[HN Gopher] A scandal in Oxford: the curious case of the stolen ...
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       A scandal in Oxford: the curious case of the stolen gospel
        
       Author : theprop
       Score  : 41 points
       Date   : 2020-01-09 18:06 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
        
       | Jedd wrote:
       | > which would make it the oldest surviving manuscript of the New
       | Testament, copied less than 30 years after Mark had actually
       | written it.
       | 
       | I thought it was well understood that 'Mark' didn't write this,
       | at least not the Mark the book is named after, and that we're not
       | really sure who did write that first story, or indeed precisely
       | when or where.
        
         | AnimalMuppet wrote:
         | That's disputed, not "well understood".
        
       | pulisse wrote:
       | A gem from near the end of TFA:
       | 
       | > At present, just over 20 papyri are displayed on the museum's
       | website, out of 5,000. I asked Holmes whether one can therefore
       | conclude that the Greens own around 4,980 papyri that lack
       | reliable provenance. "In general, yes," said Holmes.
        
       | pnathan wrote:
       | Fascinating stuff. Brings to mind the fact that much of earlier
       | antiquity artifacts were plain looted into museums, etc. Mummies
       | were made into artists' paint, for instance.
        
         | danharaj wrote:
         | There was a fad where posh victorians were really into eating
         | mummies.
        
       | jimhefferon wrote:
       | > I have stolen, removed or sold items
       | 
       | No Oxford comma?
        
       | sudosteph wrote:
       | In case anyone else is interested, I found that the org that
       | handles the the papyri has a really cool write-up about how they
       | handle the digitization process.
       | 
       | http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/POxy/imaging/imaging.html
       | 
       | According to the article: . Over the past century, just over
       | 5,000 of the half-million Oxyrhynchus papyri have been published.
       | 
       | So between the large data set and scanning process, I'm hopeful
       | that all of these (and other) ancient manuscripts will be shared
       | publicly. I love imagining all the potential studies we can do
       | with proper machine learning once we have the data set.
        
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       (page generated 2020-01-09 23:00 UTC)