Longform Guardian Article on the Mark Fragment Saga

This morning, the Guardian published a long story titled “A scandal in Oxford: the curious case of the stolen gospel.” Its about Dirk Obbink and the stolen Oxyrhynchus fragments. It’s quite good and worth reading in full. Here I highlight things that stood out as new or noteworthy.

Obbink has been suspended from Oxford.

Since October, he [Obbink] has been suspended from duties following the biggest scandal that has ever hit, and is ever likely to hit, the University of Oxford’s classics department.

We get some sense of how much these items might have been selling for.

The Greens, advised by Carroll, were buying biblical artefacts, such as Torahs and early papyrus manuscripts of the New Testament, at a dizzying pace: $70m was spent on 55,000 objects between 2009 and 2012, Carroll claimed later. The market in a hitherto arcane area of collecting sky-rocketed. “Fortunes were made. At least two vendors who had been making €1-2m a year were suddenly making €100-200m a year,” said one longtime collector. 

The prices of the items [on the MOTB sale contracts] were redacted, but an expert told me he thought they could have been sold for $200,000 each. 

No price is mentioned [in the Christie’s brochure for the Sappho papyrus], but a collector familiar with the field estimates a likely figure of around $800,000.

$200k seems low for a “first-century” NT fragment, but I’m hardly knowledgeable in this area. In any case, it appears that Obbink was not only making enough money to buy his “castle” in Waco, but also to upgrade his home in Oxford.

In 2014, around the time his antiquities dealership Castle Folio was incorporated, he bought himself a castle. Or, rather, the Texan equivalent – an 1890s neo-Gothic pile in Waco, called Cottonland Castle. He already had a six-bedroom house in Oxford’s suburbs, in the garden of which he had dug a large, L-shape swimming pool – an upgrade from the canal boat he had once shared with a colleague.

The MOTB still has a lot of dodgy papryi and they are trying to repatriate (some of?) them.

At present, just over 20 papyri are displayed on the museum’s website, out of 5,000. I asked Holmes whether one can therefore conclude that the Greens own around 4,980 papyri that lack reliable provenance. “In general, yes,” said Holmes. The organisation is now negotiating, he told me, with national governments to return ownership of unprovenanced items to their countries of origin.

Why were so many duped along the way? I think the author nails it with this:

These rumours [about Obbink selling papyri] seemed outlandish – who would you be more likely to trust: the eminent Oxford papyrologist Dirk Obbink, or Scott Carroll, with his mummy masks on the stove?

The irony is that, in this case, the man whose “lecture style is more 19th-century showman than sober scholar” turns out to be more reliable than the “lugubrious, crumpled, owlish” Oxford don!

For its part, the EES seems to have been on to Obbink by 2016.

Obbink always denied that he had been trying to sell Oxyrhynchus items, as a later EES statement made clear. Nevertheless, an official of the society was sufficiently suspicious that he might have been at least trying to sell the Mark fragment that he decided to try to smoke him out – by instructing him, in spring 2016, to publish the manuscript in the next volume, number 83, of the Oxyrhynchus Papyrus Series. That would get the fragment out in the public sphere. It would also mean it would have to be physically returned to the Sackler classics library so that the editing could be checked by colleagues. In short, if Obbink were indeed trying to sell it, this move would stop him. Or so the EES official thought.

This answers a question I have had since Elijah’s original post: why in the world would Obbink publish “First-Century Mark” in the Oxyrhynchus series if he had stolen it from there? Given the fanfare about FCM, it made no sense. Surely that would expose him. This looks like my answer. If the EES forced him to publish it, he may have been stuck with no other way out. He certainly couldn’t hand it over to MOTB at that point.

If this is indeed the case, then the EES’s backup information may well be what saved the day for them.

However, the alleged thief seems to have erred in one crucial respect: they do not seem to have known, or taken into account, that there was back-up information allowing the EES to ascertain what had allegedly been stolen. (The EES has remained silent on the nature of this backup, but prior to digitisation, libraries would photograph card-index catalogues and transfer the images to microfiche.)

One thing we don’t learn and that I’d still like to know is did MOTB actually hand money over to Obbink for the papyri? I assume they did. If so, is that now gone or did he give it back at some point when it became clear they weren’t getting their papyri?

One other minor question of detail: Scott Carroll is said in this article to have been the director of the MOTB in 2011. Is this accurate? I didn’t think he was ever the director.

Nongbri has also blogged his thoughts, especially on the key new Sappho details in the article.

HT: PJW