Thirty words of Coptic on a scrap of papyrus, discussed in the preceding blog post, caused scandal enough for any field of scholarship. But now there’s more affecting the study of ancient texts – more , and maybe worse.
The scam about the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife,” exposed primarily institutional weaknesses – a prestigious journal, a venerable professorship, and university governance were all swept off their well-heeled feet by a snippet that any alert classicist would find suspicious from the outset. A careful check of its provenance and a radiocarbon dating of the papyrus itself confirmed such suspicions. The question then becomes why did institutional structures fail to rein in the scam before it wasted such energy and caused such damage.
But there’s a parallel, or rather intersecting story about a no less serious crime against scholarship. In this case the most interesting questions are at the individual, rather than the institutional level..
This time the story centers on Dirk Obink,, the MacArthur award winning papyrologist suspected of having stolen and sold some Oxyrhynchus papyri to some of the same over-zealous buyers involved in the “Gospel of Jesus” scam. Again, the story is well-told by Ariel Sabar in the June 2020 issue of The Atlantic. (The electronic version has the title “A Biblical Mystery at Oxford,” – but it’s not just about biblical papyri. Nefragments of Sappho” are involved as well.)
New developments in the story have now been reported in the New York Times article, “He Taught Ancient Texts at Oxford. Now He Is Accused of Stealing Some”..
If Obink is found guilty, the most puzzling and enduring question in the case, to my way of thinking, will be how such an intelligent and devoted scholar could fail to recognize that while he could destroy some evidence of the theft, another list of these papyri existed – of course it did! How could he fail to know that? This record was very likely to be checked when the stolen papyri surfaced.
But there’s more to it than that. The most serious crime against scholarship in this case is not the theft itself, but the misdating - for a while at least - in an apparent effort to increase the market value of a text. Again, such misdating would eventually be discovered once the papyrus was properly published. In the meantime, the reputation of the great scholar would mislead anyone interested in its implications.
When such things happen, the whole foundation of scholarship in the field is shaken. So the questions multiply:
What could have caused such blindness?
Who can now be trusted?
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