initiative was launched in London which should improve the chances of the codices being seriously investigated: something that everybody, including the most hardened sceptics, must presumably want. Under the benign gaze of Richard Chartres, who as bishop of London is the third-ranking hierarch in the Church of England, it was announced that a Centre for the Study of the Jordanian Lead Books has been established (as a not-for-profit limited company) with some distinguished figures lending their weight to the project. The centre's board includes two veteran British politicians, Sir Tony Baldry and Tom Spencer; an "evaluation panel" will be headed by Professor Robert Hayward of Durham University; and a Jordanian professor, Fayez Khasawneh of Yarmouk University, has agreed to chair an "advisory council".A brief article on the announcement of the founding of the Centre is here.
Perhaps the most urgent need now is for some independent, peer-reviewed metallurgical analysis. One test found that the lead could indeed be ancient, but a sceptic would immediately retort that ancient lead can be re-fashioned by modern forgers. On the other hand, the objects show an extraordinary variety of forms of corrosion; a forger would have needed to be extraordinarily diligent and energetic to tailor-make all these effects. It's also worth stressing that even if some of the objects in this collection are proved to be forgeries, that doesn't mean they all are. Another possibility is that they will prove to be relatively old copies of a prototype that is much older still; that would still be of great interest.
The really good news is that Professor Robert Hayward is heading the "evaluation panel." He is an expert in Second Temple and Late Antique Judaism and an eminently appropriate person for the job.
My most recent substantive post on the fake metal codices (and, yes, I still think they are fakes) is here from two years ago, in reply to "B.C." of the Erasmus blog. A couple of other relevant posts since then are here and here.
Regarding B.C.'s comments quoted above, I note first that he or she says "even if some of the objects in this collection are proved to be forgeries, that doesn't mean they all are." That is a bit disingenous, given the undisputed fact that the copper codex featured in the original announcement was shown almost immediately to be a crude fake that used (incompetently) a Greek inscription published in the 1950s and that everyone acknowledges that many of the codices currently circulating are fakes. (To be fair, the latter are supposed to be forged copies of the original lot of codices.) It would have been considerably clearer, especially to readers new to the story, to say "even though some of [or even "one of ... has"] the objects in this collection have been proved to be forgeries ..."
I don't know what the last sentence quoted means, so I will refrain from commenting.
Later in the article, B.C. says, "Perhaps the newly-established Centre should take heart from the fact that it took quite a few years for the importance of Dead Sea Scrolls to be widely realised." Well, it took some years for them to be widely known at all, but when Israeli biblical scholar Eliezer Sukenik saw one of them, shortly after its discovery, he immediately realized it was genuine. And years later when some of the scrolls were, as B.C. observes, put up for sale in America in the Wall Street Journal, Sukenik's son, Yigael Yadin (himself a biblical scholar), quickly made arrangements to buy them on behalf of the State of Israel. It may be that buyers were wary because of the high price and the not-entirely-clear ownership status of the scrolls rather than doubts about their genuineness. (You can read most of this in the link that B.C. provides, with some more at the one I've given.)
That doesn't sound very much like the story of the Jordan codices to me.
I have been saying for years (e.g., here) that the current evidence is very strong that the whole lot of metal codices are modern fakes (with at least one apparently made from ancient lead), but if someone wants to make a real case that some of them are genuine, they need actually to argue it. If I may quote myself:
Bottom line: such evidence as we now have, which is not inconsiderable, indicates that the Jordan metal codices are fakes. I am prepared to consider any new, reputable (especially peer-reviewed) evidence to the contrary, but failing that, I see no reason for scholars to be concerned about them.We now have the good news that a panel of specialists is going to examine the codices. Very early on I offered a list of conditions that needed to be fulfilled to demonstrate that some of them are genuine. And I underline that any such case needs at least to make the cut of being published in peer-review journal articles or monographs. I look forward to hearing more about the membership of the evaluation panel and to seeing what they produce in due course.
