For a previous diary of mine on the Museum of the Bible, see here.
Another story is emerging about the Green family, their museum, and the people with whom they do business. A good summary is available here from Candida Moss, who follows this issue closely and writes on it often.
A little over a year ago The Daily Beast published an article asking whether one of the oldest passages of the Gospels had actually been found in a garbage dump, or if a prominent scholar was passing off an artifact as having come from that legendary discovery. Now, the scholar involved in its “discovery” has been accused of secretly selling pieces of one of the world’s most famous collections of ancient manuscripts, which is housed at Oxford, to the evangelical Green family of Hobby Lobby.
It’s really worse than the headline states. He secretly sold an over-hyped artifact that he did not own.
Here is a little background from our arcane little world. The gospels in the new Testament were written during the last three decades of the first century, probably in the order Mark, Matthew, Luke John. The oldest substantial manuscript of the gospel of Mark is probably Papyrus 45 (also known as the Chester Beatty Papyrus) from the middle of the third century. This document likely contained all four of the gospels, but it is heavily damaged and only parts of six of Mark’s sixteen chapters are readable. The oldest gospel fragment is probably papyrus 52, from about a century earlier, containing parts of a few verses of John. Complete copies of the gospels are only available from the 4th/5th centuries, 300-400 years after they were written. The academic value of earlier fragment is that they can be compared to the later complete ones to arrive at conclusions about the stability of the text over those few early centuries.
Oxyrhynchus is a small city along the Nile about 100 miles south of Cairo. In the late nineteenth century a large collection of manuscripts was found there, in what is usuallydescribed as a garbage dump. Among them were many fragments of the Christian New Testament that are typically dated from the 3rd to the 6th centuries. Pieces of somewhere around 50 different manuscripts have been identified, so it is an important collection. The manuscript in question here P. Oxy. 5345 has been advertised by persons connected to the Museum of the Bible as possibly part of a first century copy of Mark. The dating seems very unlikely to begin with, but it has not been made available for wide scholarly review. The fragment had not been previously cataloged among the Oxyrhynchus collection, so its provenance (origin and chain of custody) is dubious. Now this story is emerging about how it has been trafficked.
Note: The image above is of the Temple Scroll found in Cave 11 of near Qumran and is part of the collection known as the “Dead Sea Scrolls.” It is the best image I could find of an ancient manuscript.