In 2012 I enrolled in a master’s program at Oxford to study papyrology. Of the many subfields in classics, papyrology is perhaps the most difficult to understand but also the most bewitching. It is one of the only types of classical scholarship through which new texts can still be found; there is always the promise that the pieces of reedy paper papyrologists conserve and study could contain unknown work.

Archaeologists began to look for these texts in the middle of the nineteenth century, after a discovery of carbonized books at the Italian city of Herculaneum a century earlier—mainly works of philosophy—drew public attention to the vast array of ancient literature that might still be brought to light. “What rapture! could ye seize/Some Theban fragment,” Wordsworth wrote in 1819, “or unroll/One precious, tender-hearted scroll/Of pure Simonides.” Egypt promised still greater treasures, since the dry climate that kept mummies intact was also good for preserving papyrus, a fragile material made from the pith of the papyrus plant. In the early nineteenth century, after Egyptian peasants happened upon ancient fragments, archaeologists began to look in such places for pieces of manuscript, which could vary in size from a few letters to a slice of text. Soon excavations yielded lost work by ancient authors and a rare roll of the Iliad.

Papyrus was used for writing across the ancient world for some four thousand years. But by the time it arrives in a student’s hand, it is often small, brittle, and very worn. To read ancient manuscripts—many of them written in ancient Greek thanks to the spread of the empire—requires a strong enough grasp of the language to glean complete words from just a few marks. Oxford is the mecca for this kind of work. It houses much of the Oxyrhynchus collection, a group of more than 500,000 texts excavated around the turn of the twentieth century from garbage mounds in Egypt, of which only a fraction have been studied. The excavations were supported by an organization called the Egypt Exploration Fund, launched by the British novelist and travel writer Amelia Edwards, and the collection technically remains in the hands of that group’s successor, a research nonprofit called the Egypt Exploration Society. The Oxford papyri draw scholars from around the world with the hope of new discoveries.

My papyrology class took place on Tuesdays in Christ Church college, off a large quad beloved by tourists. The instructor, Dirk Obbink, had spent nearly two decades at Oxford. His research on the scorched scrolls in Herculaneum had revolutionized the field and won him a MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the “genius grant.” Like many geniuses, he was reliably unreliable. Every week he would enter the classroom twenty minutes late and look around muttering something like, “Oh, you’re still here.” He would then launch into a lecture, strange and elliptical, as if he were vocalizing an interior monologue on the history of garbage disposal or a picture of a tree at Oxyrhynchus. He would tell the story of the discovery of the cache in Oxyrhynchus in 1896 over and over, repeating the same details—the digging of the garbage mounds, the unearthing of the first finds, the importance of the excavation. (Here I feel the journalist’s need to point out that these are my memories and they may be weakened by time.) He seemed absentminded, and students complained. In my old emails I can see evidence of frustration from my classmates: “PLEASE mention at least in some polite vague way dissatisfaction with the papyrology teaching in your GSS report. I don’t want to look crazy.” But his teaching style was not entirely out of place in a field in which scholars’ thoughts are generally located about two thousand years in the past.

The collection itself was held in a small room in the Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library. As I recall, scraps of papyri were everywhere. The room showed signs of eternal stasis. A colleague of Obbink’s passed around a large brown envelope and ordered each student to put a hand inside. One student hesitated, and the professor yelled, “It will not kill you!” Inside the envelope were tiny pieces of papyrus mixed with dirt.

I had neither the skill nor the patience to pursue this work in a serious way. I was assigned my own papyrus to study but couldn’t make it through the letters. Instead I graduated with mediocre marks and got a job at The New York Review, where I found a practical application for a graduate degree in scribble—deciphering the cryptic notes and marginalia of the magazine’s cofounder Robert Silvers. I learned a few years later that during my year at Oxford Obbink had perhaps also engaged in other pursuits: he’d allegedly been slipping papyri out from the collection and selling them to a prominent family of American evangelicals for millions of dollars.

The thefts at Oxford—and the slightly too porous border between papyrology and the black market—is the subject of Roberta Mazza’s Stolen Fragments. Mazza is a papyrologist herself and a former trustee of the Egypt Exploration Society; alongside the official investigation into Obbink’s alleged misdeeds (still ongoing), she conducted her own inquiries into what exactly happened.

At the center of the story is Steve Green and his family, the wealthy owners of Hobby Lobby, whose thousand-odd craft stores generate about $8 billion in annual revenue and promote a distinctly Christian message. The stores are closed on Sundays and fund missionary work worldwide. “Hobby Lobby donates half of its pretax earnings to charity and invests them in a portfolio of evangelical ministries,” write Candida Moss and Joel Baden in Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby (2017),which looks at the Greens’ empire of biblical art. The vetting process for beneficiaries of their donations includes questions about the Virgin Birth.

The Greens see their philanthropy as part of a larger project to elevate Christianity. In their native Oklahoma, they have pushed a Bible-centered curriculum designed by evangelical thinkers. (It was not adopted.) In 2014 Hobby Lobby’s refusal to pay for employees’ contraception reached the Supreme Court, which ruled that private companies could be exempted from the contraceptive mandate if the owners objected on religious grounds. “I matter 10 billion years from now,” David Green, Steve’s father, has said.

In 2009 the Green family began to plan a Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., constructed around proof of the Bible’s veracity. Most scholars of religion will tell you that the history of the Bible is one of variations discarded, narratives changed. What we now know as the New Testament is only one version of Jesus’s story.

But evangelical Christians, Mazza writes, see the Bible as the word of God: “Evangelicals conceive of the Bible as transmitted in a fixed form through a stable chain of scribes, who copied word-by-word from the original copies of the scriptures inspired by God.” They refer to these texts as “autographs.” “The older a copy of the Bible is,” Mazza continues, “the closer it is to the moment in which God’s words were first given, thus the more holy the object is.” The earlier one goes, however, the fewer manuscripts there are. Only some 125 papyri might come from the first few centuries of Christian history. The oldest known excerpts of the New Testament might date from the second century; of those there are only four.

In the fall of 2009 Steve Green traveled to Turkey and Israel to look at possible acquisitions. “This was a whole new world we knew nothing about but were excited to explore,” he and his wife, Jackie, wrote in This Dangerous Book (2017), their account of biblical history. Accompanying him was a man named Scott Carroll, an ancient studies Ph.D. from Miami University in Ohio who claimed to know thirteen languages and who documented their purchases on Facebook as a “Magic Carpet Tour.”

Within a few years Carroll and Green had turned up a number of remarkable finds for the collection, including a fragment of the Gospel of Mark apparently datable to as early as AD 70, just the kind of artifact the museum was built for. Carroll himself discussed the Gospel fragment in 2015 at the United States National Apologetics Conference at the Southern Evangelical Seminary of Charlotte. He’d first seen the papyrus in 2012, he said, on a pool table, “along with a number of mummy heads,” in Christ Church, Oxford. It was “in the possession of an outstanding and well-known eminent classicist,” as he called him, “the most important person”—Dirk Obbink. If the papyrus was authentic, as Carroll seemed to believe, it would be the oldest example of the Christian text known to scholars, something approaching proof of the Bible’s veracity.

Carroll’s revelation of the manuscript’s existence shocked his audience. His interlocutor onstage, the evangelist Josh McDowell, seemed stunned: “That early?” He told the audience, “Don’t go out and say that there’s a manuscript dated 70 AD…. When this hits the media, you will hear about it…. It will be on every program.” And indeed, as Mazza writes, news of the papyrus had traveled quickly:

Despite the fact that nobody seemed to have seen it for real, the first-century Mark was mentioned at evangelical talks and gatherings as fresh, new proof that the quest for the originals was giving tangible results.

Did Carroll really believe it? The setting in which he saw the papyrus, he said, had been “surreal.” But the transaction continued to move forward.

Papyrology is as marked by the hope of recovering the ancient past as by the greed to exploit it. Nowhere is this clearer than in the story of the Oxyrhynchus collection itself. In 1896 two British archaeologists, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, traveled to el-Bahnasa, a village near the Nile about a hundred miles south of Cairo. In antiquity the site had been considered an important Christian center. Its ancient name, Oxyrhynchus, means “city of the sharp-nosed fish,” as the late papyrologist Peter Parsons explained in his 2007 study of the same name.^* Its inhabitants called it “the Glorious and most Glorious city” because of its baths, theater, and colonnades.

By the time Grenfell and Hunt arrived, layers of sand and dirt and discarded material had covered up the ancient town. The two archaeologists turned to the rubbish mounds to search for texts.

Three weeks later they seemed to find the trove they’d been chasing: a copy of what they called “the sayings of Jesus.” It turned out to be the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, an early Christian text. It was a harbinger of discoveries to come. “The flow of papyri soon became a torrent it was difficult to keep pace with,” Grenfell recalled. In one place, “merely turning up the soil with one’s boot would frequently disclose a layer of papyri.” As Parsons described, the sand “yielded works long lost” as well as “fragments of authors who had survived only as great names and small quotations,” essentially creating a second Renaissance.

For many classicists, Grenfell and Hunt are heroes. But from today’s perspective their work could easily be seen as exploitative. Large-scale digs were a colonial enterprise; they necessarily meant the spoliation of an African country. Grenfell preferred hiring boys rather than men, because they were “easier to manage and more trustworthy.” He wrote that “natives…are in search of gold, or at least ancient coins. That there should be any interest attaching to ‘old paper’ is, of course, quite beyond their comprehension.”

Grenfell was well aware of the profit the “old paper” could generate, Mazza writes. To fund the digs, he also acted as an intermediary for wealthy patrons looking to buy antiquities. As a colleague at the time noted, Grenfell was in Egypt “not only to dig, but to travel and buy—to look up the dealers and the tomb robbers from one end of the Nile valley to the other.”

After a few seasons of excavation, he developed some form of mental illness. “He is very excited,” a doctor wrote in a 1906 report. “Speaks incessantly and incoherently. He has delusions, such as, that ‘he is the Emperor of the Universe.’”

The rest of his life was marked by periods of scholastic achievement and stays in asylums, as Lorne R. Zelyck writes in a recent paper. His mother begged for him to be allowed access to ancient texts: “The Dr. he is under thinks it most beneficial to Bernard that he should decipher papyri, (in moderation).” By then the cache was already settling at Oxford, where it would be for the next 130 years. Mazza writes that many were still in the “boxes and folders where Grenfell and Hunt left them, between pages of the Oxford University Gazette.”

Collectors are often slow to gain the knowledge necessary to buy with confidence. Not so the Greens. Whereas a previous major collector acquired 1,100 papyri over the course of thirty years, “the Greens had acquired four or five times more in just five years,” Mazza writes. Their acquisitions were not only in papyri but in anything that might relate to biblical history: manuscripts, cuneiform tablets, Torah scrolls. At one point, as Moss and Baden note in Bible Nation, the Greens were buying so many objects that they actually inflated the art market. The value of comparable material began to soar, making it harder for universities to acquire new objects or insure the ones they already had.

There was a lot of money at stake for the Greens as well. Part of the family’s strategy, Mazza writes, was to have work appraised for three times higher than the amount they had paid for it, in order to claim a tax write-off: “The Green family realized that biblical collecting and the building of a museum could be an evangelical activity both blessed by God and profitable.”

Carroll himself had no discernible academic expertise in papyri, and his methods were dubious. He claimed that many of the texts in his possession had been discovered by dissolving cartonnage, the material used to wrap mummies, which was indeed often made of old papyrus. In a demonstration to students at Baylor University, he dissolved a mummy mask by plunging it in soapy water with spaghetti tongs. He wrote on Facebook:

Baylor-mania update: One less mummy mask BUT new papyri texts of Homer, Euripides, Thucydides, the earliest-known text of Romans and numerous large sections of the most-illusive and valuable of all Greek works—the lyricist SAPPHO!! This will be front page London Times news! Woohoo.

It was a trick: Carroll had brought many of the fragments with him and released them in the washed-out cartonnage. Nonetheless, he proudly posted about his discoveries in videos and Facebook updates: “I have also identified several biblical texts and other lost classical works! Beats golfing on a Saturday afternoon.” At times he didn’t seem especially interested in the papyri fragments themselves, which he referred to as “thingamajigs.”

This sleight of hand also helped redirect attention from the provenance of the papyri—their previous owners and origins—which was often obscured or not given at all. Green and his team regularly evaded official channels. Traveling from the UAE in 2010, Green told the customs official that he was carrying a Bible worth over a million dollars and that because it was a devotional item he did not have to pay taxes. “They asked Green to attach a handwritten statement to the customs declaration form and let him go,” Mazza writes.

Despite widespread fraud and a well-known black market in antiquities, Green did not seem interested in where the objects he purchased came from. In 2014 Hobby Lobby bought a cuneiform tablet with lines from the Epic of Gilgamesh through the auction house Christie’s in a private sale for $1,674,000. The Christie’s brochure stated that the tablet could be tracked to a sale in 1981 (which would have predated a 1990 ban on importing such work). The documentation from Christie’s was flimsy, and in 2021 the Greens’ museum had to return the tablet to Iraq. Other objects came by unusual routes. Packages of antiquities were sent to Hobby Lobby, Mardel, and Crafts, Etc!—other companies that belong to the Green family—with labels saying they contained “ceramic tiles” or “clay tiles (sample).”

Purchases like these drew the attention of the US government. In 2017 Hobby Lobby settled TheUnited States of America v. Approximately Four Hundred Fifty Ancient Cuneiform Tablets and Approximately Three Thousand Ancient Clay Bullae for $3 million. The case described how Hobby Lobby hired an expert on cultural property law in 2010 who warned that their acquisitions carried considerable risk; nonetheless, they executed a purchase “fraught with red flags” just two months later. Hobby Lobby has since returned more than 10,000 objects to Egypt and Iraq. Other items weren’t ancient to begin with. A group of sixteen Dead Sea Scroll fragments were notable for the passages of the Bible they bore; they turned out to be modern forgeries, written not on parchment but on a rough material that experts concluded may be ancient shoe leather.

In acquiring ancient objects at such a frantic pace, the Greens and their associates also obscured much information about the provenance of the objects they’d acquired. A Coptic translation of Paul’s letter to the Galatians popped up on eBay, only to appear in a Green exhibition Mazza visited a few years later; the explanation for its origins was inconsistent and confused. Mazza herself investigates, in a bold back-and-forth with the original eBay seller. The more details that appear, the fishier the story becomes. Ultimately the fragment was never displayed in the Museum of the Bible and instead returned to Egypt. In other cases, the elision of the history was even more bizarre. The fragment of Paul’s letter to the Romans purportedly discovered by Carroll’s soapy water trick in fact belonged to Oxford.

Obbink, a native Nebraskan, had quickly climbed the ranks of the small papyrological world and started working at Oxford in 1995. The Oxyrhynchus papyri were arguably the most important collection of ancient texts in the world. In 2012 he began to branch out into selling antiquities himself. He founded a US-based company, Oxford Ancient, followed two years later by another, Castle Folio, based in the United Kingdom and jointly owned with Mahmoud Elder, an American with ties to a prominent family of dealers in Jerusalem. Castle Folio, they wrote on LinkedIn,

began as an idea between collectors and investors with a simple question: what would it take to start a company that provided services to prepare an exhibition focusing on ancient texts and antiquities for any major public viewing?

Obbink was doing well for himself: the “castle” in the company name referred to a large stone castle, named Cottonland, that he had bought near Baylor University in Texas, where the Greens had been helping set up a papyrology chair position for him as he began to face problems at Oxford.

Obbink was general editor of the academic volumes that publish and comment on new discoveries in the Oxyrhynchus collection. In 2011, when a graduate student identified two tiny fragments from the Oxford papers as chapter 1 of the Gospel of Mark—a major find—Obbink “reserved the papyrus, something general editors often do.” Instead of keeping the fragment in the library, where it could be seen by any scholar with access to the collection, he moved it to his own rooms. It was there that Carroll and a colleague saw it for the first time. In 2013 Obbink sold the Mark fragment to Hobby Lobby, along with three other papyri from the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John. On the contract he listed the age of each text as “circa 0100 AD.” The total price was $760,000.

Obbink unearthed other marvels of dubious authenticity as well. In one of the most gripping parts of the book, Mazza describes the saga of the “New Sappho,” a purported poem by Sappho that Obbink claimed to have discovered in 2014. Mazza and others immediately raised questions about its obscure provenance; the story did not line up. Obbink claimed that it, like the other fragments, had come from “cartonnage” sold at Christie’s to an anonymous collector. Mazza pressed Christie’s for more information but was unable to learn the owner’s name. The police seized the papyrus in 2022, and so far as we know, it remains in their custody.

Despite selling the four biblical fragments, Obbink never actually sent them. Over time, Mazza writes, the Museum of the Bible began to wonder where the papyri were. Relationships “at the Oxford Papyrology Rooms were strained” thanks to Obbink’s prolonged absences. But while he assured the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Management Committee at its annual summer meeting in 2014 that he would stop working for the Green collection, he did not. An investigation found that some 120 pieces had gone missing from the Oxford Papyrology Rooms. Of those, some had been sold directly by Obbink, others through intermediaries in the United States and Turkey. In December 2017 Obbink wrote to the Hobby Lobby team to say he had sold the papyri “by mistake.” He agreed to pay them back in installments. He sent $10,000 and then stopped paying. A US court ultimately ruled by default that Obbink owed Hobby Lobby $7,085,100 plus interest for fraudulent activities. Amid all of this, a study of the Mark fragment, authored by Obbink himself with a colleague, dated it to the late second or early third century.

Mazza’s book on this investigation shows her talking with her colleagues, messaging with alleged antiquities smugglers, and sharing her own passion for provenance. Still, aspects of it seem oddly distant. It might have been revealing to have a greater sense of her own work as a trustee of the papyri. What did her colleagues think of Obbink? And what, if anything, could be said about his motivations? Money, of course, is a powerful driver—but not typically one that pushes people to ancient history in the first place. That a single scholar could have had such reach speaks to the intensely hierarchical nature of the field. Classics is often criticized for being too obsessed with “great men”; in this case, the great man may have been a thief.

In a statement that Obbink released in 2019, he said, “I am aware that there are documents being used against me which I believe have been fabricated in a malicious attempt to harm my reputation and career. I am working with my legal team in this regard.” According to court papers, Obbink has been living on a houseboat in Oxford. He has not, Mazza writes, been charged in England.