SWBTS acquires Dead Sea Scrolls fragments

FORT WORTH, Texas — Pieces from what many scholars argue is the greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th century have found a permanent residence at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) in Fort Worth, Texas. Southwestern trustee Gary Loveless presented President Paige Patterson with the collection during a seminary chapel service Jan. 20. Loveless, founder and chief executive officer of Square Mile Energy in Houston, provided the lead gift for the purchase of the fragments, which were acquired from a private collector in Europe. The collection makes SWBTS one of only a handful of institutions of higher education in the United States to possess pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Early analysis shows the fragments owned by SWBTS include portions of Exodus 23, Leviticus 18 and Daniel 6, although the seminary will conduct further study on the pieces. A pen made from a palm tree, which was found with the Dead Sea Scrolls and presumably used by the scribes who wrote them, also was gifted to the seminary as part of the collection. It is only one of three pens known to exist from the Dead Sea Scroll discoveries. Weston Fields, executive director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation, an organization dedicated to the preservation and publication of the scrolls, said in a telephone interview, “Any piece of the Dead Sea Scrolls is significant because it shows us what the state of the Hebrew text of the Bible was 2,000 years ago, which gives us a way to measure whether or not they’ve been faithfully transmitted over the last 2,000 years.”