For all its stated good intentions, when the Museum of the Bible in Washington was first envisioned a decade ago, skeptics worried it would favor religious proselytizing over neutral scholarship and buttoned-down collecting practices.

Part of that caution grew from the fact that the museum’s guiding spirit was 78-year-old David Green, an evangelical Christian who founded the multi-billion-dollar Hobby Lobby chain in 1972 and who had written of the Bible: “This isn’t just some book that someone made up. It’s God, it’s history, and we want to show that.”

So it was far from good news for the museum last month when it disclosed, just days apart, that thousands of its Middle Eastern antiquities had tainted provenances and that its vaunted collection of Dead Sea Scrolls was fake.

But in a dozen interviews in recent days, some of the institution’s toughest critics said the transparency with which the museum has handled the disclosures was a positive step toward converting those who had questioned its methods and principles.