For those who are following the trial of Raphael Golb and the controversy about the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Huffington Post has the latest information:

A lawyer charged with impersonating a Judaic studies professor online took the witness stand in his defense Monday, offering jurors a history lesson on the Dead Sea Scrolls and arguing his attempts to defend his father’s lifelong research on the ancient texts weren’t criminal.

Raphael Golb doesn’t dispute that he sent e-mails and messages under pseudonyms attacking his father’s critics, but he testified his actions weren’t illegal.

“These blogs were about a pattern of unethical conduct in this field of study,” he said.

Golb spent the bulk of his life around the scroll research and debate because of his father, University of Chicago professor Norman Golb. The scholarly debate is over the ancient Jews who wrote the scrolls, which are more than 2,000 years old and have provided important insight into the history of Judaism and the beginnings of Christianity.

Many academics say the scrolls were assembled by a sect known as the Essenes. Others, including professor Golb, say the writings were the work of a range of Jewish groups and communities.

Golb said he believed that his father’s work, which includes a book called “Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?” has been stolen in part by a rival professor, Lawrence Schiffman, and that his research was being wrongly discredited, so he took to the Internet to avenge him.

“I was aware of my father’s feelings of being violated,” he said. “They were constantly making nasty remarks about my father.”

Schiffman, chairman of New York University’s Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, told the jury earlier that he and Norman Golb have long disagreed, albeit cordially, about the issue. But the disagreement so angered Raphael Golb, prosecutors said, that he mounted an elaborate, cloaked effort to promote his father’s side by creating aliases and then crafting blog posts and e-mails to tarnish Schiffman’s reputation

Read the article in its entirety by visiting the Huffington Post here.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary