"Scott Carroll may have claimed that Obbink had “no agenda whatsoever,” but in fact Obbink had several. He was acting as a scholar, an adviser, and a seller: The first owed allegiance to the truth, the second to his clients, the third to his own bottom line." https://twitter.com/arielsabar/status/1260530222530809857

Interesting info in this article on Obbink's various business interests, which "hemorrhaged money"...

"At events sponsored by the Greens, Obbink, at times in a white lab coat, dunked wedges of mummy cartonnage in soapy water...[Attendees] "got this spiel about ‘This is where you discover New Testament papyri’ ”-a line that Coogan, like other scholars, soon recognized as dubious."

"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."

PEOPLE. Stop making it so easy for insider thieves. My little essay on that in case you need to brush up on why giving someone solo access to uncatalogued material is a TERRIBLE IDEA: https://eidolon.pub/the-old-white-malest-of-crimes-e86571325bf3 - @BookTheftGuy can you believe this?

"It was one of some 20 masks Obbink sold the Greens c. 20 mummy masks, over $4 million worth of papyri, and $1-2 million "for a host of other antiquities. Among them was a medieval Latin manuscript titled “On Stolen Things.""

On his Sappho discovery: "'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.'"

"Obbink declined to name the papyrus’s owner or to release its provenance paperwork. In a @nytimes op-ed, Douglas Boin, a historian at Saint Louis University, called Obbink’s secrecy 'disturbingly tone deaf' at a time of 'catastrophic' looting in the Middle East." @douglasboin

The idea of destroying ancient funerary objects is infuriating enough, but to do so to create a fake provenance by pretending to discover Sappho fragments in a cartonnage mummy mask you dissolve is just.... attn @Angela_stienne!

WHAT.

@arielsabar tracked down Obbink's contractor!

Pro tip for thieves: try not to fence your good to people who will publicly announce that they bought it from you.

@arielsabar doesn't draw explicit an connection, but FYI the Museum of the Bible's curators got worried about lack of provenance for papyri purchases only in 2017, after Hobby Lobby was busted for buying cuneiform tablets looted/smuggled from Iraq: https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/hobby-lobby-antiquities/

Update on numbers of missing papyri from EES: "the EES said it has so far identified 120 papyri that “appear to be missing, almost all from a limited number of folders.” In what might well be British understatement, it warned “that a few more cases may emerge.”"

"If Obbink’s relationship with the Greens had a fatal flaw, it was that he needed it to stay secret, whereas the Greens wanted to shout it to the world."

Slow clap to Guillem Casasús for this illustration to the article.

"virtually every papyrus in his [Steve Green of Hobby Lobby] collection lacked sufficient evidence of not having been stolen, looted, or acquired by other improper means."

"With hundreds of millions of dollars of spending power, Green had all the leverage to ask hard questions about provenance—and to order investigations—before handing his money over to dealers. But he never did."