
Greek New Testament Papyrus Is Discovered on EBay - hvo
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/21/books/greek-new-testament-papyrus-is-discovered-on-ebay.html?ref=books
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themadcreator
"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!"

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golergka
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.

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nemo
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.

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veddox
> 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...

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coliveira
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.

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veddox
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...

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pervycreeper
“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?

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest)

Quite a bit of ancient writings survived in that form.

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pervycreeper
The fragment referenced in the article was written on papyrus.

