Earlier this month Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary purchased three pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which contain the oldest known surviving copies the Hebrew Bible. This came four months after Azusa Pacific University, another Christian school, also bought fragments of the scrolls.
Yesterday UCLA’s Robert Cargill, an archaeologist and biblical scholar specializing in Semitic languages and Near Eastern archaeology, wrote on his blog that online college DeVry University was getting into the biblical archaeology market too, paying $2.3 million for a single letter of the text:
This fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls, although small, shows DeVry’s commitment to being a leader in the online university/alternative education market. This single aleph is the ‘A’ for effort that will make DeVry a major player in the world of higher education. Look out Harvard! DeVry knows a little about the Bible too. In fact, we now own a part of it.
Cargill was joking.
