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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. 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's father Jack was director of the Federal Housing Administration office in Omaha; his mother worked for the state government. He attended Lincoln Southeast 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.[citation needed] 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. 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.
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.[failed verification]
In 2001, Obbink was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for his work on the papyri from Oxyrhynchus and Herculaneum. 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. 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 as 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. 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.
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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. 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's father Jack was director of the Federal Housing Administration office in Omaha; his mother worked for the state government. He attended Lincoln Southeast 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.[citation needed] 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. 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.
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.[failed verification]
In 2001, Obbink was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for his work on the papyri from Oxyrhynchus and Herculaneum. 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. 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 as 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. 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.