Oxford professor accused of selling ancient Bible fragments
Since 2012, scholars and University of Oxford officials have been trying to trace a rumour that the oldest Bible fragment ever discovered not only existed but had been mysteriously stolen and sold to an American arts and crafts giant.
Now, officials say they have finally cracked the case. The suspected thief at the centre of the controversy? Professor Dirk Obbink, one of the most celebrated classics professors in the world, a Nebraska native who had long directed – and allegedly looted – Oxford’s Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project, a collection of centuries-old literature recovered from an ancient Egyptian rubbish dump in 1896.
Officials from the Papyri Project have released the results of a three-month probe into Obbink. They have accused the acclaimed professor of taking and selling at least 11 ancient Bible fragments to the Green family, owners of the Hobby Lobby retail chain, who operate a Bible museum and charitable organisation in Washington, DC.
Obbink, who is still a professor at Oxford, hasn’t responded to the claims.
An Oxford spokesman confirmed that it was working with the Papyri Project and conducting its own investigation. The Green family and Hobby Lobby did not respond directly to requests for comment, but a museum spokeswoman said Hobby Lobby bought the artefacts ‘‘in good faith’’.
Early copies of the New Testament are very rare, and most substantial manuscript fragments come from no earlier than the 3rd century. Obbink studied these earliest iterations of the Bible and headed the Papyri Project from 1998 to 2016.
In February 2012, speculation spread that the oldest known biblical fragment had been discovered and examined by a small and tight-lipped group of scholars and artefact dealers.
Those who had seen it couldn’t say much about the so-called ‘‘First-Century Mark’’. They described the text as the first few verses from the gospel, which was allegedly written in the 100 years after the birth of Jesus.
They said they were bound by non-disclosure agreements to keep the owner’s identity secret. Only the Green Collection required scholars to sign such agreements at the time.
Steve Green, the president of Hobby Lobby, who amassed one of the largest private collections of biblical artefacts in the world in just 10 years, had hinted that the fragment might be part of his massive archive. ‘‘This is an item I want to pursue,’’ he told the authors of a 2017 book when they asked him what he knew about the First-Century Mark.
Scott Carroll, who served as director for the Green Collection, said he had first seen the fragment in late 2011, on a pool table in Obbink’s Oxford office. He refused to say who owned the verses or whether he had helped Green buy them.
Obbink allegedly swiped the Bible fragments, which include passages from Genesis, Psalms and an ancient copy of the Ten Commandments, in 2010, when Green was in the early years of building his private collection.
The museum will return the fragments to the Egypt Exploration Society, a non-profit organisation that manages the Papyri Project’s collection of ancient literature, which will store them once again on the Oxford campus.