Oxford professor arrested for selling stolen Bible fragments
An academic from the U.K.’s Oxford University has been arrested as part of an investigation into the theft and unauthorised sale of ancient Bible fragments to Hobby Lobby Stores in the U.S. The Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., displayed the fragments temporarily. The accused, identified as Dr. Dirk Obbink, a 63-year-old professor of papyrology at Oxford, who allegedly stole the fragments belonging to the Oxyrhynchus collection in the Sackler Library, was arrested on Thursday by Thames Valley Police, according to The Telegraph.
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri is a group of manuscripts that were discovered during the late 19th and early 20th centuries at a spot where ancient inhabitants of the city of Oxyrhynchus dumped their garbage of over 1,000 years.
The Egypt Exploration Society, a British nonprofit excavation organisation that works in Egypt and Sudan which owns the collection, issued a statement last October accusing Obbink of selling fragments of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, after which the university suspended the professor.
Obbink had denied the accusations. “The allegations made against me that I have stolen, removed or sold items owned by the Egypt Exploration Society collection at the University of Oxford are entirely false,” he earlier told The Guardian.
The Oxyrhynchus collection includes more than 500,000 fragments of literary and documentary texts — written in Greek, ancient Egyptian, Coptic, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew and other languages — dating from the 3rd century BC to the 7th century.
Source: christianpost.com
