An Image of the Green Collection “Aristotle” Papyrus?

Posted on December 4, 2019 by Brent Nongbri

I’m preparing a post on recently emerged Coptic manuscripts of dubious origins to go along with the working list of similarly dodgy Greek and Latin manuscripts. In doing so, I’ve revisited some material put out by the Christian apologist Josh McDowell, who claims to own several very small fragments containing bits of the New Testament in Coptic. But I came across something even more interesting in one of McDowell’s PowerPoint presentations that is available online. It shows images that appear to have been taken during one of Scott Carroll’s cartonnage dismantling sessions held at Baylor University at which McDowell was present (the session recorded in this video that took place on 16 January 2012). The images from McDowell’s presentation were made available in a DropBox folder and highlighted on the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog in 2014. During that session, Scott Carroll brought some papyri that were not extracted from cartonnage that day. They are distinguishable because they were mounted between glass panes. This latter group included some pieces now known to have been stolen from the Oxyrhynchus collection, such as the Green Collection fragment of 1 Corinthians, GC.PAP.000120 a.k.a. P.Oxy. inv. 106/116(d) + 106/116(c). Another piece that was displayed on that occasion has a Ptolemaic (or very early Roman) look to it:

Continue reading →
Posted in Antiquities Dealers and Collectors, Antiquities Market, Dirk Obbink, Green Collection, Green Collection Aristotle, Mummy cartonnage, Scott Carroll | 8 Comments

Recap of the SBL “First Century Mark” Session

Posted on November 26, 2019 by Brent Nongbri

A few days ago, I was fortunate to be a part of the a session dedicated to a “postmortem” on so-called “First Century Mark” at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in San Diego. Below is a quick summary derived from my recollections. Please let me know if there are any inaccuracies, and I will correct them.

SBL 2019 “First Century Mark” panel: image source: Twitter feed of Charles J. Schmidt (via Evangelical Textual Criticism)

Bart Ehrman started things off by revisiting his 2012 debate with Dan Wallace. He made the case that even if we did have a fragment of Mark datable to the first century, it wouldn’t really tell us much that is new. If it looked like the text of Mark that we know, that’s great, but we still wouldn’t know how it matched up with the lost earliest copy of the gospel. If the first century manuscript looked too different from the Mark we know, then “scholars like Dan” might claim it wasn’t actually a copy of Mark. Bart finished up by speaking out against relying on hearsay (as Dan Wallace had in their debate).

Continue reading →
Posted in Antiquities Market, Dirk Obbink, First Century Mark, Mummy cartonnage, Oxyrhynchus Papyri | 35 Comments

The Coptic Material from Oxyrhynchus

Posted on November 18, 2019 by Brent Nongbri

Several people have asked me why there are no Coptic pieces on the list of recently emerged papyri of dubious origins. I put that list online in the hopes of identifying more material that may have been stolen from the Egypt Exploration Society. Having seen plenty of Greek papyri from Oxyrhynchus, we all have a pretty good sense of what that material tends to look like. But the profile of Coptic materials known with certainty to have come from the Oxyrhynchus trash heaps is something of a mystery. Very few of them have been published. This post will summarize what has been published.

Continue reading →
Posted in Dirk Obbink, Oxyrhynchus Papyri | 3 Comments

News: Egypt Exploration Society Missing At Least 120 Papyri

Posted on November 18, 2019 by Brent Nongbri

I missed this news from a couple days ago. The Egypt Exploration Society has announced that they are missing at least 120 papyri from the Oxyrhynchus collection.

Read the full announcement here.

Posted in Oxyrhynchus Papyri | 6 Comments

Once Again, Scott Carroll and a Papyrus of Plato

Posted on November 17, 2019 by Brent Nongbri

I’ve written before about Scott Carroll’s connection to a papyrus of Plato’s Phaedo. What I have only just now realized while reviewing some of Carroll’s past lectures is that his association with this piece goes back to early 2012 (or maybe even 2011), when he was still the director of the Green Collection.

In remarks made during a Passages lecture in Atlanta on 27 March 2012, Carroll said the following:

“Three days ago, discovered at Baylor University, ah, with students, ah, one of the earliest texts of Plato. And it’s, just so happens to be an account that Plato wrote of the death of Socrates, a very famous account, that was used in the early Church period as a contrast with the death of Christ. And so it’s a very interesting passage.”

Now, it seems to be a good rule of thumb to take Carroll’s claims of “X days ago I discovered Y papyrus” with a grain of salt. But this description does sound a lot like the description (attributed to Dirk Obbink) of the papyrus of Plato’s Phaedo appraised by Lee Biondi in 2013 (“The account has uncanny parallels with the life and death of Jesus Christ, something not lost on scholars through the ages.”).

Continue reading →
Posted in Antiquities Dealers and Collectors, Antiquities Market, Dirk Obbink, Green Collection, Lee Biondi, Scott Carroll, Van Kampen Collection | 4 Comments

A New(-ish) Published Papyrus from the Green Collection!

Posted on November 11, 2019 by Brent Nongbri

Sometimes my own oversights absolutely astound me. On my last update to the list of recently emerged papyri of dubious origins, I noted that a papyrus of a work of Aristotle in the Green Collection was said to have been extracted from mummy cartonnage along with another literary papyrus on the mysteries. Thanks to an especially observant anonymous commenter, I now see that the latter papyrus (or another one in the Green Collection incredibly similar to it), was actually published (back in 2011!) by Professor Dirk Obbink.

The details of the publication are as follows: Dirk Obbink, “Dionysos In and Out of the Papyri,” pages 281-295 in Renate Schlesier (ed.), A Different God? Dionysos and Ancient Polytheism (Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2011). The image of the papyrus (Figure 4, pictured above) is “© Imaging Papyri Project, Oxford.”

Continue reading →
Posted in Antiquities Dealers and Collectors, Antiquities Market, Dirk Obbink, Green Collection, Green Collection Mysteries Papyrus, Scott Carroll | 7 Comments

Additional Papyri of Unknown Origins

Posted on November 8, 2019 by Brent Nongbri

At the prompting of David Bradnick, I have added a few more items to the list of recently emerged papyri with dubious origins. I hesitated to add these pieces to the list because I have not seen images of them, but I can see the wisdom of putting them on the list in hopes that they surface at some point. If anyone has seen any images of these pieces elsewhere online or in print, I would be grateful to know where.

Aristotle, unknown work on reason? (unverified identification by Scott Carroll, Green Collection). First reference: 2011. This Green Collection papyrus was to be featured in the Brill series and was assigned to a date in the 3rd century BCE. [Update 3 January 2020: I believe a photograph of this papyrus was put online in 2014.] Like so many other Green Collection pieces, this one is sometimes said to have been extracted from a mummy mask. Here is Scott Carroll in an interview published back in May of 2011:

“Recently I would say the most surprising discoveries have come from working with mummy (mask) coverings…A professor from Oxford and I have extracted a lost work of Aristotle, other classical works, and very early unrepresented texts of Scripture.”

It is of course interesting to see once again the “professor from Oxford” invoked in relation to cartonnage dismantling, but it now appears that many, if not all, of Carroll’s claims about extracting Christian texts from mummy cartonnage were simply fabrications.

Continue reading →
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Dirk Obbink Discusses Oxyrhynchus “Distribution” Papyri

Posted on October 25, 2019 by Brent Nongbri

Although Professor Dirk Obbink has issued an emphatic denial of accusations that he illegally stole and sold papyri from the Egypt Exploration Society, he has not (to the best of my knowledge) denied that he (legally) bought and sold so-called “distribution” papyri. These are published papyri from Oxyrhynchus and elsewhere that the Egypt Exploration Fund gave to subscribers mainly in the US and the UK between 1900 and 1924. Some of these pieces later ended up on the antiquities market to be traded by collectors and dealers, including (apparently) Prof. Obbink himself, if Museum of the Bible records are to be believed. I have discussed these “distribution papyri” in an earlier post.

Why do I bring this up? On the Oxford University website, there is a recording of a talk given by Prof. Obbink in 2015 on the now infamous Sappho fragments that he edited. During the talk, he spends a good deal of time discussing P.Oxy. 10.1231, a different copy of Sappho’s poems that was excavated from the trash heaps of Oxyrhynchus. This piece is now held at the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

Dirk Obbink speaking at Oxford in May 2015; image source: University of Oxford Podcasts

It is kept at the Bodleian (rather than the Sackler, where the bulk of the Oxyrhynchus collection is held) because it was one of those early publications that was “distributed” to donor organizations. In his talk, Prof. Obbink acknowledges this fact and then makes some remarks that are quite stunning in light of the fact the he himself seems to have been buying and selling distribution Oxyrhynchus papyri as recently as 2010. At about the 5:35 mark in the video, he begins to moralize:

Continue reading →
Posted in Antiquities Dealers and Collectors, Antiquities Market, Dirk Obbink, Oxyrhynchus Papyri | 2 Comments

A Couple More Manuscripts of Questionable Origins

Posted on October 23, 2019 by Brent Nongbri

I’ve added a couple more pieces to the list of manuscripts of dubious origins. These are more pieces that have shown up in Scott Carroll’s talks in recent years, and both of these items may also be connected to the manuscripts stolen from the Egypt Exploration Society. The first is a collection of papyrus fragments identified only as “a patristic text.” I am also posting an image here:

This particular image comes from a talk given by Carroll in 2016 that is not freely available online (this is yet another instance in which I need to thank David Bradnick for digging up the evidence).

Continue reading →
Posted in Antiquities Dealers and Collectors, Antiquities Market, Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Scott Carroll | 4 Comments

More News on Stolen Papyri from the Egypt Exploration Society

Posted on October 21, 2019 by Brent Nongbri

The Egypt Exploration Society has posted an update to last week’s announcement regarding papyri stolen from the EES and allegedly sold to Hobby Lobby by Professor Dirk Obbink. The updates discuss the EES manuscripts that have made their way to the collection of Andrew Stimer. These include the following, which Mr. Stimer intends to return to the EES:

The EES also notes that a couple of manuscripts on the list of papyri with dubious origins are actually safe and sound in EES holdings and have been assigned to editors:

It seems that Scott Carroll had only gotten hold of images of these unpublished papyri and not the manuscripts themselves. I will update the list accordingly. See the full EES announcement here:

https://www.ees.ac.uk/news/missing-papyri-two-updates

Posted in Dirk Obbink, Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Scott Carroll | 4 Comments