The San Diego Natural History Museum’s upcoming Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit has now also come under attack. At least two blogs have now published a letter from Dr. Risa Levitt Kohn, a professor of religious studies who is curating the exhibit. For details and links, see http://pacific-science-scrolls-scandal.blogspot.com/. In her letter, Dr. Kohn denies allegations that the exhibit is “biased” and “unbalanced”. As Dr. Mariottini explains, Scrolls scholarship is currently polarized into two opposing groups, one holding that they were written by a sect living at Qumran, the other holding that no sect lived at Qumran and that the Scrolls are the remnants of the libraries of Jerusalem. This polarization is confirmed by the Cambridge History of Judaism, which features two separate articles presenting each of these two theories. In her letter defending the planned exhibit, Dr. Kohn admits that not a single opponent of the Qumran-Essene theory — not even the leader of the official Israel Antiquities Authority archaeological team that has concluded, after ten years of excavations, that Qumran was a pottery factory and that the Scrolls came from Jerusalem — has been invited to participate in the Museum’s lecture series (featuring 22 speakers), but she attempts to justify this decision by referring to the “scholarly consensus” on Scroll origins. It is difficult to square this assertion of “consensus” with the picture presented in multiple news accounts and the Cambridge History of Judaism. If Dr. Kohn has set out to defend the old Essene theory in the face of growing scholarly disenchantment with it, why doesn’t she just admit that the exhibit is indeed biased and unbalanced, instead of arguing herself into an impossible situation?