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Patron Bonus Episode [Unlocked] - The Case of the Stolen Gospels
29 Plays4 years ago
Josh and M discuss the curious case of the stolen gospel (of Luke), and the most likely suspect, Dr. Dirk Obbink, papyrologist at Oxford.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Word Game
00:00:08
Speaker
It's the podcast's guide to the conspiracy patron bonus episode. In a break from tradition, rather than introduce Josh as someone who he isn't, I thought we'd do a word game. I will say one word, Josh will follow that word up with another word, and we'll try and construct a very quick story and hope that Josh doesn't use the word penis almost immediately when I say the.
00:00:41
Speaker
I've made it fine. I've got the penis out of my system, I can carry
Stolen Gospel Scandal
00:00:54
Speaker
on. Well, you know, it's been in there for a while, so it had to come out eventually. Welcome to the Patreon bonus episode of the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, where Josh can only think of one thing and that thing is...
00:01:06
Speaker
Yes, well actually this is a really quite fascinating little story to be told. So it was originally published over in The Guardian and it's called A Scandal in Oxford The Curious Case of the Stolen Gospel and I would recommend after listening to this episode why not go read the story because I don't think we're going to do it justice. The story really is quite fascinating.
00:01:35
Speaker
Now, the short version of it, Dr. Dirk Obnak, a paparologist at Oxford University, stands accused of stealing and selling ancient documents to the Green family, who, if you're a long-term listener to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, you might go, aren't they the owners of Hobby Lobby? And didn't they get in trouble a few years ago for
00:02:04
Speaker
illegally importing artefacts from Iraq into the US for a museum they were making devoted to the Bible. Yes they are. And also put it out, Hobby Lobby are an incredibly conservative Christian organisation. Yes, so Christian, well I mean the owners of Hobby Lobby at least and I guess they put their values into their company but
00:02:31
Speaker
We talked about it was it was I think more than 100 episodes now a few years ago. They got into a lot of trouble because they're making this this Christian museum essentially and they've been buying up as many ancient artifacts from biblical times or at least close to biblical times to put on display. And it was found that some of these artifacts had been smuggled out of Iraq illegally and indeed
00:02:56
Speaker
Essentially, not only was this illegal and they ended up having to pay three million dollars because of it, and I assume give the things back, but the people who they were paying to smuggle these artifacts out of Iraq essentially funneled the money back to ISIS. So you had a conservative Christian company basically funding ISIS.
00:03:18
Speaker
Yes, funding Islamic terrorism, something which the American government, at least back then, was not particularly keen on. So this all apparently got in motion because of one particular
The Papyrus Investigation
00:03:30
Speaker
papyrus fragment. I mean, Dr. Robin, his thing is studying these papyrus fragments, which, you know, obviously they're written in ancient languages, they're tiny scraps and fragments. It's quite painstaking work to actually decipher them at times.
00:03:45
Speaker
But supposedly there was a piece of papyrus that contained a fragment of the Gospel of Mark and dated to around the first century AD. So it was almost actually contemporaneous with biblical times and was supposedly the oldest.
00:04:03
Speaker
recorded bit of the Bible at all or certainly of the Gospels known to man. Yes, it's the New Testament. We have scraps of the Old Testament which are a lot older. Yep, that would make sense. So obviously there's something Hobby Lobby would be very interested in for their museum.
00:04:19
Speaker
And in the investigation of how this ended up in their hands and all the talks about that and so on, it was discovered that more than 120 such papyrus fragments had gone missing. Now, these fragments were part of the Oxyrhynchus collection, which is owned by the Egypt Exploration Society, who were formerly the Egypt Exploration
00:04:42
Speaker
something else, slightly dodgier. They're sort of, they're a legitimate organization, but they've existed from back when people were just looting the shit out of stuff and acquiring things through much more dubious means. Actually, so this is the point in time we should probably talk about the Algin marbles. Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, that's, they're coming up, aren't they?
Cultural Property Disputes
00:05:02
Speaker
Yes, so people may be aware that now that the UK is in a transitional state of leaving
00:05:09
Speaker
the EU. They're now going through trade negotiations with the EU to work out the future economic and trade relationship with the European Union. And there's going to be a whole bunch of things which people are going to want.
00:05:24
Speaker
Now one thing that a member state of the EU wants, Greece, is the Elgin marbles back because the Elgin marbles which are the marbles from the Parthenon. And not as I did for a while and as I'm finding quite a few people thought, not actual marbles that you play games of marbles with. They're statues made of marble.
00:05:45
Speaker
quite cute to think the Elgin marbles, these are the marbles that Pythagoras used to use when he was playing in the school layout. So these are these are freezers basically of lots of exciting Greek myths and Greece is going we want those back because you took them during the Turkish occupation of Greece well over a century and a half ago
00:06:09
Speaker
And you took them illegitimately. Now, the British Museum, which currently houses and stores and claims to have the moral right. Oh, I don't know what's going on there. Hello. OK, we're in the midst of recording, but I'll come and deal with it now. Just
00:06:40
Speaker
As you know, I won't pause it. I'll let you vamp. I deal with a large wetter. We're not going to cut this bit out there. No, you shouldn't. OK. You should explain to the listeners, because we do have some long New Zealand listeners, what a wetter is. I will. Very well, then. Emma's off to deal with a rather large wetter that the cat has just apparently brought in. If you're not from New Zealand, you may not be aware what a wetter is. It's basically the largest species of cricket in the world, as far as I'm aware.
00:07:09
Speaker
They're kind of cool, actually. I think, like, I'm not a fan of spiders and creepy crawlies and all that, but I think wetters are actually kind of cool. They're like a sort of industrial-strength-looking cricket. They're sort of big and horny and spiky and quite armored. The ones we get around here would have a body that's, I don't know, like the bigger ones might have a body that's sort of an inch or two long. But you can, there is the giant cave wetter, which I believe is like the
00:07:36
Speaker
heaviest insect in the world or something which these are these are powerfully built insects anyway so so em is off to apparently to evict one of these from the house so uh that'll be that'll be an adventure i'm sure um but while that's going on i'll just carry on here so the um yeah basically the ees um
00:08:01
Speaker
is in possession of scraps of papyrus and other things, which in past times they might have acquired through more dodgy means, but apparently these days...
00:08:15
Speaker
they're a little bit more legit. I don't know if it's sort of light with the Elgin Marbles where they sort of retrospectively decided that no, this stuff we have is legitimate now and really it isn't. I did see someone the other day saying that it's a bit weird to call them the Elgin Marbles in the first place, naming them after the guy who stole them, essentially. That would be like me coming round to your house, stealing all your clothes and then referring it to it as the Josh Wardrobe. But anyway,
00:08:42
Speaker
And the oxyrencus collection apparently was quite the trove. They discovered it was only fairly recent. It was this century. They found what was basically sort of a rubbish dump, essentially, an ancient rubbish dump that had
00:09:00
Speaker
had, I believe, in the order of millions of tiny scraps of papyrus from all over the place. So it's apparently a really significant collection and one that's going to take a very, very, very long time to actually sort through. And so what people like Dr. Obink do is they'll take one of these scraps or a collection, I suppose, if they can be matched to each other,
00:09:25
Speaker
and then spend a lot of time working out exactly what they say, and then at that point they publish. They will put out in somewhere a journal, here's this scrap, here's what we think it is, here's what it says, and then that becomes, you know, that's part of the academic publication. Oh, you're back. Is the wetter gone?
00:09:45
Speaker
The wetter is outside. Was it big? It was actually quite a big one. Yeah, good. I was just saying, I don't like creepy crawlies and spiders, but I actually think wetters are kind of cool. Yeah,
Missing Artifacts Audit
00:09:57
Speaker
I do too, actually. Maybe it's just sort of parochialism since they're natives, but I don't feel that way about native spiders, so I don't know.
00:10:03
Speaker
Anyway, I was just talking about the process by which these papiruses... The article says papyri, which I object to. I do too. I think it's... We pluralise in English in this country anyway. Yes, and it sounds a little bit... Doesn't it? But yeah, it's a thing that some Latin words get an eye on the end, but I don't think papyrus is even a Latin word.
00:10:29
Speaker
No, I think it's great. I'm pretty sure it's Greek. Yeah. So at any rate, people, these things get published. Oh, another another little, another little side note there is that they're housed at Oxford's Sackler Library. Oh, now Sackler.
00:10:46
Speaker
I know that name. You do. You certainly do. Something like Poodoo? Pooey Sackler? Yes, no, this is the actual Sacklers who own Purdue, who produce Oxycontin, who are embroiled in all sorts of conspiracy theories these days. Now, apparently the Sackler Library was gifted to the university by sort of not the current generation of Sacklers, but their father, who I believe is now deceased.
00:11:10
Speaker
And that is a thing the Sacklers have, you know, do donate a lot of money to universities and stuff, and universities now are starting to actually say, no, we don't want your money, thank you, because you're responsible for a massive drug epidemic in the States. But anyway, that's just an interesting little side note. But yes, so the EES did an audit once this fragment of the Gospel of Mark showed up, and people were like, hang on, it doesn't?
00:11:37
Speaker
that belong in the Orchi Rinkis collection which is owned by the EES and the EES has not been selling things to the greens so what the hell is going on here? Did this audit, found 120 missing and then the gardening article as we talked about goes into a lot of detail of exactly how they sort of tracked this down and who was dealing with whom and sort of wacky figures and then
00:11:59
Speaker
supposedly there is documentation involved showing sort of sales agreements between Dr. Obink and the likes of the Greens and so on, which finger him for the crime.
Sting Operation & Evidence
00:12:11
Speaker
Now he denies everything doesn't he? He does, he claims that yes he had meetings with people about things and yes there were sales of other things but because he also
00:12:24
Speaker
apart from being a tenured academic, also sells an antiquities exporting business. No, no, no, those are bits I got from elsewhere. The greens are simply mistaken. Maybe I was talking about something from the library and they thought they were buying it, but I was never selling stuff from the library and I don't know what happened to the 120 pieces that went missing, even though I'm the last person to have checked them out.
00:12:52
Speaker
Now did you talk about the sting operation they did? No I did not. So this particular fragment of the Gospel of Luke is something that people have been looking forward to for quite some time because it appears to be one of the earliest fragments of a New Testament text that we've got.
00:13:13
Speaker
And people are quite curious to know how does the text compare to the standard translations we have? Are there differences? What's the context of its discovery? And so the EES produces books every year or so.
00:13:30
Speaker
which are translations and commentaries and contextualizations of the translation. And they're produced very slowly because the process of translating these fragments is painstaking and very slow. Sometimes you've got mere words or a few sentences. You might be lucky and have several pieces from the same text and you're literally playing a jigsaw game of moving the bits around trying to work out whether you can get some semblance of meaning from scraps of
00:14:00
Speaker
paper. So it takes quite some time to produce these translations, commentaries and contextualizations. So they basically set Omnic a task. A piece of text that he had taken out, which they thought had been sold to the Greens, that he had taken out, they assigned him to produce a translation.
00:14:28
Speaker
and they kept on asking him about it and they kept on waiting for it to come out and nothing was happening which they then took to be evidence that indeed that piece had been sold on because it should be in his custody and he wasn't doing anything with it at which point they did the first thing you do you're an academic which is cut off someone's access to the library
00:14:58
Speaker
Now, Dr. Robin suggests that perhaps he's being framed, that these documents that have his name on them are forgeries specifically to frame him for the job. But the evidence doesn't look good. I mean, the idea that there's just been some sort of a mix up
00:15:17
Speaker
doesn't look too realistic when you learn that not only did 120-odd papyrus fragments go missing, so did the catalog records that referred to them in the first place. So not only were these fragments taken, but also someone tried to remove any evidence that they were there in the first place, which is what you probably want to do if you're stealing something from a collection.
00:15:41
Speaker
Unfortunately, whoever did this doesn't seem to have been aware that the EES did have a backup cataloging system, which is basically a microfessional, something like that, which they were able to use in cross-reference and find out what had gone missing. So A, this seems to have been something very deliberate and B, it certainly seems to have been an inside job if someone at the very, you may not have known or may not have been able to get at the backup catalogs, but definitely knew enough to get rid of the regular catalogs.
00:16:09
Speaker
So it's all a little bit dodgy. And then we come to the subject of mummy masks.
Mummy Masks & Forgeries
00:16:15
Speaker
We do. So here in lies an interesting little tale. So mummy masks, the masks that were put on mummified corpses in both ancient Egypt and the kind of Greco-Roman era of Egypt, were made from what we would today call paper mache.
00:16:37
Speaker
So you'd basically get scraps of papyrus, you would put them into a vat with some kind of gluey substance, you would then create cartonnage, and then you would sculpt a mask out of that, paint the mask, and then put it on the corpse, put it in the ground. Which means you're taking papyrus, you're rendering it into a kind of papier-mâché-like stuff, and then putting it into the dry, dry ground.
00:17:05
Speaker
Now, cartonnage was also used as packing material during the Greek and Roman periods in the Mediterranean. In the same way that we use foam and polystyrene as a packing material, the ancients used cartonnage to do it.
00:17:24
Speaker
Now it turns out the process of making cartonnage is not destructive. You can basically reverse it. You take cartonnage, you put it in water and then very slowly the glue dissolves and you can just tease apart the scraps of papyrus and get the text back. Now there is now a trade in papyrus fragments which apparently come from mummy masks because
00:17:55
Speaker
Whilst there are rules about the exporting of treasured cultural artefacts, artefacts that have already left Egypt and exist in other people's collections are often exempt from these things.
00:18:11
Speaker
So you can take a historical artifact like a mummy mask, render it down into its individual scraps and hope to find a lost bit of Aristotle. But also there are people who sell things like mummy masks, especially cat mummy masks and the like in
00:18:27
Speaker
Egypt as tourists at which are not controlled by the antiquities in Egypt or considered to be antiquities abroad because of how common these things are. And so these papyral fragments are apparently being rendered from these masks
00:18:44
Speaker
which is actually a very convenient way to hide the provenance of a piece of text. I didn't take it from a library or steal it. I had this mummy mask over here which I dissolved in water and it miraculously had bits of the gospel of Luke in it and you can't prove otherwise.
00:19:04
Speaker
Yes, I mean, of course, this is not with our controversy. There are a lot of people who strenuously object to the idea of destroying ancient artefacts, even if you're doing it to get at other ancient texts. It's still, you know, there are a lot of people who think that's just not all. You have no guarantee you're going to get anything exciting from it whilst you are actually destroying something. Hundreds of thousands of years old. Not hundreds of thousands of years. Hundreds or thousands of years old.
00:19:32
Speaker
That makes a lot more sense, otherwise we have to have a discussion about history. But as people have pointed out, the fact that this is possible makes a very convenient way to to launder, essentially, bits of papyrus that may have either been obtained through illegal means, you can say, oh no, it just came from this legally obtained mummy mask, or even faked forged artifacts
00:19:59
Speaker
you don't have to establish any sort of provenance when you can just say, oh, no, I got it out of this mummy mask that I dissolved. And you can't tell me otherwise. And indeed, there are suggestions that Dr. Robert may have been involved in this in some way in particular. Now, if you've just listened to the main episode, you know, we promised you ancient lesbians and we deliver the only ancient lesbian who I'm aware of, of course, is the poet Sappho.
00:20:24
Speaker
I think it published fragments of papyrus containing text written by Sappho, apparently, or was written by her or just of her works. I think they were transcriptions of the poems, but missing poems.
00:20:41
Speaker
which were supposedly abstracted. Is it cartonnage or cartonnage? It looks like an academic... I expect it to be a little bit French. Well, yes, I mean, given that almost all work on ancient Egypt is actually German originally and Germans use French as their academic language. Who knows? At any rate, whatever you call it, supposedly these fragments were extracted in this method, but then there was some
00:21:08
Speaker
There were suggestions that maybe this was not on the level because Dr. Robynx supplied photographs of the rendering process and showing these things being extracted, but supposedly there also exist photographs of the fragments on display that are dated from before the photographs of the extraction process, which is that some people say, hang on, this
00:21:33
Speaker
How can you have photos of them if they hadn't supposedly at that date been extracted? Is this all just a ruse and these things are fake or something and you just, you know, shared photographs of completely different fragments being rented out or what? Because cartonnage basically looks like cartonnage.
00:21:53
Speaker
So it's a very convenient way to launder an artefact and go, no, no, I got it legitimately from this block of cartonnage as opposed to I probably exported it from a jurisdiction that I'm not allowed to export artefacts from.
Conspiracy Summary
00:22:09
Speaker
So there's certainly the suggestion that even the central figure in this whole scandal might have been up to dodgy dealings of that nature as well.
00:22:18
Speaker
So yeah, it's just a really interesting story. It is. Very interesting in conspiracy and ancient history and all sorts of stuff and an interesting look at the world of ancient document smuggling slash laundering. So yes, so the other option I thought for
00:22:36
Speaker
this patron bonus episode was going to be the discussion about the mysterious whereabouts of the Salvador Mundi, the Leonardo da Vinci painting, which apparently a UAA prince currently owns. But I think we might do that next time around and do a bit of a bit of art history conspiracising Dan Brown-esque malarkey. A bit of the classics, yep.
00:23:00
Speaker
There you go. As we said at the start, go and have a look. If this sounds interesting to you and you'd like to go more, definitely go to the Guardian and look for A Scandal in Oxford, The Curious Case of the Stolen Gospel, because they do go into quite a lot of detail about
00:23:16
Speaker
sort of apparently was quite interesting in that you had a lot of the sort of early detective work being done by these academic societies who normally are quite sort of dry and fusty but were suddenly, you know, posting breaking news to their blogs about the developments and this thing. But it does go into the sting operations, the various dodgy people involved, the techniques, the detective work that they've used to uncover this and to find out information behind it and so on.
00:23:44
Speaker
All of which goes into a lot more detail than we can cover here and now. Indeed. So there you go. End bonus content for another week. With bonus, wetter, excitement, malarkey. Yeah, there you go.
Listener Engagement & Humor
00:23:58
Speaker
If you're not in New Zealander and you don't know what a wetter looks like, go look up wetter, W-E-T-A, and either shriek in horror or say, oh, that's actually quite a cool looking bug. But make sure you get a size comparison because
00:24:11
Speaker
It's not a small insect. I mean there are small ones. But the ones that people tend to get concerned about when they enter the house are quite large. So there we go. I think we're done for another week so we'll say goodbye to you and once again obviously thank you and you are indeed our favourite human beings out of all the human beings currently in existence and probably most of the ones that used to exist as well.
00:24:35
Speaker
Yes because actually a lot of people in the past were not we're not patrons of this podcast and frankly we do look down upon them yeah especially your great great grandfather they should have really I really looked down upon him for not for not sponsoring this podcast back in 1756.
00:24:51
Speaker
No, they should have had the foresight to predict the advent of podcasts and their ancestors. Imagine if your great-great-great grandfather had opened up a bank account and simply put one penny a month into that bank account. And then the compound interest on that today would keep us in a life of luxury. But no, stinking ancestors and their lack of prognostication
00:25:17
Speaker
I'm just thinking, you're going to have descendants who are going to do what is the future equivalent of a podcast if the world doesn't end in 12 years. And they're going to be saying exactly the same thing about you. You better be putting a dollar a month into a bank account to support your descendants equivalent of podcasting in the future. I probably should. So while we go off and readjust our finances, we will bid you a fond farewell. I'm not planning to have any offspring, so I don't have to worry about this at all.
00:25:47
Speaker
but maybe you could just be a general sort of patron just to... Just future generations in general can benefit from your largess. A trust in 300 years time chooses the closest equivalent to the podcast's guide to the conspiracy and then endows them with the compounded interest of the money that we put aside. I like your thinking. Yeah, clever. Right, well we go and work on that. We'll see you all later. Toodly pip pip!
00:26:16
Speaker
Penis!