On Tuesday I reported on what was being billed as “the major discovery of Christian history”, a new discovery said to be “as important as the Dead Sea Scrolls”: 70 books made of lead, said to be from the 1st century AD and of Christian origin. But even by the next day the credibility of this discovery was coming into question, as I noted in a comment, because of revelations about the identity of David Elkington who was publicising this matter.

Now there seems to be proof that these books are forgeries, or at least that one of them is. Elkington asked Peter Thonemann, who is a Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Oxford, to examine three photographs of one of the discovered books (this one is apparently made of copper or bronze, not lead) showing some writing in Greek. Jim Davila of the blog PaleoJudaica has posted Thonemann’s reply to Elkington and copies of the photographs.

In his letter to Elkington Thonemann gives a full transcription and translation of the Greek text, which is meaningless as it stands. But he has discovered the source of this text. This leads him to the conclusion:

The text on your bronze tablet … has been extracted unintelligently from another longer text … a perfectly ordinary tombstone from Madaba in Jordan which happens to have been on display in the Amman museum for the past fifty years or so.  …

The only possible explanation is that the text on the bronze tablet was copied directly from the inscription in the museum at Amman …

This particular bronze tablet is, therefore, a modern forgery, produced in Jordan within the last fifty years.  I would stake my career on it.

Strong words indeed from a scholar. If this one book is a forgery, then it is reasonable to suppose that the others allegedly discovered with it are also forgeries. I suppose it is possible that someone has mixed genuine antiquities with forgeries. But if they have they have so greatly compromised the value of the genuine ones as to make them worthless.

So let’s forget this sorry story, except perhaps as a warning not to be carried away by unverified hype.

Thanks to P.J. Williams of Evangelical Textual Criticism for the link to Davila’s post.