Greek New Testament Papyrus Is Discovered on EBay | Hacker News Reader

Greek New Testament Papyrus Is Discovered on EBay

nytimes.com

63 pointshvo11 comments

"It needs to be available for research, to be put on display."

It seems like this artifact studying Dr. Jones is really trying to avoid saying "It belongs in a museum!"

Excellent catch!! (themadcreator is being quite literal - look, here is the article:

>>“History doesn’t belong to one person,” said Brice C. Jones, a papyrus expert who tracks online sales, and who wrote about the eBay listing on his blog the same day Dr. Smith noticed it, inadvertently sending bids shooting up.

>>“Collectively, globally, it’s ours,” continued Dr. Jones, who also communicated with the seller, who wishes to remain anonymous. “It needs to be available for research, to be put on display.”

Here is the more famous Dr. Jones saying just that - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-abUtRbUS_U (no sound at the moment, I trust it's the right one.)

Well, isn't it up to taxpayers to allocate the money and to the voters to elect officials who will spend this money on this eBay lot?

Because yes, it belongs to a museum, but right now it's private property. On sale. So, if you want to take it to the museum, you just have to pay the price.

Well obviously if that's the way this person feels, that's their legal right. But it's not like they have a moral responsibility to sell it for a market price, do they?

Many museums are privately owned and funded - the luckier ones have endowments. While some items are donated by patrons, when items show up on the market museums do purchase them. This isn't really a government funding problem, most museums in the US get most of their funding from private donations. (While ancient manuscript fragments are purchased by museums, the larger collections are held by academic libraries, and while those do need public funding, they typically do have the ability to purchase items relevant to their collections.)

The reasons things got complex here was that the private party was selling an antiquity through an odd venue (a lot of antiquities are sold on eBay, but it's mostly common items of less historic interest). These sort of things would usually be sold through Sothebys, or Christie's, or some other auction house where they'd catalog the item, and make sure researchers and interested parties would be aware. This one slipped under the radar until the researcher at UT spotted it because of the fact that it was on eBay. This item turned out to be a highly historically significant find discovered by researchers too late for an institutional purchase (which is a slow process), and sold in a way that doesn't fit typical institutional purchase models.

There's also tension between academic researchers and antiquities collectors that this helped exacerbate. Antiquities collectors are seen by researchers as encouraging looting of archaeological sites and of buying historically significant items and harming the public at large by preventing the possibility of research. Many antiquities collectors, and especially dealers have their own low opinions of academics as well.

> Greek New Testament papyri are among the oldest and rarest traces of Christian scripture. Only about 130 have been recognized by the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Münster, Germany

That's about a 125 more than for most other ancient books...

The first mass-consumed book of ancient times was the Iliad. Fragments of it exist from the 3rd century BCE. There are around 1000 manuscripts of it known today. But due to the difficulty of copying ancient documents, only books considered very interesting would be reproduced and therefore most of the ancient literature perished when Greek and Roman libraries were burned down at the decline of ancient civilization. Of course, the remaining literature was exactly the religious literature of the people doing the burnings.

The surprising thing about the NT is that these fragments only start to pop up from the mid to late second century. Some of the books of the NT don't even appear until the 4th century. Which says that these books either didn't exist in the first century, or that they were not considered important to be preserved at that time, or maybe even that christianity didn't exist before the mid-second century as propagated by standard christian books.

AFAIK, the earliest fragment known of the NT dates from ~110 AD, which is only about 20 years after the last book of the NT (Revelation) was written. Considering that the oldest manuscript we have of Caesars "De Bello Gallicum" is 900 years older than the original, that's pretty good...

“If it was in a personal library, and then the same scribe turned it around to write the other text, what does that mean?”

Someone was taking notes for later private study?

Writing material wasn't as easy to come by back then:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest

Quite a bit of ancient writings survived in that form.

The fragment referenced in the article was written on papyrus.

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