Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Call For Papers: The Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls unit plans four sessions: 1. “Dead Sea Scrolls and the Genre Apocalypse” will be convened jointly with the Apocalyptic Literature program unit. This session will reconsider questions related to genre and definitions of apocalyptic literature, in light of the full publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, exploring issues such as apocalyptic rhetoric, social setting, and eschatology. Some papers are invited but we also welcome proposals. 2. “Tracing and Facing Possibility of Forgeries: Methodology, Ethics, Policies” is an open session on the status of unprovenanced material in Qumran studies. SBL has recently announced a new policy on unprovenanced materials. In summer 2016, the controversy over the “Gospel of Jesus's wife” fragment was traced to Berlin by Ariel Sabar. Around that time, Qumran scholars began to express skepticism about the authenticity of some fragments attributed to Qumran which have surfaced since 2002. We invite papers to engage one or more of the following topics in a cooperative and collegial spirit: • Developments and discussion on post-2002 DSS fragments/other recent material: What has happened and what can we learn from these processes? • Methodology: How to identify forgeries? Which technological/material/paleographical analyses are available/most important? • Ethics: Whose responsibility is it to look into the nature of the material in collections? To what extent can their history and provenance be traced? How are discovery narratives constructing reality? • Policies: To what extent is the new SBL policy helpful? What implications can be expected? 3. The third session is an invited interdisciplinary session that will explore intersections between the Dead Sea Scrolls and Manichean literature, in particular the Turfan collection, which is kept in Berlin. 4. For our final session we welcome proposals on any issue pertaining to the Dead Sea Scrolls.

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