To Catch A Papyrus

Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire and his food writing website Yonder and Home. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast.

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7 Responses

  1. fillyjonk says:

    “Beware Florida men bearing papyrii”?

    Can’t tell, though, if she was complicit or merely deeply gullible.Report

  2. CJColucci says:

    Fascinating stuff.Report

  3. Saul Degraw says:

    “To Catch A Papyrus”

    ISWYDTReport

  4. Em Carpenter says:

    Florida Man continues to find new ways to menace the populace.Report

  5. Jaybird says:

    Reading that article:

    She declined to present photographs when she first announced the papyrus to her colleagues. That would have immediately raised alarms, that she didn’t give her own colleagues the evidence needed to evaluate the papyrus. And she didn’t even mention the other piece in the collection, a fragment supposedly from the Gospel of John, which top scholars of Coptic had marked as a forgery within hours of seeing it.

    “The felt tip pen was not in use until sometime around (or a little bit before) 1910, when Lee Newman patented it. As such, we can probably guess that the words on this papyrus were written after that.”Report

  6. Marchmaine says:

    Duuude… tip of the iceberg. Did you read the Atlantic Article about Prof. Dirk Obbink?

    This one has everything… Genius Grant (atheist) Scholar hoodwinking gullible (villanous) billionaire Christians – of Hobby Lobby wealth no less – to remodel giant castle in TX? Double dipping Salaries in Academia – Oxford, Baylor, University of Michigan, oh my? Staging once in a lifetime finds for credulous Graduate Students to secure more funding and solidify his “techniques.” It was a tiny bit short on sexual escapades, but nothing Hollywood couldn’t fix.

    It was a kind of Applied Academic Engineering… make things that you alone in the world are the foremost export on validating, then make the things you need to find (that only you could confirm), then, even better, make the things rich people need you to find, set-up shell company to sell them, and have them hire you to confirm the things you sold them.

    I’m convinced remodeling the Castle was the ‘one step too many.’ A nice McMansion in the suburbs? We’d still be reading about ‘challenging’ fragments that are tantalizingly close to confirming everything we thought.Report