from Hacker News

A scandal in Oxford: the curious case of the stolen gospel

by theprop on 1/9/20, 6:06 PM with 24 comments

• by rayiner on 1/10/20, 1:43 AM

  > While reserving respect for Holmes’s reforming efforts, Mazza did not pull her punches. The Greens have “poured millions on the legal and illegal antiquities market without having a clue about the history, the material features, cultural value, fragilities and problems of the objects,” she said. This irresponsible collecting “is a crime against culture and knowledge of immense proportions – as the facts unfolding under our eyes do prove.”

  That’s an interesting charge. The article repeatedly points out that the Bible Museum didn’t know anything was stolen, and cooperated to return things when they found out. But its the Oxford classics department that is keeping these artifacts hidden, inaccessible to the public or even other researchers for the last century. It was an Oxford professor that tried to sell them illegally, but that was made possible by the secrecy of and opaqueness of Oxford’s stewardship of the collection. Who exactly is the villain?

• by sudosteph on 1/9/20, 8:18 PM

  In case anyone else is interested, I found that the org that handles the the papyri has a really cool write-up about how they handle the digitization process.

  http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/POxy/imaging/imaging.html

  According to the article: . Over the past century, just over 5,000 of the half-million Oxyrhynchus papyri have been published.

  So between the large data set and scanning process, I'm hopeful that all of these (and other) ancient manuscripts will be shared publicly. I love imagining all the potential studies we can do with proper machine learning once we have the data set.

• by pulisse on 1/9/20, 7:24 PM

  A gem from near the end of TFA:

  > At present, just over 20 papyri are displayed on the museum’s website, out of 5,000. I asked Holmes whether one can therefore conclude that the Greens own around 4,980 papyri that lack reliable provenance. “In general, yes,” said Holmes.

• by Jedd on 1/9/20, 10:28 PM

  > which would make it the oldest surviving manuscript of the New Testament, copied less than 30 years after Mark had actually written it.

  I thought it was well understood that 'Mark' didn't write this, at least not the Mark the book is named after, and that we're not really sure who did write that first story, or indeed precisely when or where.

• by jimhefferon on 1/9/20, 9:00 PM

  > I have stolen, removed or sold items

  No Oxford comma?

• by pnathan on 1/9/20, 7:49 PM

  Fascinating stuff. Brings to mind the fact that much of earlier antiquity artifacts were plain looted into museums, etc. Mummies were made into artists' paint, for instance.

• by ngcc_hk on 1/10/20, 8:24 AM

  Is this still an on-going investigation?

• by Merrill on 1/9/20, 11:42 PM

  Paging Inspector Morse.