In the lawsuit filed in New York, Hobby Lobby says Dirk Obbink, a 64-year-old professor of papyrology at Oxford, sold fragments of papyrus and ancient objects worth more than seven million dollars in seven private sales between 2010 and 2013.
The Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., which was founded in 2017 by the Green family, evangelical Christians who own Hobby Lobby, temporarily displayed the fragments, which belonged to the Oxyrhynchus collection in the Sackler Library.
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri is a group of manuscripts that were discovered during the late 19th and early 20th centuries at a spot where ancient inhabitants of the city of Oxyrhynchus dumped their garbage of over 1,000 years. The collection includes more than 500,000 fragments of literary and documentary texts — written in Greek, ancient Egyptian, Coptic, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew and other languages — dating from the third century BC to the seventh century.
In the lawsuit Hobby Lobby claims, “Some of the fragments were stolen by Obbink from the Egyptian Exploration Society, the custodian of the largest collection of ancient papyri in the world.”
Obbink was arrested last March and was later released under investigation. Oxford has suspended the professor.