Many years ago, someone sent me this video of Josh McDowell from March 2013. I suspected a lot of it was going to turn out to be embarrassing, so I made a note to look back on it in 10 years. I was expecting most of the documents would turn out to be much later than he claimed, and perhaps some embarrassment about bragging about dunking ancient Egyptian burial masks in Palmolive dish soap. I was not expecting the huge scandals that actually unfolded. Although I had heard about some of these scandals, because McDowell is a fairly minor character in these events who hasn’t been directly implicated in any of the criminal activity, he hasn’t been in the headlines, and it took a fair amount of digging to connect the scandals to the actual manuscripts mentioned in his talks.

McDowell already retired after controversy about his racist remarks, so I don’t think exposing a few more of his lies will really affect anyone’s opinion of him. But I still found this to be an interesting exercise and I thought others might be interested.

1st Century Mark?

The first papyrus he mentioned was the “1st century gospel of Mark”, which he explicitly states was found in an Egyptian burial mask. We now know that the papyrus he was referring to was this one, which wasn’t found in a burial mask, wasn’t a new discovery, and when it was finally published it was dated to the late 2nd or early 3rd century, by the same person, Dirk Obbink, who allegedly sold it as a 1st century copy. He has since been arrested because it wasn’t his to sell.

Early Romans?

McDowell also claims that he personally found the earliest copy of the book of Romans in a mummy mask! On January 16, 2012, McDowell did attend a seminar at Baylor in which a mummy mask was destroyed.  This CNN video from January 18, 2012 shows Steve Green with what he says is the earliest copy of Romans, “dating to middle 2nd century” which he says was “discovered within the last 48 hours” by “uncovering layers of papyrus” from their collection, which lines up with McDowell’s story pretty well. 

However, the discovery of that fragment of Romans at that event turned out to be fraud. That copy of Romans was stolen from the Egypt Exploration Society’s (EES) collection, and sold to Hobby Lobby, allegedly also by Dr. Obbink. Dr. Scott Carroll, who was running the seminar, has admitted to planting that papyrus in the mask for the seminar.

It sounds like McDowell was probably tricked. However, his story also seems to have a lot of embellishment. The Atlantic article describes the Romans “discovery” like this:

On January 16, 2012, Carroll gave Baylor a glimpse of how it was done. He filled a sink in the classics lounge with warm water and Palmolive dish soap, plunged a mummy mask into the suds, and began swishing it around. Then he withdrew a wet fragment and presented it to awestruck students.

“He said, ‘Whoa, now take a look at this, and see if you can read it,’” recalled David Lyle Jeffrey, a medieval-Bible scholar and former Baylor provost who helped manage the school’s relationship with the Greens. The fragment turned out to be a piece of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. “The kids were bamboozled: “Wow! Wow!” It was the kind of eureka moment any professor might hope to inspire in undergraduates.

Jeffrey might have been just as floored, were it not for something he’d noticed when students were first gathering in the room.

Before his demonstration, Carroll had discreetly set a piece of papyrus beside the sink, and Jeffrey had glanced at it. When Carroll withdrew the wet Romans fragment from the mummy mask, Jeffrey recognized it as the piece he’d seen beside the sink. Carroll, he realized, had only pretended to pull it from the mask.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/museum-of-the-bible-obbink-gospel-of-mark/610576/

But in McDowell’s retelling he wasn’t just handed the manuscript out of the soapy water:

We had 3 classical scholars brought in, because I’m not a classical scholar. And they were to help me understand what we were doing. So I called one of them over, and I said, “I don’t know, what do you think this is?”

And he said “Josh, there’s another layer underneath!”

“No, there isn’t!”

“Josh, another layer.”

So I soaked it in water just for a while, and I started peeling it off. That there, is the oldest copy of the book of Romans by 125 years ever discovered!

I think it’s pretty unlikely that Dr. Carroll buried the manuscript in the papyrus mask to the degree McDowell’s story implies. It’s also well known that McDowell has a habit of embellishing anecdotes and moulding them to suit his narrative. His conversion story seems to change every time he tells it. And the Atlantic article is based on interviews with multiple eyewitnesses. So, I assume the discrepancies are just McDowell’s tendency to bend the truth.

That flexibility with the truth may also extend to being unwilling to give up a good story when he knows it’s false. Dr. Carroll was fired by both Baylor University and the Green Institute after this incident, in 2012. It seems unlikely that McDowell hadn’t heard that the seminar was faked by his March 2013 talk. The anecdote doesn’t appear in his 2017 edition of Evidence that Demands a Verdict, which makes me think he knew by then. Yet in this 2018 talk in Singapore promoting that book he retells the anecdote. In this 2019 talk he doesn’t mention Romans, but he does give the clear impression that New Testament manuscripts are being found in mummy masks. I cannot find a single documented example of a New Testament manuscript authentically found in a mummy mask, and most experts agree it’s impossible because the Egyptians stopped using papyrus in mummy masks before the New Testament was written.

The Romans manuscript was presented at a conference in November 2012. I can’t find the paper from this conference, but according to Daniel Wallace’s blog it was dated to the early 3rd century, so it wasn’t the earliest after all. Since then it has been returned to the EES.

Even Earlier Romans?

McDowell finishes that anecdote by saying that his record was broken when an even earlier copy of Romans was found:

“That there, is the oldest copy of the book of Romans by 125 years ever discovered! Shoots the hole in every Liberal Theology about Romans and when it was written.”

“The top scholar in the world was in my office the other day and he brought in some new discoveries we were looking at. We’re going to be doing two more of these masks December 5th and 6th. And he said ‘Josh, I hate to say this to you, but in the last mask, we broke your record. We took it back another 25 years!’”

In the 2018 talk, McDowell says (18:20) “that was the oldest copy of Romans ever discovered by 250 years. Now someone has found one about 50 years older, which is wonderful. But it was nice to hold the record for at least two – two and half years.”

There are a lot of problems here. Let’s start with a quick timeline of those dates, noting that in Evidence that Demands a Verdict McDowell dates P46, the earliest registered manuscript of Romans, to 200AD:

As you can see, this wouldn’t just create problems for “Liberal Theology”. Even the first dates McDowell gave put the 2nd copy before Paul wrote it. The second set of dates fall well before Paul was even born! Conservative theology would have a pretty hard time explaining that!

In fact, as far as I know, there is no “Liberal Theology” debate about when Romans was written. McDowell’s book Evidence that Demands a Verdict has a table that says “liberal dating” for “letters attributed to Paul: 50-early second century”. In the current edition there is no citation for this claim. Earlier editions cite Werner Kummel. I couldn’t find a specific date for Romans from Kummel, but he, like every reputable scholar I can find, considered Romans to be an authentic work of Paul. Which obviously means it must have been written between the time Paul converted and when he died. Basically every scholar I could find dates Romans to the late 50s.  

Even more confusing is the timeline of the discovery of this second manuscript. In the March 2013 talk, he was told about the newer manuscript “the other day”. So presumably about a year after his January 2012 “discovery”. In the 2018 talk, he held the record for 2.5 years, which means the second one wouldn’t have been discovered until the fall of 2014. But then how could he have known about it in March 2013?

Given the flexibility of these details I’m unsure if this second papyrus even existed, or if it was made up by McDowell for the sake of his narrative. However, Dr. Carroll does refer to a second manuscript as the “earliest copy of Romans” in some of his talks. The problem is, the details in his talks are even more confusing than McDowell’s!

In this talk from September 7, 2016, he says it’s Romans 4 and that he acquired it two weeks before that talk. But then in October 2016 he says it’s Romans 9 and he got it one week before that talk. But then in a February 2018 he says it’s an early copy of John[3]! So, I’m not even sure if it’s Romans.

There is also a copy of Romans 3 that was among papyri the Green Collection returned to the EES. I couldn’t find any information on this manuscript, it seems to still be unpublished.

Overall, I’m unclear whether the second manuscript of Romans McDowell was talking about even exists. If it does, it’s either much later than he claimed or it is still unpublished. The earliest registered manuscript of Romans remains P46.

The Rest of the Green Collection Papyri

All of the papyri found in this project were supposed to be published in a book called The Green Scholars Initiative: Papyrus Series, which was scheduled to have it’s first volume in early 2013. Copies of the press release can be found on a couple of blog posts from 2012, but it seems to have been deleted from the Brill website. Brill confirmed that it hasn’t been published and at this time there is no plan to publish it.

Why? Well, the book was supposed to be edited by Dr. Obbink, who was arrested in 2020. And he was arrested for stealing the most significant manuscripts, which the Green Scholars Initiative no longer has possession of. So that’s a pretty big roadblock.

But on top of that, investigations found that basically all of the artifacts Carroll obtained from Egypt and Iraq were acquired illegally. In 2021, the Greens signed an “agreement that the museum would return all Egyptian artifacts in its possession to Egypt”.

So, it seems that the mummy masks Carroll extracted the papyri from were stolen[2], and that what is left of the priceless artifacts have now been returned, in significantly different condition, to their home country. They are going to the Coptic Museum in Cairo. Any study of these artifacts is going to be significantly set back by the impossibility of establishing where they actually came from, after so many stolen manuscripts were mixed with papyrus pulled out of masks.

The Ethics of This Whole Operation

Now that we know the masks were acquired illegally, I’d like to draw attention to a few quotes from McDowell’s talk. I do have the quotes written out below, but you need to listen to the video at these time stamps and hear him squealing and giggling to truly understand.

“Scholars die when they hear it, but we own ‘em, so we can do it.”

“What if you tear it? They say ‘well, you tear it. Since we own it, it’s OK.’”

“See most scholars have never touched a manuscript, you have to have gloves on and everything <squeal> we just wash ‘em and hold ‘em in our hands. We don’t even make you wash your hands before!”

“Pull it up, wring it out. Literally wring it out! These are worth millions!”

Those statements were pretty upsetting at the time, and are completely horrifying when you learn that they did not in fact own them and did not have the right to do whatever they wanted with them!

I suspect this glee at the destruction of someone else’s sacred artifacts didn’t sit well with his audience because in later talks he tones it down quite a bit, and downplays the degree of his participation:

“Thank God, they only did a few, and I’ve observed one being done.”

That’s a pretty big change in tone! It’s also very misleading if it’s not an outright lie. There is video of him watching the mask dismounting January 2012. But after that he personally purchased two mummy masks for the explicit purpose of destroying them to find New Testament manuscripts inside at a conference he organized in December 2013. One of the masks was found to be too old to contain the New Testament and left intact. But the other was destroyed as planned, and found to contain 2nd century BC Greek and Hieratic texts, which was a disappointment to McDowell because he wanted the Bible. So if he only watched one, did he cover his eyes at his own conference?

Even if he didn’t actually watch for some reason, his talk is rather misleading, isn’t it? “Thank God, THEY only did a few!” Who is “they”? McDowell personally financed and directed the destruction of a mummy mask. What exactly is he thanking God for? We know McDowell prays about everything, so why didn’t God tell him it was a bad idea? If he now thinks this was wrong, shouldn’t he at least take responsibility for his involvement?

I will follow up with more on McDowell’s conference and the artifacts he purchased in a future post.

[1] The video is under the title “Was He a Lunatic?”, which has nothing to do with the contents of the talk, unless the question is whether McDowell is a lunatic. I think it’s more likely that McDowell also did his “liar, lunatic or lord” talk at this conference and the titles got mixed up. The “liar, lunatic or lord” talk doesn’t seem to be on the church’s website. Perhaps they were trying to delete this video because it’s embarrassing but deleted the wrong one? But then liar, lunatic or lord is a truly despicable argument that should be just as embarrassing.

[2] Note that when they talk about artifacts being acquired “legally”, that just means they were removed from the country prior to 1970, when the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Heritage was widely adopted. Even before that time Egypt had laws against robbing graves and exporting artifacts. Therefore, these masks were stolen property whether they were “legal” or not, the only question is whether the sale of that stolen property outside of Egypt was legal. Even if the artifacts were “legal”, they were destroyed without the permission of the Egyptian government, the dead body the mask was removed from, or their descendants.  

[3] The links go to Carroll’s videos other than the October one, which I couldn’t find to verify myself. But I want to be clear that all of the work to find these contradictions was done by Brent Nongbri at brentnongrbri.com, who has written extensively about Carroll and is an excellent source for additional information. David Meadows at rogueclassicist.com also has some good articles.