I'm not so sure that "reasonable people who did the right thing" is an accurate characterization. The Museum of the Bible has a lot of controversy regarding their acquisition of artifacts. The company paid a large fine for trying to acquire materials looted from Iraq. Their cover-up obfuscated the origins of the material, reducing its value to archaeology by destroying context.
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.
They were trying to cover up attempts at acquiring legitimate artifacts? Seems like OP is right; they are trying to acquire legitimate materials and that it is most likely they got duped.
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'm familiar with the scandal. I'm just saying that it points more toward the museum having been actually duped. They are clearly interested in getting genuine artifacts given the lengths they are willing to go to obscure shady provenance.
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.
If scholarship was at the top of their agenda... they wouldn't be a Bible Museum.
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.
I think you're thinking of the Creation Museum, in Kentucky. That's a whole different travesty.
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.
> If scholarship was at the top of their agenda... they wouldn't be a Bible 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.
Yes, but one project of the Bible Museum is an explicitly religious one: to prove that the wording of the Bible has stayed constant, as evidence that its preservation has been inspired by God, and the text of the Bible should be therefore taken as inerrant.
I'm not sure I follow. Suppose that actual genuineness is a lower priority than having something exciting to display while not getting caught with fakes. In that case a murky acquisition pipeline is still a benefit, in that the obscurity makes it harder to prove the fraud.
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.
> 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.
I don't think you're correct about the 2008 crisis. But even if you're right, my point is broader than that. Plenty of executives play a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose game, with plausible deniability as part of that. Look at almost any industry with significant negative externalities.
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.
It's a practice real museums have mostly stopped. There's enormous controversy about what they should do with their existing ill-gotten gains -- most prominently the Parthenon Marbles in the UK, but that's just the lid on a massive can of worms. (There are rumors that Greece will hold up any trade deal the UK wants to make with the EU until they give the pieces back, and expect all hell to break loose in the museum world after that.)
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.
They’d already been very[1] publicly[2] caught out on housing likely forgeries. That Nova documentary says (I believe verbatim) that some of the fragments they bought were “too good to be true”, one particular example I recall was a few lines that are often quoted together but quite far apart with significant context in between, that somehow ended up on the same fragment. Overall the documentary makes a compelling case that the forgers started small but evolved into targeting groups who were unreasonably gullible. Given the Museum of the Bible’s history of being unscrupulous historians I think they have it coming rather than being victims.
They clearly did hide things with their previous scandal about smuggled Iraqi artifacts. In this case it was less about hiding things and more about their desire to acquire showy artifacts being more important than authenticity or scholarship.
There isn't a ton of evidence that they weren't just naive with the Iraqi scandal. Also, they seem to have changed a lot for the better as explained by the last section of the article.
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.
While the museum - or just its main sponsors - have acted badly in other cases, this does not seem to be so here. On the other hand, an entity that conducts shady business is an attractive target for a con artist, who may be able to exploit its willingness to look the other way in duping it.
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.