In June, Daily Beast reporter Candida Moss published an explosive article “Did Oxford Scholar Secretly Sell Bible Fragment to Hobby Lobby Family?” alleging that distinguished scholar Dirk Obbink appeared to have sold to the owners of Hobby Lobby an ancient papyrus fragment that he did not own — the fragment actually belonged to the Egyptian Exploration Society (EES), a nonprofit that owns the famous Oxyrhynchus papyri collection currently housed at the University of Oxford’s Sackler Library.
Professor Obbink is not just any scholar: he is a MacArthur (“genius grant”) Fellow and is in the Faculty of Classics at Oxford University. Moreover, the fragment in question is not just any papyrus. It is Oxyrhynchus P137 (P.Oxy. LXXXIII 5345), the earliest known manuscript fragment of any part of the Gospel of Mark, the earliest Christian gospel. P137 is one of the thousands of papyri the first of which were discovered by British archaeologists Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt in a trash heap in the ruins of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus, Egypt. So many papyri have been found that they are still being analyzed and published over a century later. Recently, the EES published volume 83 in its series of books on the papyri, and this volume analyzes P137 in some detail.
And it seems that this is exactly the sort of papyrus fragment that interested the Green family, owners of the Hobby Lobby and worth an estimated $7.5 billion. In this week’s Daily Beast story “Hobby Lobby Scandal Widens as Museum of the Bible Admits Oxford Prof Sold Illicit Papyri to Green Family”, updated yesterday, Moss writes that an investigation published Monday by the EES found that a dozen papyrus fragments and one parchment fragment, all related to the Bible, “were taken without authorization from the EES” and eventually came into the care of the Museum of the Bible — a Washington DC museum that opened in 2017 and that is heavily supported by the Green family — “after being sold to Hobby Lobby Stores by Professor Obbink, most of them in two batches in 2010”. According to the EES, papyrus P137 was apparently sold by Obbink to Hobby Lobby without actually being removed from the EES collection — a neat trick indeed.
The Museum of the Bible is cooperating in returning the stolen items. However, the scale of the problem is still unknown, and other items may have been stolen, as the EES’s records were tampered with during the theft. (Enough tampering like that and eventually one might conceivably change the wording of the Bible itself — just sayin’.)
The stolen papyri are another embarrassment for the Hobby Lobby and the Museum of the Bible, along with thousands of clay tablets likely stolen from Iraq, and forged Dead Sea scrolls that were put on exhibit.
It is not known whether Scotland Yard has become involved in the investigation.