Sunday 17th May 2026
Blog Page 881

Union election winner disqualified

Greg Ritchie
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Union election winner disqualified

A candidate elected to the Oxford Union’s Secretary’s Committee has been found guilty of electoral malpractice and stripped of his position.

Musty Kamal – who received the most votes in last month’s Secretary’s Committee election – has now been disqualified retrospectively, after a Union tribunal found him guilty of electoral malpractice.

Kamal was found to have breached Rule 33(a)(i) by making an “illicit statement” – one that is “untrue or misleading” and is intended to influence the course of the election.

However, the verdict has provoked controversy. One student present at the tribunal, Stephen Osuobeni, told Cherwell it was “discouraging that a fresher could be strong-armed by a senior committee member in this way”.

Kamal had claimed to champion a more inclusive Union. He finished first in the Secretary’s Committee election of 24th November, beating nearest rival Eric Sukumaran by 40 votes.

A copy of the ruling on the Oxford Union noticeboard.

But an election tribunal was summoned soon after the close of the poll to hear an allegation of electoral malpractice submitted by Charles Wang, a successful Standing Committee candidate.

The tribunal – chaired by Michaelmas 1999 President Ben Seifert – met on Saturday evening, and unanimously found Kamal guilty of making an “illicit statement”.

An Oxford Union spokesperson confirmed to Cherwell that the statement in question was Kamal’s manifesto claim that he was running as an “independent” candidate.

Screenshots of posts made by Redha Rubaie – unsuccessful candidate for Treasurer – asking people to vote for Kamal, were reportedly brought as evidence.

It is not believed that any evidence was produced showing that Kamal had asked Rubaie to make said posts.

The Society’s rules state that the standard of proof required for a conviction “shall be that the Tribunal is satisfied beyond all reasonable doubt of the defendant’s guilt”, necessitating “an unanimous vote”.

Kamal told Cherwell: “This was an election of firsts. I believe that I was the first non-MBA Secretary’s Committee candidate to get as many as 153 votes. This was a higher number of votes than many candidates on Standing Committee. I was also the only candidate to mention inclusivity on my manifesto.

“It is not inconceivable that had my campaign not been so successful, it would not have attracted so much attention nor a tribunal.

“The idea of inclusivity was able to muster 153 people to vote for a candidate that wants everyone to be represented, everyone rather than the closed off elite it is often criticised for protecting.

“This effort by people within the Union to discredit my message will deter people who want to run independently on a platform of inclusivity in the future.”

The Oxford Union has stated that a full report on the ruling will be available shortly to all members.

Fairytales can show us the horrors of Hitler’s Germany

Henry Straughan
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Fairytales can show us the horrors of Hitler’s Germany

Fairytales often combine innocence with darkness, naivety with sin. Children stand on the edge of a great, dark wood with sex and violence at its heart. Reading the works of the Brothers Grimm, we find tales which contain murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and incest. Through a lens of fantasy and magic these stories take us into the blackest and most brutal elements of ourselves.

It’s little wonder then that Günter Grass made prolific use of fairytales in exploring Germany’s past, writing his own fairytale of Germany and the Nazis. In the midst of Germany’s postwar amnesia, Grass, often described as the nation’s moral conscience, reminded Germany of her sins, and demanded her atonement – Catholic themes permeate Grass’ work. Germany’s children stood at the edge of the deep dark forest.

The appeal of the fantasy of fairytale lies not in its distance from humanity, but in its disclosing of human nature. It is this aspect drew so many 20th century magical realists to weave fairytales into their work. The forest contains the hidden drives, wills, and neuroses of the human unconscious. The Nazis and those complicit in their crimes were, like the monsters of the Grimms’, all too human. Grass’ role was draw out the trauma of genocide repressed in Germany’s collective consciousness.

Fairytale as ambiguous allegory is exemplified in The Rat, in which Grass draws on the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The Piper seduces and leads innocent children like rats into the shadowy cave. Likewise, Hitler abducted the German people – or at least that’s the story that people would have liked to tell themselves after the war. Grass reminds them they were not blind followers, but complicit perpetrators. And yet as conscience of a nation, Grass also bears his own sins, he too was a complicit perpetrator. While his fantasy and magic can penetrate into memory, it can also obscure it.

Grass’ most pervasive use of fairytales comes in his Danzig trilogy, in particular The Tin Drum, a novel which, like The Flounder and Dog Years, takes place in a world steeped in fairytale, myth, and fable. The protagonist of The Tin Drum, the dwarf Oskar Matzerath, is a living fusion of the fairytale elements of darkness and innocence. Throughout much of the novel he remains a child and so facilitates a unique view of the events of the Nazi period. His appearance of innocence gives him a perspective which allows Grass to present the horror of the period in all its clarity. The fairytale mode of innocence as the way into the sin and savagery is manifested in Oskar’s narration.

Yet Oskar captures another ambiguous role: the dual role played by Grass himself. Oskar is at once outside observer and complicit perpetrator. Grass stood and judged the nation, and at the same time judged himself. The transcendent narrator is an actor in the narrative. Germany’s memory is his memory. In writing on Germany’s sins he seeks his own atonement. Hence the unreliability of Oskar’s story-telling, Grass seeks to simultaneously reveal and conceal the past.

This is the beauty of the fairytale – its allegory allows for deep ambiguity. Meaning is hidden in magic and fantasy. And so in Grass’ novels, the raw and unspeakable brutality of the past must be mediated through symbol. Even in his biography Peeling the Onion, Grass’ presentation of his life is steeped in metaphor and uncertainty. But in that book Grass does honestly peel away the layers, and at last reveals his role in the Waffen SS.

After unveiling the secret he’d kept for over 50 years, Grass was accused of hypocrisy and dissembling self-righteousness. How, it was asked, could he have criticised and judged Germany for all those years, when he too was complicit in the crimes? But Grass was never the objective moral arbitrator. Germany’s story, Oskar’s story, was his story too. His novels allowed him to reflect on Germany’s and his own history. Grass, like Oskar, plays a dual role. In The Tin Drum Oskar’s gang call him Jesus, while he later self-titles himself Satan. Grass’ life too combines sin and atonement.

“We’ve got lots of exciting talent in the team”

Thomas Browne
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“We’ve got lots of exciting talent in the team”

Sitting down with Sophie Behan, Women’s Rugby Blues captain, it is immediately clear just how seriously her team is taking the Varsity Match, as she hurries in straight from another session at Iffley Gym.

The women are certainly not resting on their laurels after last year’s 3-0 victory over Cambridge, for as Behan is keen to emphasise, every time you step out onto the pitch at Twickenham you have to be prepared: “When you prepare for a game normally it starts on the day, the pressure isn’t there on the pitch. For Varsity, I’ll be getting messages a week before wishing me luck. You stay in a hotel the night before, you’re away from your family and your housemates, there’s photographers and shirt presentations – that all makes it feel very different.”

As captain, she is well aware of her role on the day, helping to keep what can be a very tense, nervous atmosphere, as relaxed as possible: “My job is making it the same – people perform best when it’s what they know, so you minimise what you don’t know. Just don’t let little things throw you off,” she says, “it’s a game of minimising errors, not a game of being perfect.”

Behan emphasises what a talented and hardworking squad she had the privilege of captaining, and her responsibilities are made easier by the fact the side is coached by Gary Street, who won the Women’s Rugby Union World Cup as Head Coach for England in 2014.

Behan highlighted a few of the side’s star performers: “Sophie Trott is obviously one to watch. She was player of the match last year, and is a joy to watch. Johanna Dombrowski was a visiting student from Williams College when she played her first Varsity match and is now at Oxford for a DPhil and is going to be playing in her second Varsity, having come back incredibly strong from an ACL injury.” Pat Metcalfe-Jones is also a standout. The French and Italian student has been training with Harlequins this year as well as balancing a degree and Blues commitments.

Overall, Behan couldn’t be more positive about the Blues chances against a Cambridge side who are currently playing in the division below them, and have not been tested by a top quality team this season.

 

Photo: OURFC

For the men, captain Conor Kearns is keen to stress the challenge the squad faces. Like Behan, he stresses the importance of trying to recreate normality in what can be a disorientating environment for any players who haven’t experienced it before: “you have to just try to stay within the process, trying to maintain consistency will get you as prepared as you possibly can be for such a big occasion.”

Kearns also sings the praises of the benefits the pre-season tour had for creating a great team atmosphere. “Getting away to America was a great opportunity, when we got back we’d begun to mould into the beginnings of a team, and with each successive game we’ve grown closer and now the team has a strong bond.”

He is similarly ebullient about the pleasure of having a team with some great professional experience: “We realise how lucky we are to have these ex-pros in the team, they bring an aspect of professionalism which the younger guys really look up to.”

He is keen to pick out Andy Saull, who made over a hundred club appearances for Saracens, as well as Will Wilson who spent the summer playing with England’s Sevens team.

“We’ve got some really exciting talents and our game plan is to go there and play rugby. With the quality of players we’ve got it would be a disservice not to go out there and try to play attractive rugby.”

It seems like Oxford’s chances of a Varsity double this year are better than ever: the fans should be treated to a fantastic display of high-quality rugby.

Oxford Collage: a human sciences student

Charlotte Tosti
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Oxford Collage: a human sciences student
A self portrait of the human scientist

Q. Talk to me about human sciences.

A. I turned up to Oxford like a biological determinist [I ask what this means]- oh- it means I just thought all human behaviour came down to chemical stuff. All of this came from The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. But soon enough, I realised that not only was I a ‘baby’ in being a fresher and spending most of my time outside Hassan’s but that suddenly everyone felt like babies in this unfolded plasticine: which changes according to the environment and sculpts who you are.

Q. So what have you done with this knowledge?

A. Well I guess I’ve done what I have to do: a dissertation obviously! After changing my mind loads of times I’ve finally decided to look at colonial policy and the environment; specifically how contact with Portuguese colonialists has affected the genomes of Native Americans.

Q. Any fun facts?

A. Native American women could actually own land under the colonial rule rather than necessarily being oppressed by patriarchy as well as colonialism.

Q. Nice, what other things did you enjoy?

A. So I really enjoyed a piece of coursework I did about whether institutional education is oppressive or not. I argued that it contributes to cultural genocides, creating an inferiority complex in the developing world since it is built for Europeans, and simply makes everything euro-focussed. I guess my own experience comes into this when I was working in India last summer. I worked with an NGO that helped children from slums to learn certain skills, and business-related project management. Even though I thought the children benefited a lot, it was still an extremely western style of education!

Q. Would you rather be growing vegetables in an allotment or studying in the Bod then?

A. The allotment, obviously, should be a priority…

Q. How has studying Human Sciences affected your personal life?

A. Well it’s changed it in a way that’s not always convenient. I tend to over analyse relationships and try to fit them into some kind of cultural/genetic complex. But then when it comes to analysing myself, it teaches you to become less hypocritical; especially when it comes down to heated things like cultural appropriation. Then it’s given me a lot of perspective. It reminds me to keep asking ‘why am I worried about little things when there is a whole world of problems out there ?’.

Q. And finally, what is the thing you most like doing in Oxford?

A. Sometimes, when on Broad Street around sunset, stopping to look at the view of the Bodleian as the sun streams down. I think it’s one of the most beautiful (and distracting) views I’ve ever seen.

 

A gendered rewatching of The Silence of the Lambs

Angelica De Vido
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A gendered rewatching of The Silence of the Lambs

FBI agent Clarice Starling enters a race against time to catch serial killer ‘Buffalo Bill’ in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Twenty five years after winning the ‘Big Five’ at the Oscars, this film remains a landmark cinematic achievement.

Demme immediately posits Clarice (an outstanding Jodie Foster) as a brave, strong, and resourceful protagonist – the film opens with her powering onto the screen as she tackles an assault course. Indeed, despite the vulnerability suggested by Foster’s petite frame, Clarice is tough, underlined through Demme’s close-up of her hands as she climbs over obstacles. Rather than the sexualised images of the female body that routinely dominate cinema, Demme instead showcases female power, and establishes how the film will relentlessly rewrite the dominant gendered characterisations of the action genre.

Clarice uses this resilience to navigate the FBI, which is immediately established as a ‘macho’ domain through the sign on the assault course that reads, “hurt, agony, pain: love it!” Demme repeatedly underlines Clarice’s status as outsider and intruder in this masculine world by framing her alone alongside male colleagues, all of whom tower over her and scrutinise her through their gaze.

Indeed, one extraordinary element of Demme’s direction is his use of extreme close-up point-of view shots, to foreground Clarice’s obectification. As men leer at Clarice, the audience is also forced to become a victim of the assessing and objectifying viewpoint, a position that male viewers are rarely placed in, in society and in Hollywood cinema, which subsequently highlights the subtle, yet relentless ways in which patriarchal society exerts sexual pressures on women. It is these barriers that Clarice forcefully overcomes over the course of the film.

These extreme close-up, point-of view shots are at some of their most powerful and memorable during Clarice’s interviews with Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), theinfamous cannibal psychiatrist who becomes her unlikely aid in the hunt for Buffalo Bill. Their first meeting is one of cinema’s greats, as Clarice boldly confronts Lecter’s gaze, causing him to blink and look away first.

From its unforgettable characterisations of Clarice, Lecter and Buffalo Bill, to its innovative camerawork and thrilling plot, over 25 years later, Silence of the Lambs remains unsurpassed in the action genre. As Lecter tells Clarice, “the world’s a more interesting place with you in it,” and the same resoundingly applies to Demme’s masterpiece.

The late Mr Salinger deserves his enduring reputation

Barney Pite
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The late Mr Salinger deserves his enduring reputation

J. D. Salinger’s seminal The Catcher in the Rye has a bit of a reputation – beloved of all teenage boys with parental issues and bad hair, Catcher is something you’re meant to grow out of, like My Chemical Romance or nitrous oxide.

This reputation is helped neither by the fact that Salinger withdrew to a house in Cornish, in upstate New Hampshire, unable to cope with the mania that people brought to his book, and that Mark Chapman presented his copy to the police after he shot John Lennon. Now, 60 years on, The Catcher in the Rye, and what the novel might imply, is as important as ever.

But this is a reputation which Catcher only partly deserves. Holden Caulfield isn’t just a whiney teenage boy with a penchant for self-pity, he’s an expertly drawn character – grief struck at the death of his brother and traumatised by the harsh realities of the adult world. What makes Catcher so sad is that Holden is spectacularly unable to vocalise any of the problems that plague him. He admits late on in the novel the extent of the sexual abuse he’s suffered, without putting into words exactly what it is he’s had to go through: “That kind of stuff’s happened to me about twenty times since I was a kid. I can’t stand it.” Yet he is totally unable to recognise why he does what he does. Following the death of his brother Allie, he breaks all the windows in his garage “just for the hell of it”.

In a modern environment defined by economic and social uncertainty, the image of Holden, cut adrift and lost, has a kind of sad relevance. JD Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, six years after the end of the Second World War, in which he fought, on D Day and in the Battle of the Bulge.

Salinger saw more combat than Vonnegut and Heller combined, but he writes a novel with no explicit reference to the war. Yet the war influences this novel intensely – Salinger must have felt that the consumerist and capitalist world to which he was returning had been irreparably changed and he must, like Holden, have constantly questioned his place in it. War does this to people and societies. A. J. P. Taylor wrote that the 20th century begun not in 1900 but on the first day of the Somme. Salinger might have similarly have felt that his society had lost its innocence.

Catcher is certainly a novel obsessed with childhood and its end. The Catcher in the Rye is the one root from which teen literature has sprung. But more than that, it is a novel that encapsulates something central about our modern world. We live in uncertain times, and Catcher depicts someone trying, through it all, to cope.

A beastly tale of life and death

Josephine Southon
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A beastly tale of life and death

A foreboding wooded labyrinth where destinies are altered and lives transformed… Sound familiar? Like something from a dream? Or perhaps a nightmare? For many children, the Grimms’ forested fairytale world allows imaginations to roam free, uninhibited by the restrictions of daily life. But don’t be fooled. In fairytales, nothing is as seems.

To cross the threshold into the old German forest, to wander along its mysterious snaking paths, amongst enchanted towering trees, is to succumb to its remorseless authority. In the face of imminent peril, the Grimms present Man’s contradictory, and often brutal, relationship with nature as a paradigm for the ruthlessness and vulnerability of human life.

Take a fairytale character’s interaction with the forest animals. At times they are feared by man, as in The Skilled Hunter – “when evening came he seated himself in a high tree in order to escape from the wild beasts”. At others they fear man, as in Strong Hans – “wherever they went the wild beasts were terrified, and ran away from them”. Others still, they are comforted by his presence, as in Snow White and Rose Red – “no beasts did them any harm, but came close to them”.

But for the Grimms, an amicable encounter with a woodland creature is hardly sufficient grounds for heroic triumph. In primitive territory, the protagonist is stripped of basic necessities in the ultimate test of survival, often through means of hunger: “In his madness he ran into the forest and must have died there of hunger, for no one has ever either seen him or heard of him again” (The Two Travellers); “They always got deeper into the forest, and if help did not come soon, they would die of hunger and weariness” (Hansel and Gretel).

The Grimms’ ultimate message is that, if death is at the heart of nature, then it resides at the core of human life also. The tales were not an escape from reality but rather a reflection of it, this battleground of beast against beast in a brutal test of survival paralleling the rampant individualism of capitalism, and the world in which the Grimms lived.

So next time you decide to take a jolly-old stroll through a German forest, think about the consequences. Or take a map.

Those Who Follow review – “an appreciation of some too often ignored parts of this city we all call home”

Matthew Roberts
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Those Who Follow review – “an appreciation of some too often ignored parts of this city we all call home”

The main exhibition at the Ashmolean this term, Imagining the Divine, has already had rave reviews up and down the media landscape, from this student publication to the heady heights of The Guardian, so I will presume that you’ve already been to see it. However there is also another, smaller exhibition opening this week, with considerably less fanfare than its grandiose sibling, but equally affecting and important. Those Who Follow (open until 20th March 2018 in the Ionnau Centre on St Giles) is a simple collection of photographs, with a very simple goal. Unlike Imagining the Divine, which seeks to explore the material culture of world religions over the course of a millennium, Those Who Follow serves as a simple record of religious observances in modern day Oxford.

The pictures themselves are somehow quotidian, and yet hauntingly beautiful. Thirteen places of worship are displayed, representing the five major world religions also included in Imagining the Divine. There are two photographs for each building, an exterior and an interior – very rarely do these two pictures intersect quite as we’d expect. To this end, they interrogate our expectations of sacred space – how do we know that a building serves a religious function? A semi-detached house on the Abingdon Road transpires to be the permanent home of a Buddhist Vihara, with large statues depicting the Buddha filling what appears to be a bay-windowed living room. Another former residential house serves as the Quakers meeting House on St Gile’s – the appearance or feeling of domesticity here playing a vital role in the religious meanings it hosts. Similarly the innocuous exterior of the Rosehill Community Centre transformed with red and white fabrics into a transient setting for Hindu worship. As a nation we are so used to thinking about the permanent contexts for religious observance, stone and brick, centuries of religious continuity – understanding other forms of worship, which don’t benefit from, or actively reject, this kind of permanence is eye opening, and must play a role in making our society a more welcoming place.

The pictures are resolutely and defiantly emblems of ‘town’, as opposed to ‘gown’ – we fall into an easy trap of interacting with Oxford, and its representations, as presented to us through the stream of geo-tagged churches and colleges – how many pictures have you seen of the Rad Cam, Tom Tower, or St Mary’s? In some senses this is an inevitable product of a town so reliant on transient inhabitants – students that appear for 8 weeks and then vanish, or the coach loads of thousands of tourists than pass through every day during the summer months. This creates an artificial and lingering feeling of novelty around these ‘highlights’ of Oxford’s built environment – the famous locations that your extended family expect to be shown when you finally invite them for dinner. However, as a result of this rhythmic perpetuation of novelty, our roots are prevented from growing deeper into the built environment – this makes this exhibition all the more important, because it forces us to look at the liminal and the peripheral spaces within this city, and interact more earnestly with the religious lives of the people that actually live here as opposed to the places that tens of thousands pass through.

The photos themselves, taken by Arturo Soto, a fine art DPhil student, hold a wonderful feeling of immanent, and to some extent imminent, worship. There are no people in any of the images, so the spaces seem crying out to be filled with their congregations, to fulfil their purpose. This reflects a theme in the exhibition in the Ashmolean of the divine depicted through absence – the powerful statement made when we present the Buddha by his footprint, or even Jesus through an empty and expectant throne. Just like these artefacts, Those Who Follow make the bold claim that the act of worship itself is in some sense unrepresesentable, and that any attempt would simply do a disservice to the transcendent and complex reality of the practice of faith. A picture taken at a certain angle, at a certain moment in the act of worship could never do justice to the totality of that place of worship. The colour red acts as a striking unifying feature across the pictures of the different spaces. Red is often utilized intentionally within the material accoutrements of worship, but is also caught in mundane, incidental and accidental details such as the sign of the Pizza Hut on George Street (above which is the permanent home of the Oxford Chabad Society). Ultimately the feeling that these images create a cohesive thread between a plurality of faiths, ranging from the Christian Life Centre in a converted cinema, to the flying-buttressed Gothic-Revival traditionalism of the Cowley Road Methodists, brings some hope that a society built on religious freedom and diversity can succeed and thrive.

Curators Dominic Dalglish and Stephanie Lenk should be immensely proud of what they have achieved with this exhibition, which asks important questions about where and why we worship. You should visit it, whether you are of any faith or none, simply to think about how the buildings we spend our lives in affect us, and to appreciate some too often ignored parts of this city we all call home.

Confessions of a Drama Queen: The Final Showdown

Katie Sayer
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Confessions of a Drama Queen: The Final Showdown

Due to some unfortunate pacing and the weird numeric system of recording time at Oxford, you’re just going to have to take my word for it that two weeks have passed since I was last outlawed to my room in shame.

Apologies for the incompetent temporal dissonance, but let me tell you – these have possibly been the most dramatic two weeks of my existence.

I successfully transformed my tragedy of a life into a ten-minute stand-up set for The Oxford Revue, complete with a dramatic power ballad, interpretive tap dance, and comedic series of Welsh accents, and it was all going brilliantly.

I even made it into the new show. I thought I heard someone say “quota”, but I must have misheard. They must have said “quinoa”. There are a lot of vegans at Oxford.

Lo and behold, the day of the show came, and I was just recounting the tragic tale of how thespian Jacob cruelly rejected me and initiated a restraining order.

Naturally, I had added in a few comic details, mostly about him having syphilis, when I looked up at the audience, and of course, who should be in the front row? It was, of course, the treacherous ex-love-of-my-life… who had phoned the police. The restraining order had technically been violated.

How we women must suffer for our art.

Now all I have left is my minor role as a cannibal pot plant, and my small-time position as a reviewer for Cherwell. I hear they’re recruiting for new stage editors, which is probably for the best – whoever allowed this column to run for eight weeks is clearly incompetent.

Apparently the deadline is next Thursday at 12pm? I might check it out. I can think of worse ways to spend a term than editing a minor sub-section. Until the second curtain call – adieu, fair reader.

Heretical text of Jesus’ brother found in Oxford

Greg Ritchie
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Heretical text of Jesus’ brother found in Oxford

The first original Greek copy of a heretical Christian writing, which describes Jesus’ secret teachings to his brother James, has been discovered in Oxford.

The discovery, made by Geoffrey Smith and Brent Landau of the University of Texas at Austin, is particularly significant because it was previously thought that only Coptic translations of the apocryphal Gospel still existed.

“To say that we were excited once we realized what we’d found is an understatement,” Dr Smith, an assistant professor of religious studies at UTA, said in a statement. “We never suspected that Greek fragments of the First Apocalypse of James survived from antiquity. But there they were, right in front of us.”

The ancient manuscript, written in the fifth or sixth century, describes secret revelations made by Jesus to his brother James about the heavenly realm and future events. These include Jesus telling James that they are both predestined to die violently, though he stresses that death is nothing to be feared.

“The text supplements the biblical account of Jesus’ life and ministry by allowing us access to conversations that purportedly took place between Jesus and his brother, James — secret teachings that allowed James to be a good teacher after Jesus’ death,” Smith said.

Such apocryphal writings fell outside the canonical boundaries set by Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, in his “Easter letter of 367” that defined the 27-book New Testament. This led to the destruction of many ancient apocryphal texts, including copies of the First Apocalypse of James.

“This new discovery is significant in part because it demonstrates that Christians were still reading and studying extra-canonical writings long after Christian leaders deemed them heretical,” Smith said.

Smith and Landau discovered the fragments among the unpublished Oxyrhynchus papyri housed in the Sackler Library at Oxford University, which is owned and overseen by the Egypt Exploration Society.

The collection comprises thousands of papyrus texts from ancient Oxyrhynchus and other sites in Egypt and is the largest collection of papyri in the world.

The First Apocalypse of James fragments were unearthed in 1904/5 from the city of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.

The team who excavated this site from 1896-1907, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, unearthed upwards of 200,000 papyrus fragments and sent them back to Oxford to await publication. To date, only about 5300 have been published.

Edward Scrivens, Ashmoleon Junior Teaching Fellow, told Cherwell: “This discovery reminds us of the importance of the collections we have here in Oxford. Our libraries and museums contain so much material that we don’t even necessarily know everything that’s in them.

“It’s moments like this that remind those of us who study the past that it can be just as important to ‘excavate’ in the archive as the trench, and to responsibly use and care for what we find there.”

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