Students and university officials started getting e-mails last year in which a prominent Judaic studies scholar seemed to make a startling confession: He had committed plagiarism.

The messages, it turned out, were a hoax. Prosecutors filed criminal charges, saying a lawyer sent the messages to tarnish the professor, his father's rival.

The court case has drawn attention to issues both ancient (the origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls) and decidedly modern (phony online identities).

On Wednesday, a defense attorney asked a judge to throw out most of the charges, saying they put parodies, pranks and freewheeling Internet discussion at risk.

The more than 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1940s in Israel and include the earliest known version of portions of the Hebrew Bible. They have shed important light on Judaism and the beginnings of Christianity.

Their origin is the subject of an insular, but notoriously heated, academic debate.

Many scholars say the scrolls were assembled by an ancient Jewish group, the Essenes. Others, including University of Chicago professor Norman Golb, say the writings were the work of a range of Jewish sects and communities.

Authorities say Golb's son Raphael was so incensed by the disagreement that he decided to take aim at his father's adversaries, particularly New York University Judaic studies chairman Lawrence Schiffman.

Raphael Golb, a 49-year-old attorney, opened an e-mail account in Schiffman's name and used it to send messages to NYU students and officials in which Schiffman purportedly acknowledged plagiarizing and misrepresenting Norman Golb's scholarship, the Manhattan district attorney's office said. The e-mails asked the recipients to help cover up the supposed misdeeds.

"My career is at stake," some e-mails read.

Prosecutors say Golb also used other aliases to send e-mails and post online articles in an effort to color debate about the scrolls.

Golb faces charges including with identity theft and criminal impersonation. He has pleaded not guilty.

Golb contests sending the e-mails. But whoever did send them was just pulling an "intellectual prank" and expressing ideas protected by free speech rights, said Golb's lawyer, Ronald Kuby.

"An attempt to influence a public, academic debate by e-mails and blog postings authored under assumed names cannot be an object of criminal" laws designed to protect people from fraud, threats or physical harm, Kuby wrote in papers filed this week. Continued...