Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibit (Part 1)

My friend and I headed to Ft. Worth, Texas, where an exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls was being held. That's right. The Dead Sea Scrolls! The oldest pieces of the Bible we have! I could barely contain my excitement.

The first part of the exhibit was a treat. I thought it was just going to be the Dead Sea Scrolls there. I was in for a surprise. They had artifacts galore, such as coins, oil lamps, and goblets. Most interesting to me were some stone ossuaries with Hebrew and Greek inscriptions. I could make out quite a few of the letters, which was amazing, considering that I got a D+ in Hebrew.

One of the ossuaries stood out from the rest. It had, at one time, contained the bones of Alexander, the son of Simon of Cyrene. Simon of Cyrene was the one who carried Jesus' cross and in Mark 15:21, the gospel mentions that his two sons, Alexander and Rufus, were with him. It is not confirmed that the ossuary contained the bones of that particular Alexander son of Simon of Cyrene, but the odds of multiple Cyrenians being in Jerusalem are pretty low in the first place, with Alexander son of Simon being even lower. At any rater, it was great to see a possible artifact from a known character in the Bible. Click here for a picture (not sure if the picture is available for distribution so I didn't put it in here).

Immediately following the artifacts were a couple of rooms containing information about the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and then we entered a room containing facsimilies of the most famous Dead Sea Scrolls (the Isaiah scroll). At first, I wasn't sure what to think. Fascimilies are simply an image of the original scroll printed on thick paper and cut to resemble the shape of the original. For these particular facsimilies, the company that was hired to produce them took special care in getting the rips and tears just right, and even sewing the sheets together using thread made from authentic materials from the land.

However, they were just facsimilies. They were impressive to look at, but they weren't the originals. As time went on, I began to think that the originals were not on display here, and that the whole exhibit culminated in the facsimilies of the main scrolls.

We neared the end of that room and saw that it ended in a flight of stairs that let out into a lobby. My heart sank. This was it.

[to be continued...]

P52

Having been inspired by my research on the New Testament scribes, I decided I would try to reproduce the P52 fragment.

The first thing to get right was the shape.

As you can see, the fragment has a very unique shape. In fact, it's so recognized among the New Testament scholarly community that people have made memorabilia out of it, including ties. 

Since I didn't have any fancy equipment, I had to do it the hard way. I literally put a piece of paper up against my monitor and traced the outline of the image the best I could. Next, I transferred the tracing to the papyrus itself using a pencil, and then, using a straightedge razor, I cut the papyrus to the shape. Finally, I wrote the text on the papyrus (both sides) and aged it. It wasn't a perfect replica, but it did look good. I ended up giving it to a friend before I could manage to take a picture of it. One of these days I will manage to get a picture and upload it here.

The day after I gave my friend the P52 fragment, he and I went somewhere epic. Stay tuned to find out where!