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Looting Matters' David Gill has just been cited in Bloomberg Businessweek ( Nicole Winfield, ' Doubts over Harvard claim of 'Jesus' Wife' papyrus', Bloomberg Businessweek September 19, 2012). It's about the massive press hoo-ha about an unprovenanced fragment of papyrus with a few scraps of text on it that has got some excited because it could be used as 'evidence' to support a favourite conspiracy theory. Others are angry about it being yet another freshly surfaced unprovenanced artefact being handled by an academic disregarding the ethical issues involved.
Looting Matters' David Gill has just been cited in Bloomberg Businessweek ( Nicole Winfield, ' Doubts over Harvard claim of 'Jesus' Wife' papyrus', Bloomberg Businessweek September 19, 2012). It's about the massive press hoo-ha about an unprovenanced fragment of papyrus with a few scraps of text on it that has got some excited because it could be used as 'evidence' to support a favourite conspiracy theory. Others are angry about it being yet another freshly surfaced unprovenanced artefact being handled by an academic disregarding the ethical issues involved.
Is a scrap of papyrus suggesting that Jesus had a wife authentic? Scholars on Wednesday questioned the much-publicized discovery by a Harvard scholar that a [...] fragment of papyrus provided the first evidence that some early Christians believed Jesus was married. And experts in the illicit antiquities trade also wondered about the motive of the fragment's anonymous owner, noting that the document's value has likely increased amid the publicity of the still-unproven find. [...] Some archaeologists were quick to question Harvard's ethics, noting that the fragment has no known provenance, or history of where it's been, and that its current owner may have a financial interest in the publicity being generated about it [...] "There are all sorts of really dodgy things about this," said David Gill, professor of archaeological heritage at University Campus Suffolk and author of the Looting Matters blog, which closely follows the illicit trade in antiquities. "This looks to me as if any sensible, responsible academic would keep their distance from it." He cited the ongoing debate in academia over publishing articles about possibly dubiously obtained antiquities, thus potentially fueling the illicit market. The Archaeological Institute of America, for example, won't publish articles in its journal announcing the discovery of antiquities without a proven provenance that were acquired after a UNESCO convention fighting the illicit trade [...].Personally I am gratified that others share my suspicions on the authenticity of the fragment:
Stephen Emmel, a professor of Coptology at the University of Muenster [...] questioned whether the document was authentic."There's something about this fragment in its appearance and also in the grammar of the Coptic that strikes me as being not completely convincing somehow," he said in an interview on the sidelines of the conference. Another participant at the congress, Alin Suciu, a papyrologist at the University of Hamburg, was more blunt. "I would say it's a forgery. The script doesn't look authentic" when compared to other samples of Coptic papyrus script dated to the 4th century, he said. [...] Wolf-Peter Funk, a noted Coptic linguist [...], too, doubted the authenticity, saying the form of the fragment was "suspicious."
We then find an expression of the same sort of divergence of opinion which we tend to meet with in scholars who study the past through so-called "addressed sources" (ie those with pictures and writing on them which were created to impart information):
However, AnneMarie Luijendijk, the Princeton University expert whom King consulted to authenticate the papyrus, said the fragment fit all the rules and criteria established by the International Association of Papyrologists. She noted that papyrus fragments frequently don't have a provenance, simply because so many were removed from Egypt before such issues were of concern. She acknowledged the dilemma about buying such antiquities but said refraining from publishing articles about them is another matter. "You wouldn't let an important new text go to waste," she said.For these people the trashing of archaeological deposits and sites to get stuff out to put on the market is not an important issue, perhaps things like context and associations are not for her and her fellow classicists "important information"? I really do not follow the logic, that though she'd not buy one herself, she'll collaborate with those who do?
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