The Guess That Became a Gospel

The field in brief

Papyrology sits where classics, ancient history, and biblical studies meet, and its raw material is fragile.[3] Its great origin story is a rubbish heap. Beginning in 1896, two Oxford scholars, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, dug the ancient town of Oxyrhynchus south of Cairo for the body now called the Egypt Exploration Society, and in its garbage mounds they found papyri by the basketful.[3] The haul, commonly reckoned in the hundreds of thousands of fragments, has been edited slowly ever since in a numbered series that has passed eighty volumes, and it holds lost work by Sappho and Aristotle alongside tax lists and letters, and a handful of early Christian texts.[3] Most of it still belongs to the society and lives in Oxford, and that ownership becomes the hinge of the scandal.[1]

Three ideas make the rest of the story legible. The first is cartonnage, a papier-mache-like casing for mummies and packing made from layers of scrap papyrus glued together, which means older texts can hide inside it. Because they can, collectors have dissolved cartonnage to pull the papyri out, a step that destroys the object and any record of where it came from.[7] The second is palaeography, the practice of dating a text by the style of its handwriting. It is the field’s core dating tool and its weakest joint, because hands are dated by comparison to other loosely dated hands, and honest estimates carry ranges of fifty to a hundred years or more.[6] Palaeography cannot reliably pin a literary hand to a single century, which is the fact the whole affair turns on.[6]

The third idea is provenance, the documented history of who owned an object and where it was found.[8] An international treaty, the 1970 UNESCO convention against trafficking in cultural property, gives the field its ethical clock, and papyrologists often use the United States ratification date of 24 April 1972 as the line past which undocumented material is treated as tainted.[4] Buying, selling, or even publishing such a piece is where the trouble lives.[8]

The fight

The spark was struck in public. In a debate with the sceptical scholar Bart Ehrman, the evangelical textual critic Daniel Wallace announced on 1 February 2012 that a first-century fragment of the Gospel of Mark had surfaced, which would make it the earliest New Testament manuscript known.[9] He said he was sworn to secrecy about the source. Then came six years of near silence, while behind the curtain the fragment was shown to researchers for the Green family, the evangelical owners of the craft chain Hobby Lobby, who were assembling a vast collection for a Museum of the Bible in Washington.[9]

The demand that collection created moved fast and sometimes recklessly. Hobby Lobby itself showed how far, agreeing in a 2017 federal settlement to forfeit more than five thousand smuggled Iraqi cuneiform tablets and clay seals and to pay a three-million-dollar fine, after shipping them with customs papers that labelled them tile samples.[5] Three years later an independent forensic team led by Colette Loll examined the museum’s prize holdings, sixteen fragments said to be pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and reported that all sixteen were modern forgeries, written on old leather and coated to fake age.[10]

The Mark fragment finally appeared in print in 2018, and it deflated on contact. It was published as Oxyrhynchus papyrus 5345, dated by its own editors to the late second or early third century, not the first, and it had belonged to the Egypt Exploration Society in Oxford the entire time, never for sale.[2] The first-century label, it emerged, traced to a provisional note on an old catalogue card marked with the two centuries as a rough guess, a loose mark turned into a sensation.[2]

The following year the society said publicly what had gone wrong. It concluded that its own general editor, the celebrated Oxford papyrologist Dirk Obbink, had removed texts from its collection without authorization and sold them onward.[1] The society identified thirteen pieces held by the Museum of the Bible as having left Oxford without its permission, eleven of them sold to Hobby Lobby, and the museum accepted the ownership claim and arranged their return.[1] The society had already declined in 2016 to reappoint Obbink as an editor, citing concern about his involvement in the antiquities trade.[1] Obbink was suspended by his college and, in 2020, arrested on suspicion of theft and fraud. He has consistently denied wrongdoing, and on the public record he was never criminally charged, though a civil court later entered a default judgment against him for roughly seven million dollars after he did not appear to contest Hobby Lobby’s suit.[11]

An earlier episode shows the same disease in a purer form. Two previously unknown poems by Sappho surfaced in 2014 from an unprovenanced source, and the account of where they came from kept changing, from a vague private collection to a story about papyrus dissolved out of cartonnage that had passed through a 2011 auction.[8] Critics who traced the shifting tale called it a smokescreen, and the dissolving had destroyed whatever evidence might have settled the question.[8] The scholars who pried these stories open were mostly two, the papyrologist Roberta Mazza and the historian Brent Nongbri, who documented the contradictions until the field could no longer look away.[7]

What the fight reveals

The clearest finding is that the errors all leaned the same way, toward the older and the more sensational, in the direction the money and the theology wanted.[6] A guess about handwriting became a first-century Gospel because a well-funded buyer wanted the earliest possible text and a debate wanted a bombshell. The evidence favors the critics on the decisive points, that palaeography cannot deliver single-century precision, and that undocumented material is a standing hazard because it can be stolen, as the society’s papyri were, or forged outright, as every one of those scroll fragments was.[2]

The damage was not only reputational, it was methodological. When a peer-reviewed journal prints a text with a fabricated or dissolved history, the discipline’s own stamp of approval helps launder the object and can raise its market value, which gives looters a reason to keep digging.[8] That argument is why the field tightened its rules. The American Society of Papyrologists had already barred its members from dealing in papyri taken after 1972, and after the scandals it and its international counterpart issued a stronger joint resolution in 2021, shifting the default from publish the text and let it speak toward no clean provenance, no publication.[4]

One question stays honestly open, and good scholars split on it. If a genuinely important text surfaces with no clean history, should anyone study it at all? One camp answers no, because publishing rewards the looters, while another warns that a blanket refusal simply drives such texts into private vaults where they are read by no one and monitored by no one.[8] The field has hardened toward refusal without fully resolving the dilemma, and the sharpest fact of the whole affair remains unsettled in a different way, since the criminal question at its center was never tested in court.[1]