A new chapter in mystery over sale of ancient Bible fragments
THE mystery over the “unauthorised” sale of ancient Bible fragments by an Oxford academic deepened last night amid claims matching texts have been sold to other private collectors.
Dr Dirk Obbink, 62, an associate professor at Oxford University’s classics faculty, has been accused of selling without permission fragments belonging to the vast Oxyrhynchus collection.
Dr Obbink has denied any wrongdoing, but is now under investigation by the university, which continues to employ him while inquiries are ongoing. The Egypt Exploration Society (EES), which owns the collection, issued a statement this week that alleged that Dr Obbink had sold the fragments to the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC through an associated American company.
The EES added that the charity “is also pursuing identification and recovery of other texts, or parts of texts, which have, or may have, been illicitly removed from its collection”.
It has now emerged that fragments of papyrus matched by experts to portions of text sold to the Museum of the Bible in 2010 have turned up in the hands of a collector in California. The fragments, containing ancient texts of Corinthians 1 and Romans, were sold in 2015 to the collector through an American dealer, the co-owner with Dr Obbink of an Oxford-based firm – dissolved in April – that bought and sold antiquities.
An academic at the Institute for New Testament Textual Research, based at the University of Munster in Germany, said of the two pieces sold to the Californian collector: “It seems highly probable his pieces were also once part of the EES collection, and were sold without their permission.”
The Californian collector said he bought the pieces from Dr Obbink’s one-time business partner in good faith. He had been told they had been purchased at auction in 2014, verified by the auction house Christie’s.
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri were discovered by two Victorian archaeologists digging at an ancient rubbish dump in the Egyptian city that gives the collection its name. Hundreds of thousands of fragments are housed in a room in the Sackler Library within the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
The EES has declined to comment further. Its chairman, Margaret Mountford, who appeared on The Apprentice television show as a sidekick to Lord Sugar, said yesterday: “The EES has nothing to add to the statement released on Monday.”
An Oxford university spokesman said it was unlikely that Dr Obbink would be making a statement while the university carried out its own inquiries into the claims made by EES and the Washington-based bible museum.
Dr Obbink was believed to be working as usual yesterday. He has declined to speak to The Daily Telegraph but has previously denied any wrongdoing, insisting the claims are “not true”.