Thanks to DeluxeMoustache for alerting me to the publication of this sensational new article in
The Atlantic by Ariel Sabar:
An Oxford Professor, a Hobby Lobby Collector, and a Missing Gospel of Mark
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Ariel Sabar
[Dirk] Obbink had once kept hundreds of Oxford’s uncataloged mummy masks in his rooms, as a favor to the university, which was short on storage. But a longtime colleague told me he’d never seen Obbink perform a dismounting. “This sort of thing never took place in his university teaching”...
It was one of some 20 masks Obbink sold the Greens. A source who has seen the figures told me that on top of the $4 million to $8 million he charged for papyri, the family paid him $1 million to $2 million for a host of other antiquities. Among them was a medieval Latin manuscript titled “On Stolen Things.”
In early 2014, headlines appeared across the world: Obbink had discovered a pair of breathtaking new Sappho poems—on a piece of papyrus salvaged from a mummy mask. “For a couple of months, it was just me and a girl named Sappho—nothing between me and the text,” Obbink said on BBC Radio. “It was like being shipwrecked on a desert island with Marilyn Monroe.”
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It is an incredible story, and one that I have been following for several years now. Ariel Sabar is the same reporter who broke the so-called "Gospel of Jesus's Wife" forgery back in 2016. In addition to being a top-notch reporter, he is also a good guy that I have had the pleasure to share beers with on a couple occasions.
The timing of this story is serendipitous: it coincides with the conclusion of my own provenance research on the Dead Sea Scrolls-like fragments and forgeries in private collections, which I expect to deliver to the Museum of the Bible in the next few weeks, and then will begin pitching to publishers.