Now that the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) has found that Oxford Professor Dirk Obbink has clandestinely sold papyri from the Oxyrhynchus collection to Hobby Lobby, several questions arise. It will take a while to process this. But let’s make a start. Here is a brief excerpt from the longer announcement made earlier today the EES:
“With the help of photographs provided by the MOTB [Museum of the Bible], the EES has so far identified thirteen texts from its collection, twelve on papyrus and one on parchment, all with biblical or related content, which are currently held by the MOTB (see the attached list). These texts were taken without authorisation from the EES, and in most of the thirteen cases the catalogue card and photograph are also missing. Fortunately, the EES has back-up records which enable us to identify missing unpublished texts…The MOTB has informed the EES that 11 of these pieces came into its care after being sold to Hobby Lobby Stores by Professor Obbink.”
There is so much to unpack here. The sale of the manuscripts and the attempt to cover it up by removing records is almost unbelievable. But the first thing to note are the words “so far.” We don’t yet know the full extent of this. More items may well have been sold to Hobby Lobby.
The Egypt Exploration Society has just released a statement regarding manuscripts owned by the EES but sold to Hobby Lobby. So, 13 such manuscripts have been identified. 11 of these 13 manuscripts are said to have been sold by Professor Dirk Obbink. The Museum of the Bible has agreed to return the items. The list is here:
Read the full EES statement here. More to come. Thanks to Mike Holmes for the tip.
When it comes to the question of assigning palaeographic dates to Greek literary manuscripts of the Roman period, British papyrologists in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seem to show some different tendencies. One of the most respected of the early palaeographers, Arthur S. Hunt (1871-1934) tended to favor relatively wide date ranges and often allowed for somewhat later dates for particular manuscripts than did his contemporaries. The equally esteemed Harold Idris Bell (1879-1967) and Frederic Kenyon (1863-1952) tended to approve of narrower ranges and earlier dates (a related point is discussed with regard to a particular cluster of early Christian manuscripts in Roger Bagnall’s Early Christian Books in Egypt, pp. 10-16).
This usual difference between Hunt and Bell makes their evaluations of the writing of Codex Sinaiticus all the more interesting.
In a few days, I hope to complete a post on the date of Codex Sinaiticus. It has been educational for me to revisit the arguments for the dating of this codex. One quotation that I found especially eye-opening was this admirably forthright comment from H.J.M. Milne and T.C. Skeat’s classic, Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus (1938):
“…the dangers of judging age on grounds of style are nowhere better illustrated than in the Sinaiticus itself, where the hands of scribes A and B present a markedly more archaic appearance than that of scribe D; did we not know that all three were contemporary, D might well have been judged half a century later than A and B.”
Let that sink in for a minute. The quite subtle differences between the writing of copyists A and B and the writing of copyist D would, in other circumstances, have led Milne and Skeat to assign copyist D to a period a full 50 years later than A/B, even though they are in fact contemporary.
This example is a good reminder that minute differences in the appearances of samples of Greek writing of the Roman era are not necessarily indicative of differences in the ages of the writing samples. Other factors, such as the personal tastes or skills of the copyist, could very well account for such differences.
Samples of writing from Codex Sinaiticus: Copyist D, Matt. 16:22 (left) and Copyist A, Mark 8:32 (right); image source: codexsinaiticus.org
The latest issue of Journal for the Study of the New Testament contains a group of articles that emerged from an SBL session in 2016 arranged by Roberta Mazza on problems of dating ancient manuscripts. In addition to Roberta’s introductory essay, which discusses some of her work on the Rylands collection, there are articles by Malcolm Choat (“Dating Papyri: Familiarity, Instinct and Guesswork”) and by the Ancient Ink Laboratory at Columbia University and New York University (“Dating Ancient Egyptian Papyri through Raman Spectroscopy: Concept and Application to the Fragments of the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife and the Gospel of John”).
My own contribution is “Palaeographic Analysis of Codices from the Early Christian Period: A Point of Method.” Here is the abstract:
It is often said that palaeographic analysis of Greek literary manuscripts from the Roman era has progressed from an aesthetic judgment to more of a science, thanks largely to increased data (in the form of newly discovered papyri and parchments from Egypt) and to more sophisticated ways of describing similarity and difference in handwriting. This progress is frequently taken to mean that we may now use the analysis of handwriting to assign dates to undated manuscripts with much greater precision and accuracy than was possible a century ago. This article questions this conclusion by focusing on neglected methodological points that specifically relate to the problem of palaeographic dating of codices, namely the size and character of the corpus of securely datable samples to which the handwriting of undated codices is compared. This problem is especially relevant for early Christian books, the surviving examples of which tend to be copied in the codex format.
For those with institutional subscriptions, the articles can be found online here. Otherwise, for a copy of my article, contact me via e-mail.
Past posts on this blog have examined different aspects of Dirk Obbink’s involvement in the trade in ancient manuscripts–as buyer, seller, and consultant to Hobby Lobby. Another key part of the high-end antiquities market is the process of appraisal, assigning dollar values to cultural heritage items. The process is important both for transacting purchases and for making donations of such items, as Candida Moss and Joel Baden have reported. Professor Obbink’s name surfaces in this aspect of the market as well. The story begins back in 2015, when Roberta Mazza drew attention to the website of a firm connected to Scott Carroll called Ancient Asset Investments (AAI). The site contained several documents related to the appraisal of ancient manuscripts. These documents quickly disappeared, and their disappearance was accompanied by a curious note (Thanks to Dorothy King for having the foresight to take a screenshot and for sharing it with me [[Update 17 Aug. 2019: I see now that this notice was also recorded by Paul Barford here]]):
The documents that “incorrectly ascribed information to Dr. D. Obbink, which was incorrect” turn out to be of considerable interest in puzzling out the possible source of at least one of the manuscripts that Scott Carroll has been displaying in his lectures in the last couple years. In a recent remark on an earlier post on that topic, a commenter pointed out that these documents can in fact still be consulted online. This link points to an appraisal, dated June of 2013, for a fragment of papyrus containing Plato’s Phaedo:
In my last post on the various discrepancies in the origin story of the Sappho papyrus published in 2014, I mentioned an article by Dirk Obbink published in The Times Literary Supplement on 5 February 2014. In this article, Professor Obbink stated that–as a part of the process of authenticating the Sappho papyrus–a small piece of it was subjected to radiocarbon analysis. The results of this test were reported in the following form: “The owner of the papyrus wishes to remain anonymous, but has submitted the papyrus to autopsy and multi-spectral photography, as well as Carbon 14 testing of an uninscribed portion of the papyrus sheet itself by an American laboratory, that returned a date of around 201 AD, with a plus-minus range of a hundred years.” No further information was provided.
But working through all the details can be highly confusing because, as Mazza and others have noted, key elements of the story change with each retelling. A particular locus for the changing of the story is an interview Professor Obbink gave to Live Science in January of 2015. I want to revisit some elements of that interview with the close relationship between Scott Carroll and Dirk Obbink in mind.
Like many people, I have a number of lingering questions about the alleged sale of four fragmentary gospel papyri from the Oxyrhynchus collection. I’ve mentioned a few of them already in other posts. I’m going to go a little deeper with one of these questions: How did anybody think they could get away with this? I’ve already raised the issue of the photograph-and-card record system, which would presumably allow for the manuscripts to be connected back to the Oxyrhynchus collection. But there is more. These were the contents of the papyri allegedly sold by Dirk Obbink to Hobby Lobby:
As Michael Holmes noted in his e-mail accompanying this documentation, all of these manuscripts can be identified with pieces in the Oxyrhynchus collection, two of which were published in 2018. The Mark papyrus can be identified with P.Oxy. 83.5345, and the Luke papyrus can be identified with P.Oxy. 83.5346. Although this fragmentary papyrus containing a few words from the Gospel According to Luke has received less attention, it deserves a closer look. What is interesting is that P.Oxy. 83.5346 has a further obvious connection to the Oxyrhynchus collection. Here is the photographic plate published with the edition of P.Oxy. 83.5346:
Variant Readings 