One time curator Jiri Frel, who helped build the J. Paul Getty Museum's collection, was pressured to resign in 1984 when people looked closely into his eyebrow-raising acquisition practices.
While Frel's transgressions were many, one of the most damning was a tax manipulation scheme through which antiquities dealers sold ancient art to wealthy collectors who in turn agreed to donate the objects to the J. Paul Getty Museum. Through Frel and associate arranged appraisals which greatly inflated the value of the antiquity, donors were compensated for their philanthropy with hefty tax write-offs.
Fast forward thirty years later to 2015 and listen in at 25:01 minutes into this Scott Carroll video viewable on Vimeo.
Foster explains that donors can purchase "beautiful treasures," like the one being touched by the bare-handed audience in California and when the assessment of its worth comes in, the object's appraisal would be for a much higher value. He elaborates further explaining that with this appraisal the individual would qualify for a tax write-off for their donation which usually will end up being "at least three times as much" as their original investment. A second voice, off screen arbitrarily, without any object under consideration echoes the same statement saying "we can guarantee at least three times as much"(for the appraisal).
Dirk Obbink in his home in Oxford at Christ Church
Image Credit: Facebook Photo Screenshot from the profile of Timothy Smith, Former Chief Development Officer at Museum of the Bible
The seller was Dirk Obbink, an American papyrologist, who was appointed to the University Lectureship in Papyrology at Oxford in 1994, taking over the post vacated by Peter Parsons when the latter took up the Regius Chair of Greek. Obbink's appointment at Oxford combined a variety of responsibilities, including a Tutorship at Christ Church, where he lectures on a wide range of classical material as well as the direction of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project and its related Imaging Papyri Project. Obbink's involvement as the seller of these ancient texts appears to be a side pursuit with which he has been involved for a considerable period of time.
Excavations at Oxyrhynchus 1, ca. 1903.
Image Credit:EES
Religious Rubbish to Sacred Scriptures
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, most of which are now the property of the Egypt Exploration Society, is a substantial collection of thousands of papyri fragments discovered during six excavation seasons carried out by British Classicists Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt from 1896 until 1907. The literary material was uncovered outside the ruins of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus, near the modern-day city of El-Bahnasa (in the Al-Minya governorate), on the left bank of the Bahr Yussef in Egypt. There, at the turn of the century, more than 100,000 fragments were unearthed from the city's rubbish mounds, saved by the ravages of time, with the help of Egypt's arid climate and the layers of dry sand which created the ideal conditions for preserving organic matter.
For biblical scholars, the New Testament papyri found in the garbage heaps of Oxyrhynchus constitute the oldest, most numerous, and most geographically concentrated group of first to third century Christian texts found in any singular area. Given the vast size of the Oxyrhynchus cache, textual critics and scholars are still deciphering, reconstructing and publishing the transcriptions of the papyrological and parchment fragments discovered by Grenfell and Hunt's team more than a century after their original discovery.
In that agreement, the US-based craft company is listed as the purchaser of six items including the four New Testament papyri whose dates are listed as "circa 0100 AD". Oxford scholar Dirk Obbink is listed as the objects' private seller. The heavily redacted invoice, released publically last June, itemized the objects to be included in the sale and sequences the invoice as number "17". This leaves one to speculate as to who Obbink's sixteen previous invoices were issued, and if they too might involve ancient artifacts that were not in the scholar's purview to sell.
At the time this purchase agreement was drawn up, Obbink's role as the director of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project, gave him hands on access to any number of ancient texts for scholarly interpretation. Yet his sale's agreement to Hobby Lobby makes no mention of the four fragments true owners, the EES, or any other provenance collection history for that matter. Nor does their agreement state when or under what condition these slips of papyri left the territory of Egypt or in what capacity Obbink was acting as the UK-based seller.
Instead, Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., seemed more focused on obtaining the fragments' in time for an upcoming exhibition at the Vatican in Rome and for control of any future academic publication. Under their mutually negotiated sales agreement, Hobby Lobby agreed to Obbink's stipulations for exclusivity regarding the research and publishing of the circa 100-300 CE fragments. They also granted him permission to retain the fragments for a period of four years so that he could conduct scholarly research.
Yet the path to this sale is filled with contradictions and some statements made by several overlapping actors who were aware of the sale rebut the facts and one another.
In a video interview at the National Apologetics Conference, held on October 16-17, 2015, almost three years after the alleged sale, the Green Collection's controversial former buyer, Scott Carroll commented on seeing the Mark fragment on a pool table along with a number of pieces of mummy cartonnage, in what is believed to have been, but was not explicitly stated to be, Obbink's office in Oxford at Christ Church.
Here is a brief excerpt from that interview between Carroll and the Evangelical Protestant Christian apologist Josh McDowell. The full seven minute video is also included below.
Carroll: "Now, this Mark may have been in that kind of a context. I’m not sure um I saw it in, ah, at Oxford University, at uh, at uh, Christ Church College and with, it was in the possession of an outstanding, well-known, and eminent classicist. I saw it again in 2013. There were some delays with its, with its, ah purchasing, and I was working at that time, ah, with the Green family collection which I had the privilege of organizing and putting together for the Hobby Lobby family, and had hoped that they would, at that time, acquire it. But they delayed and didn’t. Um, we were preparing an exhibit for the Vatican Library, and um, I wanted this to be a show piece in that exhibit, but, it…."
McDowell: "Who wouldn’t?"
Carroll: "I know, wouldn’t that have been awesome? But it was just not the timing and so it was passed on, delayed. It has since been acquired. I can’t say by whom. It is in the process of being prepared for publication and what’s important to say is…."
McDowell: "What does that mean, “process of being prepared”? What does that mean?"
Carroll: "It’s a lengthy process, actually going through, especially with this because it’s going to get, it’s going to go out there, and there are going to be people immediately trying to tear it down, ah questioning its provenance, so where it came from, what it dates to, especially with the date. And so they want an ironclad argument on the dating of the document so that, ummm, it won’t be, I mean they have a responsibility to that. But this is going to be very critical (***inaudible***). It will be a major flash-point in the news when this happens."
McDowell: "Who’s the main person in the publishing of it?"
Carroll: "Well, umm, the most important person of note is Dirk Obbink, who is… see this is a lot more information than you heard last time."
McDowell: "Yeah it is." Carroll: "Dirk Obbink is an outstanding scholar. He’s one of the world’s leading specialists on papyri. He directs the collection, for students who are in here, you may remember hearing the word “Oxyrhynchus Papyri.” He is the director of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Um, I can’t speak to his, like his own personal faith positions and I don’t think he would define himself as an Evangelical in any sense of the word, but he is um, not, he doesn’t have a derogatory attitude at all. He’s a supportive person. But he, he, specializes in the dating of handwriting. And as he was looking at the, both times I saw the papyrus, it was in his possession. So, it was in Oxford at Christ Church, and actually on his pool table in his office, along with a number of mummy heads. So, he had these mummy heads..."
McDowell: "So, you’re playing pool [laughter, inaudible]."
Carroll: "And you’ve got that document there. And that’s the setting. That’s kind of surreal. And Dirk, Dirk was wrestling with dating, somewhere between 70 AD and 120, 110/120..."
On December 1, 2011 Carroll took to social media and wrote on Facebook "For over 100 years the earliest-known text of the NT has been the so-called John Rylands papyrus. That is about to change with a sensational discover[y] I made yesterday. Stay tuned for the update." The same day he tweeted the same in shorter form on the social media site Twitter. "For over 100 years the earliest known text of the New Testament has been the so-call John Rylands Papyrus. Not any more."
In this instance Carroll was referring to the Rylands Library Papyrus P52, also known as the St John's fragment, (accession reference P. Rylands 457), a papyrus fragment which Carroll believed was superseded, in terms of earliest known NT scripture by the yet to be published fragment shown to him in Oxford by Obbink.
According to Pattengale, Obbink then opened a manila filing envelope containing the four papyrus pieces of New Testament Gospels of Matthew 3.7-10, 11-12; Mark 1.8-9, 16-18; Luke 13.25-7, 28, and John 8.26-8, 33-5, which the scholar was purportedly shopping to the pair of MOTB affiliates on behalf of a confidential seller. In Pattengale's version he tries to paint an innocent portrait of himself as having been duped by the Oxford professor. He even goes so far as to admit that he was the individual who photographed Obbink’s handwritten list of the four manuscripts for sale, reporting that he carried the slip of paper, folded up in his own wallet, for years.
In reality, it was the file metadata of the photo of the handwritten inventory which tied the photo to Pattengale, and which showed that the image was taken near Indiana Wesleyan University, where Pattengale works. Despite throwing Obbink under the bus, Pattengale gives the reader no information on whether or not he or Carroll pressed the Oxford scholar for any documentation on the objects' legitimacy for sale before he and Carroll brought the offer forward to the Greens and Hobby Lobby.
Buyer's Remorse?
The evangelical Green family's private collection of biblical artifacts is known to have been gathered and purchased, in staggering quantities, over a ten year period, many brokered through purchases arranged by Scott Carroll, in anticipation of the opening of the family-sponsored $800 million, eight-story, Museum of the Bible. Brimming with objects gifted to the Washington DC museum by their deep-pocketed benefactors, this family-sponsored museum opened its doors, just two blocks south of the National Mall, in November 2017.
As aggressive buyers who at times have been portrayed as being unfamiliar with, or obtuse to ethical collecting practices, the Greens and the Museum of the Bible have not commented publicly on their own involvement leading up to the sale of the EES fragments. It is not known (publically) if the Greens or anyone connected to the sales and ownership transactions queried Obbink at any point to produce documentation demonstrating how the scholar came to acquire the manuscripts, or when, and under what circumstances, the artifacts had left the source country.
What is known is that after agreeing to the Obbink's conditions and proceeding with the invoiced transaction. The museum waited from 2013 until June 2019 to get cold feet and only transmitted the sale's details to worried scholars, confirming that something was afoot with this purchase, a full year after the Egyptian Exploration Society had identified the Mark fragment as their own.
This lack of transparency is not the Museum's first, or only time that their collection's acquisition and disclosure details leave a lot of unanswered questions and have proven problematic for the Greens' reputation. In their drive to acquire, the family has not only purchased stolen artifacts, tied to multiple transactions, but they have also been snookered into buying forgeries which later proved to be too good to be true.
With the transmission of this controversial purchase agreement and other documents sent to Dr. Brent Nongbri's and published in his June 2019 blog post,Obbink's statements regarding what happened during the his MOTB meetings can now, once and for all, be concluded as false. This plus the continued scholarly outcry from Roberta Mazza, Josephine Dru, Candida Moss, Brent Nongbri, Ariel Sabar, David Bradnick, and a host of other concerned scholars, perhaps served to impetus to the EES to initiate a thorough, internal investigation into what else, in addition to these fragments, might be missing from within their collection while under Obbink's supervision.
Screenshot: Facebook, taken 16 October 2019.
That inquiry, facilitated by information and photographs provided by the Museum of the Bible staff, has served to confirm that the MOTB purchased 13 EES fragments stolen from their collection. Likewise, their investigation has revealed that key file records, including some catalogue cards and photographs relating to the missing fragments (twelve on papyrus and one on parchment) were also methodically removed, likely to cover the tracks of the thief or thieves involved.
Yet whomever removed the artifacts from the Egypt Exploration Society and tampered with the find records, in furtherance of the theft and subsequent sales, was evidently unaware that the EES still had a small ace up their sleeve. Archival records stored in another area of the society enabled EES staff to identify several missing texts. With this iron-clad evidence, the Society then worked with the MOTB to developed a mutually beneficial agreement which would allow research on the stolen fragments by scholars under the auspices of the MOTB, who would publish their findings in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri series, in exchange for the museum's Board of Trustees acceptance of the Society's claim to ownership and the museum's voluntary forfeiture of the contested pieces.
Hashing out this agreement may explain the nearly one year delay between the time EES issued a statement that the fragment of Mark P.Oxy. LXXXIII 5345 was theirs and the time in which Michael Holmes, Director of the Museum of the Bible's Scholars Initiative, released information on the sale's process to worried scholars.
In June 2019, perhaps in tandem with the release of the purchase agreement documents, the EES formally banned Obbink from any access to its collection, at least for the moment, pending his satisfactory clarification of his 2013 contract for another fragment. For the moment, no formal charges against Obbink have been made public and Oxford University seems to be carrying out their own internal inquiry. The EES has also stated that it is "also pursuing identification and recovery of other texts, or parts of texts, which have or may have been illicitly removed from its collection."
Stimer has long been connected with Scott Carroll, as well as with his exhibitions in eastern Europe and Russia. He is also believed to be the same individual who may have sold fake Dead Sea Scrolls fragments to the Museum of the Bible.
Knowing that this could be the tip of what could be a much larger iceberg, the EES will continue carrying out its systematic review of their entire collection, in order to determine what else might be missing and might have been sold. Further details into their internal investigation and whether or not law enforcement authorities in the UK or US will become, or are, involved have not been publicly confirmed as of the writing of this blog post.
Archived Facebook Screenshot
The Castle Folio Page
Image Credit: ARCA
Earlier on this blog we reported on an entry published on the Obbink/Elder's Castle Folio Facebook page. That post made reference to the alleged first-century Gospel of Mark fragment, now known correctly as P.Oxy LXXXIII 5345, in which the writer of the entry stated that an important text had been recovered thanks to the dismantling of a mummy's cartonnage mask.
In that Facebook entry, the excited company promoter stated:
"A print of the ancient Gospel of Mark has been discovered inside of an ancient Egyptian mummy mask that had been fashioned with recycled papyri. Researchers have dated this fragment to be from before the year 90 A.D., making this fragment the oldest known copy of the Gospel of Mark!"
Clicking on the Facebook link embedded with this social media post, one arrives to a dead page link on the Obbink/Elder Castle Folio website. An archived image of that missing page, written by an unknown author with access to the hosted company website wrote on January 28, 2015 that a piece of the ancient Gospel of Mark had been discovered inside of an ancient Egyptian mummy mask that had been fashioned out of recycled papyri. The writer of the article then used the significance of the purported find as a defense for the controversial text fragment recovery method, as the process of extracting papyri ultimately destroys the mummy masks. More on that extraction method and its total disregard for the sanctity of surviving antiquities later.
The same image found on the Castel Folio Facebook page was likewise published, with the same Castle Folio website link on the same day on the company's Twitter feed.
Just six days later, on February 7, 2012, during a Atlanta lecture series ex Green Collection buyer Scott Carroll also talked up the purported earliest fragment with no mention of mummy cartonnage, admitting he was at the Chapel Hill event and saying the fragment first came to his attention in January 2012. As first noted by Brent Nongbri in June earlier this yearCarroll Stated:
“I was with Dan, ah, five days ago, ah, prior to an important debate he had, ah, in North Carolina with a scholar by the name of Bart Ehrman on the reliability of the New Testament and New Testament manuscript evidence.
In our collection, we have a wonderful collection of unpublished papyri. We have a number of New Testament papyri. And the New Testament papyri consist of the earliest text of the Gospel of Matthew, the second earliest text of the Gospel of John, the earliest text of Romans, the earliest text of Paul’s writings altogether, and also the earliest text of 1 Corinthians. And, ah, some others within our research scope, including the earliest text of the Gospel of Mark and the earliest text of the Gospel of Luke.
The earliest text of the Gospel of Mark, ah, came to my attention a month ago with a colleague, scholar, friend of ours Dirk Obbink from Oxford, and it is certainly, absolutely–dated by a person that has no agenda whatsoever–the earliest New Testament document in the world, and it is a first-century text of the Gospel of Matt–of Mark. That’s remarkable to know. And so there are many things like that that are coming up in our research and discovery, and it’s an absolute thrill to be a part of it.”
The first provenance story and photo referring to the Mummy mask origin mentioned by Castel Folio in 2015 occurred during the 2014 Apologetics Canada Conference in Vancouver, BC Canada. Speaking at the event was Craig Evans, professor of New Testament at the Divinity School of Acadia University. Evans was the first individual (that I have found) who publicly stated that the "discovery" of the probable first-century copy of the Gospel of Mark was attributed to a papyrus fragment taken from the Egyptian cartonnage mummy mask.
On January 18, 2015 Owen Jarus, for Live Science also interviewed Evans who again reiterated his earlier statement that the purported 1st century Mark fragment was from a sheet of papyrus reused to create a mummy mask. Unapologetically, he went on to say "we’re not talking about the destruction of any museum-quality piece."
Evans added that he was only allowed to discuss the fragment in general details because a member of the team had leaked some general information in 2012 and he was only repeating what others had already stated, given that he too, apparently, was subject to a Non Disclosure Agreement. This statement is interesting because nothing "leaked" in 2012 made mention publically of a mummy cartonnage provenance connection.
Image Credit: Craig Evans, Acadia Divinity College
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/mummy-mask-found-contain-oldest-known-gospel-first-century-ad-1484086
This was quickly followed up by the January 28, 2015, Castle Folio social media posts mentioned at the start of this article, which showed the same masks on a different background. All of which served to fan the flames of the urban legend that was now spreading through the evangelical and textual criticism communities as the purported collection source for this rare biblical fragment, turning attention away from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri at the EES to which Obbink was then affiliated.
Scholars pressed for more information...
Who owned the papyrus, or the mask from which it was taken?
How extensive is the fragment?
Could they see it?
Why did Wallace, Carroll and Evans believe that the fragment was from the first century?
Who were the scholars who had examined it
What method was used to date it?
As everyone was occupied with either the excitement of the purported find or with the controversial revelation that the fragment had been ripped from an ancient mummy mask, few reached deeper to question if the confessed provenance was truth or if it might be fabrication. Instead most scholars focused on whether or not this yet unseen fragment, was in fact the oldest known fragment of the Gospel of Mark and debated the voracity of this claim in light of so little proof, while everyone held their breath and waited for the fragment to be published so they could understand more.
But in May 2018 the jinn was out of the bottle
The Egypt Exploration Society (EES) reported that a fragment published in their most recent edition of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (vol. 83), was, in fact, the aforementioned and much discussed NT Mark 1. Identifying the fragment as P.Oxy. 83.5345; P137, the EES stated that this small butterfly shaped papyrus was not, as was long flaunted to be the case, from the first century. Instead, it had been assigned to the late second/early third centuries by none other than Dirk Obbink. Likewise the EES also made it clear that the fragment did not come from a mummy cartonnage, instead it was part of their Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection and had never been for sale. They even open-sourced the pages in the new publication discussing P.Oxy. 83.5345 so that interested scholars could review their conclusions.
If Obbink "sold" the fragment to Hobby Lobby, as evidence in the case seems to indicate, was it Scott Carroll who Wallace perceived to be the owner when asked to talk up the fragment? And who came up with the idea of saying that the fragment was discovered inside a cartonnage mummy mask instead of from within the EES archive?
Laundering mummy masks to launder stolen property
This leads me back to 2011 when Balor Magazine wrote about a "new" method for recovering ancient texts. The article mentioned an extraction exercise conducted by Scott Carroll, then a research professor of manuscript studies and the biblical tradition at Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion, as well as the director of the Green Collection. The event was witnessed and participated in by students and faculty from the Department of Classics and the Honors College at Baylor, as well as other guests. Video recorded, Carroll is seen gently laundering of a third-century BCE Egyptian mummy mask in soapy water as if it were someone's lingerie. After being doused, the ancient object was then broken apart gently to extract strips of papyri, some of which reportedly dated back to the fifth century.
Joslin "Josh" McDowell, an Evangelical Protestant Christian apologist also gave a video talk with slides documenting more images of papyri extraction through the dismounting of mummy masks.
"You shall know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free" (John 8:32).
In the end, soaking these ancient mummy masks and then claiming to have extracted X-Y-Z papyrus fragment from the siggy masks during the process has created a reasonable loophole for dealing with distasteful dodgy provenance. As this method provides the actors involved with a reasonable defense for how they came by ancient texts which in reality are not legitimate to sell. All that has to be done, is to say that the ancient papyrus came from a deconstructed object, provide valid proof of the legitimate purchase of that cartonnage and then destroy it, as American and in some other countries, the legal owner of an ancient object can dispose of it as he/she sees fit.
By claiming that the Gospel of Mark fragment was found inside mummy cartonnage which has ultimately been destroyed during their extraction process, the actors involved in its illegal sale tried to side step the next obvious question...where the fragments came from.
That is until the invoices of the transaction come to light and the incriminating pages of the Castle Folio manuscript were not so successfully "scrubbed".
In 2015, I created a list of known persons who had identified themselves as Museum of the Bible employees using available open source data out of growing concern for their collection practices. At that time, only a limited number of the individuals had any formal museum or curatorial background, and the few that did were frequently at the nascent stage of their professional careers. None of those I documented listed anything in their backgrounds that would have attested to having had experience in ethical collection management.
Additionally, only one employee was listed as a conservator/restorer. Given the size of the future museum, and its burgeoning collection, one would assume that personnel with experience in both these important skillsets would have been required and should have been a top priority for a museum with a growing and extensive collection of objects and manuscripts.
Instead, the restorer of record had no formal conservation training, and listed his university degrees as having a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and a Bachelor’s degree in Communication Sciences and Journalism. One curator of Cuneiform tablets had no museum experience at all and listed his former posting as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. Another curator, of Medieval Manuscripts, had been a summer intern at the Smithsonian.
Revisiting this list, to see who may have come and who may have gone since the first list was compiled, I also came across two newish job announcements. The first is for a registrar, and includes some normal registrar duties as well as a hodgepodge of other duties:
While museums and their museum security risk managers routinely look at threat levels as part of their wider risk assessments, this job description seems to be a lot more specific.
Conduct predictive threat analysis to support domestic and international Executive Protection operations for VIPs, designated individuals, and MOTB staff as directed.
But enough on potential new hires. Filing away those that have worked for the Museum of the Bible in the past and have subsequently left the Green's museum behind, I thought I would also try to see where former collaborator Dr. Scott Carroll has been keeping himself over the last year since parting ways with the Washington DC apologists.
Instead of dissolving mummy masks in Palmolive soap...
While in Hong Kong Carroll also popped in for a dedication ceremony at Evangel Seminary, affiliated under the Evangelical Free Church of China, where a Torah scroll was being donated by Ken and Barbara Larson.
The Larsons, founders of the family-owned furniture chain Slumberland, have purchased Torah scrolls as apologetic tools for establishing the reliability of the word of God with the intention of giving many of them to evangelical seminaries.
Torah's are normally retired to a Genizah, a vault, or a protected receptacle, in which holy things which are posul are kept until burial. When holy objects are no longer in use as according to Jewish law, they cannot be destroyed, but should be treated with the same respect and care allotted the deceased.
One of these, the Larson-Bethel Baghdad Torah dates predominantly to the early 17th century.
Carroll states the Torah dedicated to Evangel Seminary in these videos “comes from Eastern Europe, very likely from Germany” and “dates to the 18th century.”
According to statements in the video, the Larson's currently list their donation count at 36.
Carroll's next 2017 stop was Bangkok, Thailand, where he recently concluded a teaching assignment on Bible Backgrounds and Ancient Cultures in early July. Sadly none of these religious outreach visits seemed to include any mention of the ministry of collecting ethically.
Issued on 26 March 2010 and uploaded quietly to the Museum of the Bible website here.
Statement on Past Acquisitions Published: Mar 26, 2020
Museum of the Bible’s Chairman of the Board, Steve Green, makes the following statement on past acquisitions:
In 2009, when I began acquiring biblical manuscripts and artifacts for what would ultimately form the collection at Museum of the Bible, I knew little about the world of collecting. It is well known that I trusted the wrong people to guide me, and unwittingly dealt with unscrupulous dealers in those early years. One area where I fell short was not appreciating the importance of the provenance of the items I purchased.
When I purchased items in those early years, dealers would make representations about an item’s provenance, which the consultants I employed would say was sufficient. As I came to understand taking a dealer at his or her word was not good enough, I cut ties with those consultants. When I engaged with new advisors, I acquired a better understanding of the importance of verifying provenance and we developed a rigorous acquisitions policy that would help avoid repeating those early mistakes.
For the past several years, the many dedicated curators at Museum of the Bible have quietly and painstakingly researched the provenance of the many thousands of items in the collection. That work continues. While this research was proceeding, beginning in late 2017, we also engaged with officials in several countries, including Egypt and Iraq, to open a dialog regarding items that likely originated from those countries at some point, but for which there was insufficient reliable provenance information. Those discussions have been fruitful, and continue to this day.
I long ago made the decision that when our research revealed another party had a better claim to an item, I would do the right thing and deliver such items to that party. We have already proactively made several such returns.
Today, I am announcing that we have identified approximately 5,000 papyri fragments and 6,500 clay objects with insufficient provenance that we are working to deliver to officials in Egypt and Iraq respectively. As discussions with officials in Egypt and Iraq continued, we also engaged with officials in the U.S. government to determine the best way procedurally and logistically to make the deliveries, and are appreciative of their assistance. We are working to finalize the deliveries in the near future. We also hope to finalize agreements with organizations in Egypt and Iraq that will allow for us to provide technical assistance, and support the ongoing study and preservation of their important cultural property.
These early mistakes resulted in Museum of the Bible receiving a great deal of criticism over the years. The criticism resulting from my mistakes was justified. My goal was always to protect, preserve, study, and share cultural property with the world. That goal has not changed, but after some early missteps, I made the decision many years ago that, moving forward, I would only acquire items with reliable, documented provenance. Furthermore, if I learn of other items in the collection for which another person or entity has a better claim, I will continue to do the right thing with those items.
I understand established museums, universities, and other institutions have evolved over the years and developed sound protocols for dealing with cultural property with insufficient provenance. I intend to continue to learn from the collective efforts and wisdom of those institutions, and support every person and organization possessing such items to continue their research into the provenance of their items.
Steve Green Chairman of the Board
Museum of the Bible
Takeaways:
This letter and these restitutions do not adequately address the negligence of the museum's management or the indiscretions of its philanthropists. Nor do statements like these erase the indelible blemish on the museum's founding history.
Green claims to have unwittingly dealt with unscrupulous dealers without appreciating the importance of the provenance of the items he purchased. Does he want us to believe that HAD he appreciated the importance of provenance he would have walked away from the many once-in-a-lifetime pieces dangled before him?
Green explains that the consultants he employed were overly trusting of dealers, which is why he made mistakes and why he "cut ties" with those consultants. Emphasis on the word cut ties. Fired? Let go? Contract not renewed? Swept under the rug? Who and When? What does "cut ties" mean exactly?
When he relates only his own story of events, it seems more like he is trying to control the narrative than do anything to actually make amends.
If we look back in the history of this scandal, it took Green an exceedingly long time to "cut ties" and when he did, we didn't see a great deal of improvement in the museum's operational model, purchasing due diligence, or its transparency. January 3-5, 2011 is when US Customs inspected Five Federal Express antiquities-filled packages shipped bearing air waybills:
No. 7286 2809 6729 from the UAE Dealer to the “[President] or [Executive Assistant]” at Hobby Lobby's Mardel’s address.
No. 7286 2809 6751 from the UAE Dealer to the “[President] or [Executive Assistant]” at Hobby Lobby’s principle address.
No. 7286 2809 7162 from the UAE Dealer to the “[President] or [Executive Assistant]” at Hobby Lobby's Crafts, Etc!’s address.
No. 7286 2809 7173 from the UAE Dealer to the “[President] or [Executive Assistant]” at Hobby Lobby's Mardel’s address.
No. 7286 2809 7162 from the UAE Dealer to the “[President] or [Executive Assistant]” at Hobby Lobby's Crafts, Etc!’s address.
But despite this embarrassing faux pas, by May 16, 2011 Hobby Lobby was still sticking to their guns that the plundered material was rightfully theirs. To substantiate that claim, they had their attorney file an administrative petition with the CBP seeking the return of their seized property, which one can assume by all the lawyer fees that would have entailed, that at least on paper, Hobby Lobby still felt their claim to the ancient objects, was legit.
As spring turned eventually to autumn, on September 7, 2011 Hobby Lobby was still defending its honor, submitting a supplemental petition to the CBP trying to satisfy the governments concerns about the payment methodology used in the purchase of the antiquities contained in these shipments.
The Supplemental Petition stated that the reason the payments for the order were made through “separate wire transfers was that various original owners were to be paid directly.” This explanation however proves inconsistent with the fact that Israeli Dealer #3’s provenance statement covered almost the entire order and Israeli Dealer #3 was not one of the payees. It was also inconsistent with representations made to Hobby Lobby about listing Israeli Dealer #3 in the purchase agreement “because the invoice is from [Israeli Dealer #3’s] family and the collection is the [Israeli Dealer #3] family collection.”
Nine months after the problematic shipment, on October 15, 2011, still-consulting Carroll took the last flight out of Heathrow bound for Israel to retrieve still more "unknown, significant Hebrew biblical manuscripts", where upon arrival he poured over 1100+ scrolls spanning 700 years, and spent the day looking at someone's private collection of papyrus.
Such were the Green's buying power that on November 27, 2011, and despite an open investigation into their previous purchases, Carroll set off yet again on another international buying trip. A voyage which would take him from West Africa, to Istanbul, and then on to London, where in addition to making purchases, he met with people in Oxford, in all probability, Dirk Obbink, regarding the Green Scholar Initiative.
Three and a half months later, on March 12, 2012, Carroll, still consulting for the MoTB, is quoted in the Toledo Blade saying:
Given all that, the fact that Green's press release statement yesterday, relays that they did not get around to speaking with the source countries of the looted material until 2017 is not surprising. In an earlier Wall Street journal article, also by Crow, the Museum of the Bible's Vice Chairman of the board Robert E. Cooley indicated that the museum's board itself only learned about the government’s six-year smuggling investigation involving Hobby Lobby when the craft company was close to signing the settlement... so again, the year 2017.
Green purportedly did not tell the museum's board sooner because he considered it a Hobby Lobby matterwhich brings into question Green's statement yesterday about having "acquired a better understanding of the importance of verifying provenance... we developed a rigorous acquisitions policy that would help avoid repeating those early mistakes."
So this more vigorous acquisitions policy applies to the problems in Green's private collection or to the objects from that collection he donated onward to the Museum?
That said, it was around 2017 that the Museum's board hired cultural-heritage lawyer, Thomas Kline, to vet the pieces remaining in the museum’s collection. One question which remains is whether or not they hired anyone else besides one busy lawyer, who does not have manuscript provenance experience. If not, then that might explain why it took an additional three years for this next, and I suspect not last, round of at a snail's pace restitutions.
The final interesting statement is Green's letter is his hope that Egypt and Iraq will allow the Museum of the Bible to provide technical assistance, and support the ongoing study and preservation of their important cultural property.
Having (possibly) worn out their welcome with the EES, and having hooked their dreams on folks like Carroll, Obbink and company, Green now hopes that the very source nations their purchases robbed will see their better late than never restitutions and a single carefully-worded, reputation management letter from the Museum's principle donor as a sincere and real attempt at righting several wrongs.
For me it doesn't even start.
It should not have taken this many years for Mr. Green to own up to his and his buyers indiscretions. He may have been blindsided by his consultants in the beginning, but throughout this process he has been the one to control the narrative.
If he truly wants to earn my trust, and really make meaningful amends, he could start by addressing the degrees of his own culpability, both for his actions (wantonly and heedlessly purchasing objects without any due diligence consideration) and his inaction, (to get ahead of this, to his refusal to answer researchers questions about where and from and in what time frame he or his consultants purchased suspect material) from 2009 to present.
Screenshot: 19 October 2019
https://www.museumofthebible.org/collections/artifacts/7505-letter-from-plutarchos-to-theoninos-poxy-1775#/
Friday, the Waco Tribune-Herald received a statement, relayed by the attorneys of Dirk Obbink, contesting the claims linking him with the illegal sale of ancient material to Hobby Lobby, Inc., which have been determined to have come from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Collection, which are the property of the Egypt Exploration Society.
That quote, with a link to the original Waco Tribune-Herald article, is listed in its entirety here.
More importantly what is he saying he was framed for?
It is clear from the archives on the website for the Museum of the Bible that Professor Obbink found himself in the unique position as a learned scholar to leverage the value of his knowledge in ancient texts to a greater advantage financially and was actively selling directly to the Greens at least as far back as 2010, during the early formation of the family's buying spree, and in anticipation of the opening of a future biblical museum sponsored by the evangelical family.
The photo at the top of this article, of a Letter from Plutarchos to Theoninos. (P.Oxy. 1775)was acquired by Dirk Obbink in 2009-2010 from the United Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio and very quickly, privately sold to the Green Collection in 2010.
Likewise the 1 Peter Fragment (P.Oxy. 1353; Uncial 0206) was acquired by Dirk Obbink in 2009 from the United Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio and very quickly, privately sold to the Green Collection in 2010.
Likewise the Lease of Land (P.Oxy. 1688) was acquired by Dirk Obbink in 2009–2010 from the United Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio and very quickly, privately sold to the Green Collection in 2010.
Likewise the Account of Receipts and Expenses (P.Oxy. 1728) was acquired by Dirk Obbink in 2009–2010 from the United Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio and very quickly, privately sold to the Green Collection in 2010.
Likewise the Psalms Fragment (P.Oxy. 1779; Rahlfs 2073) was acquired by Dirk Obbink in 2009–2010 from the United Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio and very quickly, privately sold to the Green Collection in 2010.
Likewise the Return of Unwatered Land (P.Oxy. 1459) was acquired by Dirk Obbink in 2009–2010 from the United Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio and very quickly, privately sold to the Green Collection in 2010.
Likewise the Letter from Theon to His Mother (P.Oxy. 1678) was acquired by Dirk Obbink in 2009–2010 from the United Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio and very quickly, privately sold to the Green Collection in 2010.
Likewise the Letter from Sarapion to his Father Dionysius (P.Oxy. 1756) was acquired by Dirk Obbink in 2009–2010 from the United Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio and very quickly, privately sold to the Green Collection in 2010.
Likewise a Draft of Release of Claims Concerning Receipt of Dowry was acquired by Dirk Obbink in 2009–2010 from the United Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio and very quickly, privately sold to the Green Collection in 2010.
While the Museum of the Bible may not comprehensively list all the provenance on all the objects within the museum's collection, this is at least ten other documented examples of sales where Dirk Obbink was not serving simply as a scholarly advisor to the Greens, but rather as a direct supplier of manuscripts to the family in addition to the purported sale of pieces already earmarked to be restituted to the EES.
Then there are the other fargments sold to a collector named Andrew Stimer, two of which are also linked to the EES inquiries, where Stiner has stated that he purchased the pieces from M. Elder of Dearborn, Michigan.
The Edler-Obbink company's first introductory post on Facebook reads:
"The Castle Folio began as an idea between collectors and investors with a simple question: what would it take to start a company that provided services to prepare an exhibition focusing on ancient texts and antiquities for any major public viewing?
We collaborated with historians, linguistics, art conservationist, appraisers and dealers to work on our board's private collection, refining our services until we were ready to offer them.
We are not only investors. Every member of The Castle Folio family is a serious collector with a passion for collecting and preserving our shared history.
Please take a minute to explore our services and see how we can be of help.
The Castle Group is an Elder-Marini Group held company."
The unknown author of this entry uses the significance of the find to try to put a lid on the debate over the controversial text fragment recovery method, as the process of extracting the papyrus ultimately destroys the mummy masks. It also appears that saying the fragment was discovered inside a cartonnage mummy mask would draw less attention to the fragment than "finding" it and removing it from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection.
collecting history,Collecting;Collections,ethical collecting,Hobby Lobby,Museum of the Bible,Scott Carroll,tax fraud
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collecting history,Collecting;Collections,ethical collecting,Hobby Lobby,Museum of the Bible,Scott Carroll,tax fraud
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