Police have arrested a professor at Christ Church Oxford for allegedly stealing and selling some 120 ancient pieces of papyrus, including a piece of the Gospel of Mark.
According to Christianity Today, Dirk Obbink, professor of papyrology and Greek literature at Christ Church Oxford, is suspected of stealing the papyrus fragments from the Egypt Exploration Society’s collection at Oxford’s Sackler Library.
The collection houses some 500,000 artifacts from the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus.
Obbink has denied that he stole the ancient documents, claiming that the evidence was “fabricated in a malicious attempt to harm my reputation and career.”
Obbink first came to Oxford in the late 1990s and served as director of a project to digitize ancient pieces of papyrus. Obbink was one of three editors overseeing the publishing of the collection. In 2001, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for his work in rescuing and interpreting the papers.
In 2011, Obbink claimed that he found a fragment of Mark’s Gospel among the collection. He said the manuscript dated to the late first century and referred to Jesus’ baptism where John the Baptist says, “I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
Obbink says the book may have been copied within 30 years of the original bible manuscript, making it a rare discovery.
Scholars and experts have since…
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