Once denounced as forgery, fragments of old Biblical manuscript earn credibility, a scholarly article claims

By Jennifer Schuessler In 1883, a Jerusalem antiquities dealer named Moses Wilhelm Shapira announced the discovery of a remarkable artefact: 15 manuscript fragments, supposedly discovered in a cave near the Dead Sea. “Qumran was a massive shift,” Na’ama Pat-El, an expert in classical Semitic languages at the University of Texas in Austin, said, referring to the area where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. It’s pretty incredible if he’s right.” For Dershowitz, the dismissal of Shapira’s manuscript nearly 140 years ago was not just a mistake, but “a tragedy” — and not just for Shapira. “He would keep emailing me details, and I would reply TGTBT — too good to be true.” As it happens, Dershowitz wasn’t the only one taking a fresh look at Shapira. And if he is, Stackert said, V would serve as powerful evidence for what scholars have long hypothesized: that the traditions and stories preserved in the Hebrew Bible “are only a fraction of those that existed.” Over the years, some who have tried to reopen the Shapira case have speculated that the manuscript might be a “rewritten Bible” of the sort found among the Dead Sea Scrolls — texts that revised the canonical books of the Bible, to clarify certain points or appeal to new readers.