Wednesday, July 08, 2020

Update on the "Ben Padiah Scroll" (a.k.a. "Angel Scroll")

THE LYING PEN OF SCRIBES BLOG: The Angel Scroll: A Fragmentary Chronological Bibliography [Link now corrected!]. Årsten Justnes provides a pretty full bibliography for this dubious, supposed scroll discovery.

Years ago I mentioned the "Ben Padiah Scroll" or "Angel Scroll" a few times here, here, and here.

The links to Stephen Pfann's original post have rotted, but the Wayback Machine seems to preserve it here. The most recent discussion of it in Professor Justnes's bibliography is Michael Heiser's A WORD ABOUT THE ANGEL SCROLL from five years ago. If you read those two, you should be pretty fully informed.

The text sounds quite interesting. However, the actual scroll has never been produced and there are not even any photographs of it. The text that was released could have been forged by anyone reasonably competent. Unless we see the scroll, we should assume the document is an unimpressive fake.

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