The scroll first came into the possession of Khalil Iskander Shahin, better known as Kando, an antiques dealer who was a member of the Syrian Church.[15] Kando was unable to make anything of the writing on the scroll, and sold it to Anastasius Yeshue Samuel (better known as Mar Samuel), the Syrian Archbishop of the Syrian Orthodox Church in East Jerusalem, who was anxious to have it authenticated.[16] The Archbishop consulted many scholars in Jerusalem to determine the nature and significance of the documents, and in July 1947, he finally consulted the École Biblique and came in contact with the visiting Dutch scholar Professor J. van der Ploeg of Nijmegen University. Van der Ploeg identified one of the manuscripts at the monastery as a copy of the Book of Isaiah in Hebrew, but was met with skepticism, as a fellow scholar at the École Biblique believed that the scrolls must be fakes due to their antiquity.[16]