DUBAI: The founder of research center Art Fraud Insight this week confirmed that all 16 Dead Sea Scroll fragments housed at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, are forgeries. In October 2018, German scholars revealed that at least five of the museum’s 16 scroll fragments were fake. The scrolls are a collection of ancient religious texts first discovered in the mid-1940s in the Qumran caves on the western shore of the Dead Sea. The massive cache of Hebrew language Biblical scripts features more than 9,000 documents and 50,000 fragments — the entire collection took decades to fully excavate. “After an exhaustive review of all the imaging and scientific analysis results, it is evident that none of the textual fragments in Museum of the Bible’s Dead Sea Scroll collection are authentic,” Colette Loll said in a released statement. “Moreover, each exhibits characteristics that suggest they are deliberate forgeries created in the twentieth century with the intent to mimic authentic Dead Sea Scroll fragments.” Most of the scrolls and fragments are tightly controlled by the Israeli Antiquities Authority. But around 2002, a wave of new fragments began mysteriously appearing on the market, despite skepticism from scholars. These fragments, they warned, were specifically designed to target American Evangelical Christians, who prize the scrolls. That appears to be exactly what happened; a Baptist seminary in Texas and an evangelical college in California reportedly paid millions to purchase alleged pieces of the scrolls. The Museum of the Bible was opened by Evangelical Christian and billionaire Steve Green in 2017.