I think the late Geza Vermes’ introduction to these fragments in
The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (p. 472-73) is the most concise and the most sensible:
(B) OTHER GREEK FRAGMENTS
(4Q126-7; 7Q3-19)
The remaining two Greek fragments in Cave 4 date roughly to the turn of the era. One (4Q126) cannot be identified and the other (4Q127) is either a paraphrase of Exodus, mentioning among others Pharaoh, Moses and Egypt, or possibly an apocryphal account of Israel in Egypt.
Seventeen out of the nineteen minute Greek papyrus fragments from Cave 7 have been declared by the editors to be unidentifiable. Yet against all verisimilitude, several of them have generated sensational and even revolutionary claims, especially that they represented the earliest textual examples of the Greek New Testament.
The contention originated with a Spanish Jesuit, José O’Callaghan, who in 1972 persuaded himself that these hardly legible scraps derived from six books of the New Testament: the Gospel of Mark iv, 28 (7Q6 1), vi, 48 (7Q15), vi, 52-3 (7Q5), xii, 17 (7Q7); the Acts of the Apostles xxviii, 38 (7Q6 2); 1 Timothy iii, 16, iv, 1, 3 (7Q4); James i, 23-4 (7Q8) and even one of the latest New Testament writings, 2 Peter i, 15 (7Q10). Of these, the case for Mark vi, 52-3 is purported to be the ‘strongest’.
The real facts are the following. We are dealing with a fragment on which the written area measures 3.3 x 2.3 cm. Letters appear on four lines; these are of unknown length since both the beginning and the end of each line are missing. An unrecognizable trace of another letter is observed at the top of the fragment. In the editio princeps seventeen letters are identified of which only nine are certain. A single complete word has survived: the Greek
kai = and!
The leading experts in the field, the late C.H. Roberts of Oxford and the German Kurt Aland, unhesitatingly discarded O’Callaghan’s theory. Roberts jokingly told me [Vermes] that if he wanted to waste his time, he was sure he would be able to ‘demonstrate’ that 7Q5 belonged to any ancient Greek text, biblical or non-biblical. Yet this unlikely and clearly unprovable hypothesis was revived in the 1980s by C.P. Thiede and others, only to encounter the same fate of summary dismissal as Father O’Callaghan’s a decade or so earlier.
For the
editio princeps of the 4Q and 7Q material, see P.W. Skehan and E. Ulrich,
DJD, IX (Oxford, 1992); 161-97, 219-42; M. Baillet et al.,
DJD, III (Oxford, 1962), 142-6. For the theory that 7Q contains New Testament texts, see J O’Callaghan,
Los papiros griegos de la cueva 7 de Qumrán (Madrid, 1974), and C.P. Thiede,
The Earliest Gospel Manuscripts (London, 1992);
Re-Kindling the Word (Valley Forge, Pa, 1996). For views for and against expressed at a symposium, see B. Mayer, ed.,
Christen und Christliches in Qumran? (Regensburg, 1992). Against the theory, see C.H. Roberts, ‘
On Some Presumed Papyrus Fragments of the New Testament from Qumran’,
Neue neutestamentlische Papyri III’,
New Testament Study 20 (1973-4), 357-81. For the latest authoritative views, see G. Stanton,
Gospel Truth? (London, 1995); E. Puech, ‘
Des fragments grecs de la grotte 7 et le Nouveau Testament?’,
RB 102 (1995), 570-84 ; M.-E. Boismard (the first decipherer of the fragment), ‘
A propos de 7Q5 et Mc. 6, 52-53’, ibid. 102-4.
Add to this chapter 14 of Peter Flint and James C. VanderKam’s
The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus and Christianity? Also VanderKam’s
The Dead Sea Scrolls Today, Fr. Joseph Fitzmyer S.J.'s
The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christian Origins (p. 24) and
Responses to 101 Questions on the Dead Sea Scrolls (p. 16), and Emanuel Tov’s
Hebrew Bible, Greek Bible and Qumran: Collected Essays (pp. 347-350).
) and Q instead.
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