“In 2009, the Green family, owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of arts-and- crafts stores, began acquiring a series of weathered fragments advertised as Dead Sea Scrolls, including this one, … [which] were displayed at the Museum of the Bible. … Last spring, however, scientific analysis proved what a number of biblical scholars had begun to suspect: the sixteen fragments the Greens purchased were forgeries.” Here, in one of Harper’s trademark Annotations, Madeleine Schwartz explains how researchers could tell the pieces were fake. – Harper’s
