A scandal in Oxford: the curious case of the stolen gospel(theguardian.com) |
A scandal in Oxford: the curious case of the stolen gospel(theguardian.com) |
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?
What the article repeatedly points out are circumstantial reasons for thinking the Bible Museum very much knew that they were not engaged in legitimate trade. 99.6% of the papyri the museum owns lack provenance and are still inaccessible to researchers and the public, even digitally. Artifacts were declared as "tile samples" when shipped to the US. The museum only returned pieces after years of controversy whose resolution came about without their cooperation (proof that the papyri were stolen was assembled without cooperation from the Greens).
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.
> 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.
"In 2017, for example, a consignment of ancient Iraqi cuneiform tablets they had purchased was found to have been smuggled into the US as 'tile samples'."
To be more precise: The Green family bought over 5,000 ancient artifacts (mainly cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals from Iraq) -- at one point, wiring money to seven separate bank accounts to do so -- at a cost of $1.6 million. And they did this despite having been warned by their own legal counsel that the transaction was probably illegal.
They subsequently paid a $3 million fine.
They continue to insist that all of this was "inexperience" on their part. I think it was simple greed, combined with their certainty that any part of the cultural heritage of the world that pertains to Christianity properly belongs in the hands of American evangelicals.
I appreciate Holmes's candor, but let there be no mistake. He was hired to cover their asses.
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.
That being said, it had to have been written by someone, and shorthand that person is often referred to as “Mark”.
- These texts are all attributed to the same author. Were they all written by the same person?
- This text is attributed to a historical person. Did he write it?
- This text is attributed to a single person. Is it the work of a single person? Is it a compilation?
And so forth. It is not in general true that an ancient text has to have been written by someone, unless by "writing the text" you mean nothing more than that a single person copied or bound other sources into one more comprehensive document. (Even that isn't true; there's no conceptual problem with multiple scribes copying different pieces of a long text.)
All that said, I see no problem with using a convenient designation to refer to a hypothetical author. The opinion of other people varies; I have seen the argument made that the reason we don't consider medieval European philosophy to have accomplished anything is that medieval European philosophy texts are generally not attributed to a named author. I think this is ridiculous; if the texts were significant, they would have attributed authors, or conventionalized authors, because of their frequent use in society -- just as, in your example, the Gospel of Mark is attributed to an entity named "Mark" for no particular reason.
No Oxford comma?
From: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Mark
> Although written anonymously and in third-person, the author of the Gospel of Mark is believed, per Christian tradition, to be Mark, the interpreter of Peter the Apostle. However, this tradition should be taken with a grain of salt, for Papias, the originator of this tradition, was, by far, no scholar. It has been suggested that the book was originally intended as fiction and further that its author understood the non-historicity of Jesus.
> The Gospel of Mark is considered the first of the gospels written because the only material it contains that is not contained in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are a few insignificant details that anyone in his right mind would edit out. It can be dated to 67 CE by its apocalyptic Oliviet Discourse, for it mentions "wars and rumors of wars", a reference to the First Jewish Revolt, tells of the persecution of Christians under Nero, who died in the summer of 68 CE, tells the Judeans to "flee to the mountains", which would be stupid after the autumn of 67 CE, and, especially telling, prays that the flight of the Judeans may not be in the Winter. Documentation of these events sets the lower limit on the date of authorship at about 67 CE, but does not rule out the possibility that the gospel was actually written much later.
> All that said, I see no problem with using a convenient designation to refer to a hypothetical author.
And that is -- it's not terribly convenient if it distracts the under-informed reader about the provenance of the source material.
In this specific case there's the insinuation of authority by proximity / familiarity.
While it's a convenient designation, continuing to imply the author of the primary source of the new testament was someone we can identify gives it more credibility than attributing the story to an unknown source, or an amalgam of sources.
Compare and contrast, say, Greensleeves -- a piece that everyone in the UK and AU recognises as indicating soft-serve ice cream is in the area, where the composer / author 's actual identity is at best secondary -- attributing a work of fiction to a (likely wrongly) named author grants credence that may be inappropriate.