Hi and thanks in advance for your help.
I'm doing a bit of creative writing and wanted to source something I heard of once, but I'm not getting anything on google.
Back when I was in seminary years and years ago, a professor said something that, though I don't remember word for word, the jist of which stuck with me.
We were in a New Testament Exegesis class, and he made an offhand comment along these lines of: "And how did the Britism Museum get it? The way they get everything. They stole it!"
He went to explain how in a certain monastery on the continent, some very old fragments of the New Testament were lent to representatives of the British Museum (they were trying to be good academic "sports"), fragments that would have been hand copied by monks of the same monastery centuries earlier.
Supposedly, the British Museum has never returned these manuscripts. The way I remember my professor tell it, there is a door in the monastary with a letter posted on it: a letter from the British Museum stating when the document would be returned.
Anybody have an inkling of what I made me remembering (or misremembering)? If so...
In that monastery in what country might this have happened?
What was the text borrowed (as in, was is *John's Gospel)?
In what year did this happen?
Was the loan for free or for a price?
This for a book I'm writing and, though it's fiction, I like to have my research ducks in a row.
Again, thank you historians!
Hi there - we're happy to approve your question related to your creative project, and we are happy for people to answer. However, we should warn you that many flairs have become reluctant to answer questions for aspiring novelists and the like, based on past experience: some people working on creative projects have a tendency to try to pump historians for trivia while ignoring the bigger points they were making, while others have a tendency to argue with historians when the historical reality does not line up with what's needed for a particular scene or characterization. Please respect the answers of people who have generously given you their time, even if it's not always what you want to hear.
Additionally, as amazing as our flair panel is, we should also point out that /r/AskHistorians is not a professional historical consultation service. If you're asking a question here because you need vital research for a future commercial product such as a historical novel, you may be better off engaging a historical consultant at a fair hourly rate to answer these questions for you. We don't know what the going rate for consultancy work would be in your locality, but it may be worth looking into that if you have in-depth or highly plot-reliant questions for this project. Some /r/AskHistorians flairs could be receptive to working as a consultant in this way. However, if you wish for a flair here to do this work for you, you will need to organize this with them yourselves.