They put these artifacts in their catalog; it was outside researchers who declared them forgeries. How many other pieces in their catalog are also forgeries, but don't have sufficiently high profile to be forced to check their acquisition?

So I'm dubious when they claim victimhood. Scholars only want the material because of its context. The lack of context was the first clue to outsiders that they were in fact forgeries. Why didn't they know?

They seem to want to acquire these objects more as trophies than as scholarship, and are willing to cut corners on provenance to achieve that. They present themselves as scholars but act more like a cross between treasure hunters and religious fanatics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_Lobby_smuggling_scandal

If this were a one-off thing, this might indeed be a non-story. But it fits a pattern of them putting collecting over scholarship. It casts doubt on their entire catalog, and makes it look as if they fund conferences as a fig leaf to grant them unearned scholarly authority. It may not mean anything to techies at Hacker News, but within the circles of archeology and biblical study, it's a warning that people should reconsider their relationship to the museum.

I see their willingness to accept artifacts of dubious provenance as part of an overall pattern of having things other than scholarship at the top of their agenda. But yes, I do think they'd prefer genuine artifacts when available -- even if that destroys provenance information.

If they cared more about provenance, they'd be less likely to be duped, and it makes it hard for me to see them as purely a victim.

Fair point. I don't doubt their propensity to be duped is rather high due to self-imposed biases.

This Museum literally shows people how the Earth is 6,000 years old and people interacting with Dinosaurs.

Edit:

I mistakenly confused The Bible Museum and The Creation Museum. In my shame, I am committing to leave the original comment unedited, so that it can receive all the down voting it deserves.

The Museum of the Bible is located in Washington, DC, not far from the Smithsonian. On the surface it's a much less flashy and overtly religious institution. It presents the Bible as a piece of world history in an archeological context, supported by scholarship. It doesn't muck about with creationism. It's rather respectable.

Underneath that are more subtle problems. It's funded by the same religious zealots who would not allow their employees' health care to cover birth control (and took it to the Supreme Court, where they won). There's a subtle underlying tone pushing American-style evangelical Protestantism -- one that could easily be overlooked, except that incidents like this one imply that there's an element of religious imperialism going on as well.

So they are funding and supporting genuine scholarship, and are not at all obvious wackadoodles like the Creation Museum. But nonetheless scholarship may take a back seat to a religious agenda, one that has been a rather pernicious force in the US -- including leading to things like the Creation Museum.

Yes, because the Bible has never had an impact on the arc of humanity.

I get it. It's easy and fun to dunk on certain sects of Christians for their demonstrably false beliefs. However, this isn't the Creation Museum. While I haven't been to The Museum of the Bible or The Creation Museum, I have found absolutely nothing that supports that The Museum of the Bible pushes creationism (https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/11/17/16658504/bible-mus...). This museum's focus is on the history of the Bible, widely known as the most printed book of all time. The Bible upon whose basis 100s of millions or even billions of people order their systems of moral belief. To suggest that there can be no real scholarship about the Bible is to shove your head in the sand and pretend Christianity has had no impact on society.

https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/11/17/16658504/bible-mus...

This is of course a pretty common behavior in corporate America. Look at the number of executives during the financial crisis who suddenly went from, "We are financial geniuses, deserving of great power and greater compensation," to, "We were innocent victims who could not possibly have known what was going on in the companies we control utterly." Plausible deniability lets the powerful claim credit for the successes and deny responsibility for the failures.

Except that whole racket in your financial industry analogy depended entirely on a 3rd party (ie, a government packed with their buddies from private school) to tip the scales in their favour, on either end, for it to actually work.

There's no third party being corrupted to give credibility to the museum here, they can't really just give credibility to themselves like that - just as the bankers couldn't bail themselves out, when they otherwise were faced with devastating and long-term financial consequences for their behaviour (ie, the appropriate response or natural outcome).

A museums reputation matters and events like this directly affect it... which is why we have major news stories and Wikipedia articles about it.

I don't think it's helpful to shame them for engaging with the scholarly community, or to shame them for attempting to be good merely because of past behaviour (which is far too common practice today on social media, as if people and organizations can't become better or more responsible, and are forever just evil like in movies).

It sounds like the natural corrections processes were already working here... they got pressured from the sources of credibility (scholars, media, etc) which was influenced because of prior bad acts where they lost reputation already. If they attempted to corrupt those sources instead of engaging with them I'd be more concerned. But really there's not much here, especially given the negative spin in the article, which is what the OP was critiquing. The end result was bad-for-business PR and they probably paid millions for stuff they can't now use in their museum, sounds alright to me, things are working... I also doubt they'll be as trusting next time.

And of course the museum can give itself credibility. Just by opening as a museum, for a start. But also by striving to appear credible to the million or so visitors who pay $20/head to tour it each year. And museums always perform respectableness for donors.

Events like this do somewhat subtract from that, of course. But only if they get caught. That could be an incentive toward better scholarship. But it also could be an incentive toward higher-quality, more difficult to discover fakes.

Scandals - numerous. Buying dubious pieces that have been stolen or faked shouldn’t be taken as a good thing. This logic isn’t applied to real museums luckily.

The Bible Museum reflects a cultural attitude the celebrates the imperial age, when rich countries just took what they wanted from poor ones. There are a lot of people in those rich countries who want that back.

It doesn't sound like they were trying to hide anything.

[1]2019 November https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/dead-sea-scroll-detectiv...

[2]2018 October https://www.livescience.com/63895-dead-sea-scroll-fakes.html

They seem to be handling what have clearly been a great number of serious consequences due to previous mistakes, and sure, maybe initial greediness, with great integrity now.

I quoted some of the article that points this out lower in the comments as well.

Your quoted excerpt says: "independent researchers funded by the Museum of the Bible announced that all 16 of the museum’s Dead Sea Scroll fragments are modern forgeries that duped outside collectors, the museum’s founder, and some of the world’s leading biblical scholars"

What is it that you think the headline should say?

The important difference is the implication in the headline needs to be that the Museum is discovering this instead of the Museum defrauding people

The headline does not imply anyone being defrauded by the Museum to me.

The, "Museum" of the Bible is meant to evangelize, not to educate. Give me a break about victimization.

Now, if more broadly you are referring to relics in the generic sense of objects of historical importance surviving from times long ago, then it seems obvious that most Christian relics are NOT fakes. Christianity has a long, deep history that has influenced the creation of massive amounts of art, literature, architecture, pottery, etc.

I do agree that it's worth keeping the fakes, though. If the Museum of The Bible were bigger on "museum" than "bible" this would be a great centerpiece for an exhibit on the long history of profitable religious forgeries.

[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/researchers-hung-men...

[1] https://m.ncregister.com/blog/smcafee/i-made-a-third-class-r...

Clearly it is not something worthy of a museum then. A fake thing being old doesn't make it historically significant for a museum. A church, maybe.

No relics? less travel? Slower "flatten the curve" back plague? Smaller renaissance? Weaker atheism today? :O

Unfortunately I tend to focus on the atrocities that have happened in history in the name of the religion itself. Perhaps that would make a good topic to build a museum about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Prepuce#Traffic_in_relics

Funny anecdote. Middle age conmen.

> The museum says it is nonsectarian, non-political, and that it does not proselytize.[4][5] The former president of the museum, Cary Summers, said the goal was to "reacquaint the world with the book that helped make it, and let the visitor come to their own conclusions. ... We don't exist to tell people what to believe about it".[5]

I read it as very much a move in the culture war. It's not a museum about religious texts in general. It's very much a sectarian enterprise, whatever the PR people write.

Like, they're just really that into the Bible? It's not like it's out of print; that it needs to be reacquainted with.

In what way/shape/form does The Bible have any geographical relevance to Washington D.C.?

In isolation, maybe? But this isn’t the only scam that’s slowly playing out. Oxford and Professor Obbink is slowly playing out. The illegal importing of Iraqi items and the fakes they had on display when they opened are other examples. At the time (2017) they claimed to be victims, had learned, were moving on etc. How long is the grace period? It’s sleazy at best.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/museum-bible-faces-revelatio...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/world/europe/oxford-profe...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/10/16/mystery-deepens-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://www.goldburdmccone.com/blog/2017/06/what-are-the-tre... https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/2019_irs_criminal_investigat...

It seems to me that white collar crime, and the increasing impunity with which its perpetrators operate in the US, should be a legitimate topic of debate here on HN.

If GP had written "we need a functioning public school system", would you have considered this "flamebait" as well? That kind of assertion seems to be basically an article of faith among the YC crowd.

Sensationalized political fights are one of the worst poisons here, so when an account is showing signs of using HN for that, it's not good. Substantive discussion of divisive questions (which your comment is more touching into) is a quite different thing, and much more likely to be ok.