Dirk Obbink

Dirk D. Obbink (born 13 January 1957 in Lincoln, Nebraska) is an American papyrologist and classicist.

He was Lecturer in Papyrology and Greek Literature in the Faculty of Classics at Oxford University until 6 February 2021, and was the head of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project until August 2016.

He attended high school in Lincoln, Nebraska, and took a BA in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1979, before earning an MA in Classical Studies and Papyrology there in 1984.

In an earlier cataloguing in the 1980s by Revel Coles, the fragment had been described as 'I/II', which appeared to be the origin of the much discussed assertions of a very early date.

In 1987, he received his PhD in Classics at Stanford University with his 1986 dissertation entitled Philodemus, De Pietate I.

After an assistant professorship at Columbia University in New York in 1995, Obbink was appointed to the post of Lecturer in Papyrology and Greek Literature in the Faculty of Classics at Christ Church, Oxford University and was appointed the head of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project.

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a large collection of ancient manuscript fragments discovered by archaeologists at an ancient rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.

They include thousands of Greek and Latin documents, letters and literary works.

From 1998 to circa 2015, Obbink was the Director of the Imaging Papyri Project at Oxford.

This project is working to capture digitised images of Greek and Latin papyri held by the Ashmolean Museum (the Oxyrhynchus Papyri), and the Bodleian Library and the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples (the carbonized scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum), for the creation of an Oxford bank of digitised images of papyri.

The newly digitised versions of the literary texts will be published.

An international team of papyrologists combine traditional philological methods with more recent digital imaging techniques.

They have made accessible heavily damaged texts from the ancient world, many of which had been regarded as being irretrievably lost.

In this way the damaged texts of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri and the Villa of the Papyri can now be read for the first time.

Obbink has made significant contributions in the fields of ancient literature, society and philosophy.

He is familiar with the poetry of Sappho or Simonides discovered in the Egyptian Oxyrhynchus papyri, as he is with the technical-philosophical writings of the Epicurean Philodemus, the text of which he helped recover from the carbonized papyrus rolls discovered in The Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum.

In 2001, Obbink was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for his work on the papyri from Oxyrhynchus and Herculaneum.

In addition, from 2003 to 2007, Obbink was a faculty member at the University of Michigan, as a professor of classical studies and the Ludwig Koenen Collegiate Professor of Papyrology.

In May 2007, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven awarded him an honorary doctorate.

In March 2010, Obbink appeared in Channel 4's series Alexandria: The Greatest City, presented by Bettany Hughes.

In the programme he talked about the ancient Library of Alexandria.

The EES stated that the text in the fragment had only been recognised as being from the Gospel of Mark in 2011.

In 2011/2012 the papyrus was in the keeping of Obbink, who had shown it to Scott Carroll, then representing the Green Collection, in connection with a proposal that it might be included in the exhibition of biblical papyri Verbum Domini at the Vatican during Lent and Easter 2012.

Pattengale stated that he had been present with Scott Carroll in Obbink's rooms in Christ Church, Oxford in late 2011, when the 𝔓137 fragment was offered for sale to the Museum of the Bible, which Pattengale then represented.

Also offered for sale were fragments of the Gospels of Matthew, Luke and John, all of which Obbink had then proposed as likely to be of a second century date, while the Mark fragment was presented as more likely first century.

According to Pattengale, he had undertaken due diligence in showing images of the four fragments to selected New Testament textual scholars, including Daniel B. Wallace – subject to their signing non-disclosure agreements in accordance with Obbink's stipulations; and the purchase was eventually finalised, with the fragments agreed to remain in Obbink's possession for research prior to publication.

Obbink and Colomo dated it to the later second or earlier third century, but rumours of its content, provenance and date had been widely discussed since 2012, fuelled by an ill-advised claim by Daniel B. Wallace in 2012 that a fragmentary papyrus of Mark had been authoritatively dated to the late first century by one of the world's leading paleographers, and might consequently be the earliest surviving Christian text.

In June 2019, the EES released a further statement following the publication by Michael Holmes of the Museum of the Bible of a contract between Obbink and Hobby Lobby dated 17 January 2013 for the sale of a number of fragmentary texts, one of which Holmes identified as P.Oxy.

LXXXIII 5345.

The Egypt Exploration Society reaffirmed its previous statement that this fragment had never been offered for sale by the EES, while offering the clarification that, in that statement, they had "simply reported Professor Obbink's responses to our questions at that time, in which he insisted that he had not sold or offered for sale the Mark fragment to the Green Collection, and that he had not required Professor Wallace to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement in relation to such a sale".

He also featured briefly in the 2015 BBC documentary Love and Life on Lesbos with Margaret Mountford, in which he showed Mountford a papyrus brought to him by an anonymous private collector in 2012 and that is now believed to be a manuscript copy, executed in about A.D. 200, of a poem written by Sappho in c. 600 B.C.

In August 2016 the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) decided not to reappoint Obbink a general editor of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri series, stating this was “because of unsatisfactory discharge of his editorial duties, but also because of concerns, which he did not allay, about his alleged involvement in the marketing of ancient texts.” In May 2018 Obbink and Daniela Colomo published the papyrus fragment P.Oxy. 5345 in volume LXXXIII of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri series of the Egypt Exploration Society.

This fragment contained portions of six verses from the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark, and was designated 𝔓137 in the standard classification of New Testament papyri.

It was not until the spring of 2016 that the EES realised that the rumoured "First Century Mark" papyrus that had become the subject of so much speculation was one and the same as their own fragment P.Oxy.

5345, whereupon Obbink and Colomo were requested to prepare it for publication.

Following publication in 2018, the EES, the owners of the papyrus fragment, released a statement clarifying both the provenance of the fragment and Obbink's role in the circumstances of misleading information subsequently emerging on social media.

Obbink was also a fellow and tutor in Greek at Christ Church Oxford, from which role he was suspended in October 2019, as a result of allegations that he had stolen some of the Oxyrhynchus papyri and sold them to the Museum of the Bible.

Obbink is of Dutch ancestry.

Obbink's father Jack was director of the Federal Housing Administration office in Omaha; his mother worked for the state government.

In the July/August 2019 issue of Christianity Today, Jerry Pattengale wrote an article in which he published for the first time his own perspectives on the 'First Century Mark' saga.