Evangelical trade in Biblical antiquities in the United States: It is still happening

Would you like to see plenty of “Biblical” antiquities of unknown provenance including some forgeries too? Then download the two pdf brochures that a Mr Brandon Witt is circulating to institutions and individuals for sale (the second version seems to imply that some items have been indeed sold).

The Ancient Word_48_BW (2)Download

The Ancient Word_2022_BWDownload

Many of the pieces seem related with Scott Carroll and other evangelical dealers/collectors/morons. Cuneiform tablets, the usual Ptolemaic papyrus from cartonnage, a post-2002 Dead Sea scroll fragment and late antique parchments. Real, forgeries or replicas? Who knows? Only Torah scrolls seem missing from the cabinet of curiosities, probably none has been left after Hobby Lobby and later Ken and Barbara Larson swept the market.

I sent an email to Mr Witt to fix a call and listen at the story of how he came in the possession of this remarkable assortment, but he says he has “a couple other big deals” which are taking up a lot of his time – frightening, as I can’t imagine what else he is trying to sell.

To me it is a mystery why American evangelicals seem entitled to sell their unprovenanced and forged Biblical trinkets without any consequences.

I had thought to speak about the past at next week conference on The Market for Biblical Antiquities (1852-2022), but then the present is so remarkable I will have to discuss it, too…

Details on how to participate here:

https://www.uia.no/arrangementer/the-market-for-biblical-antiquities-1852-2022

From Athens to Washington via London: The story of a stolen and found medieval codex of the four Gospels

GA 2120 in the exhibit case. Screenshot from the MOTB Facebook video: https://www.facebook.com/museumoftheBible/videos/1776418095806474/

For once, I am writing in praise of my friends of the Washington Museum of the Bible. They seem to have (finally!) understood what provenance means and implies, and are going to give back a medieval codex to its legitimate owner, the University of Athens.

A video posted on Facebook explains how a Byzantine vellum manuscript containing the four canonical Gospels was stolen from Athens, ended in the United States via London in 2010, and will be repatriated this coming October. I am not surprised this has happened considering the way Mr Green acquired on the market in those years, with the help (so to speak) of Scott Carroll, but the story is fascinating and I am very happy the Museum seems to have taken the right path in cleaning-up their warehouses. Critics might comment that this is a MOTB’s communication strategy to restore the bad reputation gained in recent years: maybe yes, but I welcome the change of direction and the fact that through operations like this one, we will have access to invaluable information on the flux of manuscripts on the illicit and grey market, as it will be apparent at the end of this blog post. I have been very clear on the questionable source of at least part of the Green papyri that I hope will be similarly studied and then sent back to Egypt: what has happened with this twelfth century manuscript seems indeed a good start. But as I was saying, the story, which is currently at the centre of a well thought but rather dull display in the Museum (do find a better graphic designer, please…), has many interesting sides that deserve to be considered.

The chain of modern ownership of the codex goes back to Spyridon Lampros (1851–1919), a Greek classicist and politician, who taught at the University of Athens where he also served as Provost. Lampros’ legacy was inherited by the daughter, Lina Tsaldari, who was his assistant, had a political career too, and in 1964 donated her father’s collection of manuscripts, including the codex in question, to the University’s Byzantine Seminar. The Byzantine book has been well known and studied, and has been recorded by specialists as Gregory Aland 2120.

Then in 1987 the University of Athens established a History Museum and GA 2120 was one of four artefacts to be borrowed from the Seminar in order to be on exhibit. The codex went missing (= stolen, as it is now clear) most probably between 1987 and 1991, since that year a museum inventory did not include it. This is a typical story that demonstrates how fragile manuscripts and other cultural heritage objects are, even those owned by Universities and other public institutions that in theory should protect them for future study and care.

GA 2120 re-emerged in December 1998, when it was sold on auction at Sotheby’s, London. Unsurprisingly the auction catalogue entry did not offer a single line on the collection history of the Gospels book. Moreover it did not recognise the manuscript as GA 2120 and had a misleading inaccurate description. For instance, the book scribe was wrongly identified as the famous Theodor Hagiopetrides, while he is in fact a less renowned monk Theodoros the Sinner as the colophon, which was even included in the catalogue, showed (this raises the question if some collectors are indeed able to understand and appreciate the manuscripts they buy…). Of course the identification with a famous scribe raised the price nicely for the (illicit) owner and Sotheby’s: they know how to sell at Sotheby’s, that’s their job. We are miles away from cultural heritage protection and study so collectors, please, get to grip with it and try to avoid to be cheated so easily.

To my mind, the inaccuracy of the entry of the Sotheby’s catalogue can only be explained in two ways: either Sotheby’s manuscript curators were embarrassingly incompetent or the entry was voluntarily deceptive. Both hypotheses are disturbing. By that time the manuscript had also lost some pages (Sotheby’s records 261, while the codex had 263 according to older catalogues). It should be brought in mind that thieves do not take care of manuscripts and unscrupulous book dealers sometimes dismember codices in order to sell them more easily and for higher sums.

Equally disturbing are some other aspects of the following vicissitudes of GA 2120. A bookplate seems to show that at some point it was with Rick Adams, the internet entrepreneur and collector, then in 2010 it was sold to Mr Green by “a rare book dealer in London”. Mr Green and his people have the habit to protect unscrupulous dealers, so we will never be told who this one is.

In conclusion, the life of our codex demonstrates twice (Sotheby’s and the rare book dealer) that London is indeed a good location for stolen manuscripts to be cleaned and then sold for high prices, through methods that may include dismembering and producing deceptive catalogue entries for collectors, like Mr Adams and Mr Green, easy to be fooled. Let us also bear in mind that each single collector who is aware that a dealer has dismembered, mutilated or ruined a manuscript and does not denounce this shame publicly is complicit in the destruction of human cultural heritage. Finally, I would also like to highlight that despite the key role in the legal and illegal market in antiquities, the United Kingdom has a tiny, understaffed Art and Antiquities Squad of three people based in London who try to fight an impossible fight. For the joy of the crooks.

(I wish to thank my colleague and friend Tommy Wasserman who discovered the real identity of the book while working for the Green/MOTB, and has discussed some aspects of the story with me. Opinions expressed in this post are exclusively mine)

The Museum of the Bible press releases:

http://demoss.com/newsrooms/museumofthebible/news/museum-of-the-bible-solves-mystery-of-missing-greek-manuscript-will-return

https://www.museumofthebible.org/press/press-releases/museum-of-the-bible-solves-mystery-of-missing-greek-manuscript-will-return-artifact-to-rightful-owners

Frustration Week

Dear readers I should say this has been a week of social media and e-commerce failures. Having all been invited by the Museum of the Bible to join the @AskACurator ‏ day on Wednesday on Twitter, I thought to send a number of questions about provenance and guess what? Not a single one was answered. Others went unanswered too, but I have been asking since 2014, after all I felt I had to be treated with some respect. Even Mr Ask A Curator had a say…

Sadly not all questions can get answered on #askacurator – it’s just the nature of the beast 🙂

— Ask A Curator (@AskACurator) September 15, 2017

 

Anyway, I brought my frustration to eBay and it went even worse. Two papyrus fragments appeared on sale from a German account, evangelist75, an interesting chap who according to his feedback report has sold quite a number of antiquities of all sorts, including other “interesting old Coptic papyrus sheets”, as he calls and sometimes misspells them. For once I give mine and my colleagues’ expertise: those just sold, one for £ 48.93 and the other for £ 77.75, are fakes (although the papyrus sheets might be genuine or faked better than the texts: hard to say). Actually they are hilarious fakes considering the Facebook comments when my friend Alin Suciu posted the links.

So the buyers have been cheated, which I really enjoy since these papyri would have never been acquired by responsible collectors. Mr evangelist75 has in fact told me via the eBay chat: “I have purchased from an antique dealer in Germany about 20 years ago and comes from nord Egyptian area. ” Maybe he had been cheated too? Who knows…

In the light of previous experiences, I did not bother this time to fill the eBay form for irregularities, since all those I sent have remained unanswered so far. I went straight to Twitter and talked to eBay through their @AskeBay account. This is what I got back (click on the link here below and you’ll see all the conversation):

Interesting old coptic papyrus sheet https://t.co/0gy5h5PMaV via @eBay_UK except it's FAKE…

— Roberta Mazza (@papyrologyatman) September 16, 2017

Isn’t it amazing? Those fancy people in the Silicon Valley know how get by in this world. They earn tons of money and pretend us all to make their job of monitoring FOR FREE!!! If I were not the lady I am, I would pass at this point to Italian body language. But never mind, after all it is Sunday and frustration week will be ended soon.

The eBay experience

It is a while that I am chasing my Turkish friend Mixantik-Ebuyerrrr, who is selling his papyrus fragments and other merchandise via eBay since 2008. Although he likes to call himself Robert, we actually know that this is not his real name; soon or later we will delve into his interesting story. But never mind, today I’d like to talk about the e-commerce platform through which Robert and others can freely and easily offer their manuscripts and other antiquities for sale in a very convenient way. Convenient for buyers, sellers and above all for those who own the platform in question: eBay is listed 310 in the 2017 Fortune list of the 500 world leading companies. It is hard to quantify the overall amount of antiquities (licit and illicit, genuine and fake) which are exchanged through the platform, but to give you an idea of the size and profit margins, today there are 1,531 Egyptian antiquities and 3,974 antique (sic) manuscripts on sale through the UK platform, only to mention objects at the centre of my interest.

So let us consider the case of a responsible collector looking for papyri on eBay. Among the fragments recently on sale there have been two offered by luck_button, a user active since 26 September 2003 and based, as my friend Robert, in Turkey. As you can see from the screenshot above and checking the link (papyrus 1, papyrus 2), the seller specifies with a bizarre sense of pride that there is no provenance or document on any of the two. I do not want to give my expertise on the scraps, so I am afraid but I won’t tell you anything about their date, writing, if they are genuine, etc. I am just concentrating on matters of legality and ethics, which should come first.

Turkey has ratified the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property of 1970 in 1981 and as a consequence has put very strict legislation in place for the protection of its cultural heritage. The main law for the protection of antiquities was issued in 1983; antiquities are ownership of the State, their commerce is illegal and penalties are harsh. It is fresh news that a British tourist trying to bring back ancient coins, which he found while snorkelling, is now detained in Turkey. In our case, however, the papyrus fragments are not from Turkey, but are originally from Egypt; their legal status could seem ambiguous. Nevertheless, since Mr luck_button is openly stating that they are unprovenanced and there are no documents on the acquisition history of the fragments, what is happening has high probability to be illegal and the fragments look like illicit fragments in transit through Turkey. Moreover, the seller candidly explains that he sends the merchandise through the standard Turkish post, as he has clearly done so far on the basis of his trade-history: what about customs duties? In a world where nations seem to have the less and less resources to control borders, it has become quite simple to send things around without any systematic check on the contents of packages. Never mind issues of conservation etc.

So in the light of this far from reassuring picture, a responsible collector would certainly avoid buying the fragments and would try, instead, to contact eBay in order to alert them on the situation. Here problems start. Any item on sale could be reported through a form that you should fill according to some pre-existent, standard criteria. In fact, none of them really fit to antiquities. Anyway, I made an experiment filling the form as best as I could few days ago. Nothing has happened and in the meanwhile the fragments have been sold to two anonymous irresponsible collectors: one for 512 and the other for 141 dollars.

e-Bay policies on the sale of antiquities varies from one country to another, in view of the different legislation regulating the market and approaches towards cultural heritage protection. For instance, eBay Germany policy openly forbids the selling of antiquities without accompanying documents regarding their acquisition history . The policy of eBay US seems less restrictive, or at least not so explicit, and gives some specific guidelines only regarding Native American cultural heritage. As for the UK, to my knowledge the only attempt made to regulate the nature of the antiquities sold on eBay concerns exclusively UK archaeological finds. This seems a narrow minded, nation-focussed approach for a country with a rich legal (and illegal) patrimony of antiquities originating from other countries on its territory, as a result of its imperial past, and a thriving antiquities market more in general.

As an academic who feels responsible of the objects I study, I had been able in the past to get in contact directly with the eBay policy office and they usually act quickly when some bids are flagged as potentially illegal. But it is clear that more proactive and structural measures should be put in place to tackle the problem.

The reality is that everything seems allowed because too many collectors/dealers, as the two who purchased the papyri at the centre of this post, do not respect the laws and ethics underpinning such exchanges (before you even start with a pointless counter-argument, I am afraid to say that no, darling, eventual ignorance of the laws does not excuse them). Moreover, eBay policies enforcement seems inefficient at best, and police active control is also low, even more so in the UK where the Art and Antiques Unit seems to be under threat of closure. Despite all the rhetoric on heritage preservation, and the amount of public money put in various programs, the truth is that this kind of everyday unregulated and unethical (when not illegal) market is slowly killing our cultural heritage in the open and apparently with the consent of everyone implied in the transactions.

Bibliography note:

I learnt a lot from reading J. Anglim Kreder, J. Nintrup, “Antiquity meets the modern age: eBay’s potential criminal liability for counterfeit and stolen international antiquity sale” Journal of Law, Technology & the Internet 5 (2014) 143–178 and N. Brodie, “The Internet Market in Antiquities” in F. Desmarais ed. Countering Illicit Traffic in Cultural Goods: The Global Challenge of Protecting the World’s Heritage Paris: ICOM 2015.

 

Speaking of Prices: The Wyman Fragment

The Wyman fragment. Screenshot from the 2012 Sotheby’s catalogue

On the 3^rd of July 1950, Leland C. Wyman, a professor at Boston University, bought a small fragment of parchment with Greek writing on it in Cairo. According to the dealer, the fragment had been found by some local people in al-Fusṭāṭ, a story which might or might not be true as correctly noted by the first editor, W.H.P. Hatch.

The parchment, which has received different palaeographical dating ranging from the second half of the second century to the second half of the fourth century AD, bears some lines from Paul’s Romans chapters 4 and 5 attesting interesting variants. It is registered as 0220/20220 in the official list of New Testament manuscripts.

The Wyman fragment was sold through Sotheby’s, London twice: in 1988 by Wyman’s heirs and in 2012 by the 1988 purchaser, the Norwegian businessman and collector Martin Schøyen. At the first auction (21 June 1988, lot 47) the fragment had an estimate of £ 15.000-20.000, but reached the final price of £ 95.000. A similarly high increase was obtained at the 2012 auction, when from the estimate £ 150,000-200,000 the price went up to £ 301,250. The sum in this last case was paid by the Green family, who have later donated the manuscript to their Museum of the Bible.

So what does determine prices of ancient manuscripts these days? I am not entirely sure since as I said already in this blog and elsewhere the market (legal and illegal) is secretive by its own nature and we can collect only partial data on prices through publicly available auctions’ catalogues, or information that collectors and dealers are eventually happy to provide. Certainly those collectors who are opening public museums will be sharing price information; therefore I should add that in order to obtain a clearer picture of the economy surrounding world cultural heritage objects, it would be very helpful to add also appraisals to contrast and compare. We tend to forget that manuscripts and other antiquities are investment goods at the centre of interesting economic besides cultural enterprises that are worth studying.

In any case we may infer that prices are determined by a combination of factors, not necessarily in this order:

1. The importance of a piece. In the case of the Wyman fragment its Christian content, the early – although debated as above mentioned, see e.g. W. Clarysse and P. Orsini recent re-dating to 350-400 AD – date and its rarity.
2. Documented provenance. In this case pre-1972 purchase seems to be enough to make everybody happy. But legality on these questions is more a point of view than a firm subject since there was already Egyptian legislation on the antiquities market which was not always respected.
3. The presence on the market of wealthy collectors as Martin Schøyen and the Green family/Museum of the Bible, who invest large sums of money on acquisitions for various reasons.
4. Finally, marketing i.e. the way dealers and auction houses pack the merchandise they sell. In this specific case it was an easy job, in view of the contents and features of the fragment and the academic literature produced on it.