Ariel Sabar strikes again in a good, long read about a con allegedly perpetrated by an academic and other shady characters against the Green family of Hobby Lobby fame and their Museum of the Bible

A Biblical Mystery at Oxford:

'In June 2019, Michael Holmes, who replaced Pattengale as the director of the scholars initiative, flew to London to meet with leaders of the Egypt Exploration Society, who remained skeptical that Obbink, whatever his other shortcomings, might have sold Oxyrhynchus papyri.

'Over lunch at a private club, Holmes pulled out a purchase agreement between Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. and Dirk Obbink. Co-signed by the Oxford professor on February 4, 2013, it showed that Obbink had sold the company not just the Mark papyrus, but also fragments of the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John. In the contract, Obbink describes the manuscripts as his personal property, vows to “ship/hand carry” them from “Oxford Ancient,” and dates all four to a historically unprecedented “circa 100 AD,” making each a one-of-a-kind worth millions.

'When EES officials saw the contract, Holmes told me, “any uncertainties they had evaporated very quickly.” They banned Obbink from the collection.'

 

Mr. Ariel Sabar uncovers the lies, damn lies and rotten scholarship involving The Gospel of Jesus' Wife

Here in "The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife" for The Atlantic, where the old-fashioned work of a gumshoe reporter exposes the hard work too often lacking in much of contemporary scholarship:

[S]keptics had identified other problems. Among the most damning was an odd typographical error that appears in both the Jesus’s-wife fragment and an edition of the Gospel of Thomas that was posted online in 2002, suggesting an easily available source for a modern forger’s cut-and-paste job.

With [Karen L.] King [Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard] and her critics at loggerheads, each insisting on the primacy of their evidence, I wondered why no one had conducted a different sort of test: a thorough vetting of the papyrus’s chain of ownership. 

Prof. King has replied to the author, here:

For four years, Karen L. King, a Harvard historian of Christianity, has defended the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” against scholars who argued it was a forgery. But Thursday, for the first time, King said the papyrus—which she introduced to the world in 2012—is a probable fake.

She reached this conclusion, she said, after reading The Atlantic’s investigation into the papyrus’s origins, which appears in the magazine’s July/August issue and was posted to its website Wednesday night.

“It tips the balance towards forgery,” she said. ...

Thursday afternoon, however, she called me to say the story was “fascinating” and “very helpful.” ...

“I had no idea about this guy, obviously,” she said. “He lied to me.”

I asked why she hadn’t undertaken an investigation of the papyrus’s origins and the owner’s background. “Your article has helped me see that provenance can be investigated,” she said. ...

[T]he preponderance of the evidence, she said, now “presses in the direction of forgery.”