A heavyweight team prepares to unravel a modern mystery of religious archaeology
By B.C.
IT IS now four years since a respected scholar in Jordan said a mysterious collection of leaden book-like objects might be the biggest discovery in the field of religious archaeology since 1947, when the Dead Sea Scrolls gradually started coming to light in caves east of Jerusalem. It will soon be three years since a group of 38 distinguished academics wrote to The Times of London regretting the fact that the authorities in Jordan had, after the initial excitement, relapsed into silence and declined to issue any further information about the finds.
Elsewhere, and above all on the blogosphere, lots of intemperate things have been said about the codices, which appear to be ring-bound books on which some enigmatic (some would say tantalising) images and letters in various scripts can be made out. The objects were presented to the world by an Israeli Bedouin who said his family had possessed them for a long time; this was immediately contradicted by the authorities in Amman, who said they had been removed quite recently from a cave in Jordan.
If (and this is still a huge if) the objects can be shown to be really old, they might help answer one of the major puzzles of monotheistic history: what became of the Hebrew Christians, in other words the recipients of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the New Testament, after they fled Jerusalem?
Yesterday an initiative was launched in London which should improve the chances of the codices being seriously investigated: something that everybody, including the most hardened sceptics, must presumably want. Under the benign gaze of Richard Chartres, who as bishop of London is the third-ranking hierarch in the Church of England, it was announced that a Centre for the Study of the Jordanian Lead Books has been established (as a not-for-profit limited company) with some distinguished figures lending their weight to the project. The centre's board includes two veteran British politicians, Sir Tony Baldry and Tom Spencer; an "evaluation panel" will be headed by Professor Robert Hayward of Durham University; and a Jordanian professor, Fayez Khasawneh of Yarmouk University, has agreed to chair an "advisory council".
Perhaps the most urgent need now is for some independent, peer-reviewed metallurgical analysis. One test found that the lead could indeed be ancient, but a sceptic would immediately retort that ancient lead can be re-fashioned by modern forgers. On the other hand, the objects show an extraordinary variety of forms of corrosion; a forger would have needed to be extraordinarily diligent and energetic to tailor-make all these effects. It's also worth stressing that even if some of the objects in this collection are proved to be forgeries, that doesn't mean they all are. Another possibility is that they will prove to be relatively old copies of a prototype that is much older still; that would still be of great interest.
Perhaps the newly-established Centre should take heart from the fact that it took quite a few years for the importance of Dead Sea Scrolls to be widely realised. A Syrian Orthodox archbishop bought some of them from an antiquities dealer and tried unsuccessfully to hawk them round American universities; in desperation he advertised them for sale in the Wall Street Journal. Doubtless the colleges who turned them down were sniffy about the objects' uncertain provenance; similar things are being said about the codices. But in the archaeological history of the Holy Land, many a sceptic and many a "believer" has been severely embarrassed; it's a good idea to keep an open mind.
