I feel I should point out that perhaps, rather than demanding immediate explanations as to all sorts of things even before the first publication of the artifact, we might wish to give Dr Obbink the necessary time to prepare that publication and see it to print (after all we are talking about the next issue of ZPE, not a wait of years or decades), and then see whether what he says is to our satisfaction or not. At that point, if necessary, one can call him out on what he may have omitted to say, but one can hardly do that before he has had a chance to say anything definitive at all.
Until that time – until we see whether there are satisfactory explanations or not – it seems quite exaggerated to me, as well as quite unfair to Dr Obbink, to assume that the papyrus has a “murky, troubling provenance” and draw inferences from silence as thought Dr Obbink was positively hiding something instead of simply preparing his findings for publication (which, as we all know, takes time).
As for private correspondence and the lack of a reply, we ought to remember that Dr Obbink is an extremely busy person (as a recent supervisee of his I can testify to this fact first-hand): if he is in the last stages of publishing his findings and dozens of scholars and non-scholars from all over the world are bombarding him with questions and suggestions (as they are), then I suppose it is excusable that he may be unable to answer every single email straightaway, especially if this would entail repeating over and over at some length things that may appear shortly in the publication itself.
In all this, I am interested in the question of provenance too, and I look forward to seeing what data are available, if any. I am just saying we should give the publication the time it needs to happen before setting out to judge its author. Just my two cents – of course I am happy with people to disagree.
Incidentally, if I am not mistaken, if the papyrus does come from Oxyrhynchus and is not a part of either the British or the Italian finds, then it must have been excavated – and possibly nicked from the excavation ground, as the various excavators often complained back then – between the late nineteenth century and the first couple of decades of the twentieth, which is when the Oxyrhynchus digs took place. If so, it will have been on the antiquarian market – and potentially already in Europe – several decades before the ban on papyrus exports came into force. But I too am interested in knowing on which grounds the fragments – let’s not forget that there’s also “P.GC. inv. 105″, a fragment of the same manuscript which I understand is going to be published at the same time, cf. n. 7 of the now-disappeared PDF – are assigned to Oxyrhynchus.