“If the Museum of the Bible will use this news to publicly distance itself from the scandal, we should be wary,” says Hicks-Keeton, who has criticized the museum for favoring the Protestant Bible because of the Green family’s evangelical faith. “Steve Green is still its board chair,” she notes. “Is the Museum really distancing itself from its past and charting a new course, or merely coming clean about some scandals to give the appearance of reform?”
Brent Nongbri, a New Testament scholar and papyrologist, writes that “The sale of the manuscripts and the attempt to cover it up by removing records is almost unbelievable.” And this could be just the tip of the iceberg, he suggests. The EES says it’s “also pursuing identification and recovery of other texts, or parts of texts, which have or may have been illicitly removed from its collection.”
Nongbri notes, “If this isn’t a one-off thing, and there are more records of sales, it becomes harder to believe that other scholars who work closely with Dirk Obbink didn’t know this kind of thing was going on.”
The scandal is also proving to be a “cautionary tale” about academia. “There seems to have been very little oversight of Dirk Obbink,” Nongbri writes. “The EES has admitted that Obbink was keeping papyri in his personal office (allegedly the place where he was also peddling manuscripts). Even ‘geniuses’ need oversight.”
The rarity of biblical artifacts makes them—and their collectors—susceptible to theft and forgery. Nondisclosure agreements also complicate the process. For example, several experts knew about the Mark fragment for years before its existence was made public. But they say they were bound to keep the owner’s identity secret.
In 2017, Hobby Lobby was fined $3 million for purchasing stolen artifacts. And in 2018, the Museum of the Bible pulled five scrolls that turned out to be forgeries of Dead Sea Scroll fragments. It also returned a medieval New Testament manuscript when it was discovered to have been stolen from the University of Athens in Greece.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Museum of the Bible opened on November 17, 2021. The museum opened in 2017.
