Scraps of Papyrus: Earliest Gospel Texts?

[patrick457]

So Patrick–what do you think is the date for the earliest manuscript fragment of scripture?

http://www.narrowgate-rmartin.com

This is the earliest verifiable NT manuscript we have: the John Rylands Library Papyrus P52 containing text from John 18 (verses 31-33 and 37-38 to be exact). The style of the handwriting was one that was common around the first half of the 2nd century (AD 100-150), so P52 is commonly dated around that time, but at the same time you cannot exclude the possibility of a later date considering other factors.

I wrote earlier:

Of course, paleography is not an exact science; all its judgments are just approximate. ‘Book hands’ (the type of formal handwriting used for books and other formal/official documents) are more easier to date than casual hands - since as I just mentioned, different styles went in and out of fashion - but even then, most scribes will stick with a particular style as long as they live. Since the average working life period of a scribe would be around fifty years, even if we can accurately date a handwriting style to say, AD 125, it would not necessarily mean that a manuscript written in that form of handwriting literally dates from AD 125. For all we know, a scribe using that style could still have been working forty or fifty years later. …] That’s why a good rule of thumb is, whenever one sees a date given for early NT manuscripts, remember that it’s not the exact date - it’s an approximation, give or take fifty years.

 

[irenaeuslyons]

I’m replying to your post again. Actually Thiede did present P64 in the carbon-dating lab of Oxford University for a feasibility test, but he was told that the fragments were too small and too light (the biggest fragment was only 45 milligrams, while the two smaller ones were 25 mg and 21 mg, respectively). If carbon tests were run on the fragments, the biggest fragment would be halved while the two smaller ones would be lost completely, since what was then the ‘newly-developed’ Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) method requires a minimum of 20 to 25 milligrams worth of material to be destroyed. (Even then, AMS was an improvement over the older Libby method, which required a larger amount of material to be destroyed.) And as mentioned, many major libraries don’t usually allow the destruction of their collection in any way.

I don’t think that C14 will be run on these fragments at the present, since it’ll take some time for this non-destructive method to be more commonplace.

Thanks Patrick

 

[patrick457]

The sad part here is, there are some Christians out there - particularly those who hold an early dating for the gospels - who devour Thiede’s claims, all because they perceive his findings to be a useful prooftext for their beliefs against the (sometimes) excesses of many modern scholars. I’ve seen this in a number of apologetic (not necessarily Catholic) websites - some even go so far as to tout Thiede’s ‘discovery’ as something that will (as one website put it) “make liberal critics of the New Testament wake up at night in a cold sweat.”

But the fatal flaw is, many of these people end up simply parroting an often-vague (and at least in a single point, probably factually-inaccurate*) summary of his supposed findings, without ever giving any solid proof in support of Thiede’s/their claims. They don’t bother comparing the actual manuscripts, for instance - they’re just content to take Thiede at face value. (While one can be excused for not being able to do research, say, ten years ago, now thanks to the Internet even non-professional laymen like us can check artifacts and other stuff that in the past you’d normally have to check in a public library or in some obscure ancient book or have a string of letters attached to your name to be able to access, which is precisely what I did in this thread. Anyone with an internet access today no longer have any valid excuse for remaining ignorant.) Not to mention that, they conveniently ignore the people who did find holes in Thiede’s thesis (I guess they simply explain them away as desperate ‘liberals’ ).

On the other hand, you also have anti-Christian websites who (correctly IMHO) note that this argument doesn’t hold water, and (to their credit) do include explanation of why Thiede’s arguments are unconvincing, but their presentation is often hardly unbiased or charitable either. They’ll at times lace anti-Christian rhetoric with their rebuttals, which (understandably) would put many Christians off.

Here’s a nice page I found: by Professor J.K. Elliott, Professor of New Testament Textual Criticism at the University of Leeds, England.The Jesus Papyrus The fact that it’s in ‘The UK’s Leading Atheist Page’ might discourage some folks here from checking it, but as the owner of the webpage made it perfectly clear: "He has no connection with the contents of any other page on this Web site. " I think some of Elliott’s points are spot on actually. I’ll quote snippets in the next post.

 

[patrick457]

Elliott writes:

Thiede originally proposed his redating of Papyrus 64 in the technical German academic journal Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigrafik 105 (1995) pp. 13-20. A subsequent issue of the same journal (vol. 107 (1995) pp. 73-80) carried an article by Klaus Wachtel of the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Münster (which is the main registry for these texts) where he successfully demolished Thiede’s reasons for redating Papyrus 64 (and by extension Papyrus 67) as 1st. century. An even more devastating piece against Thiede appeared in the same journal in 1996 (issue 113 pp. 153-7) written by H. Vocke. And there the matter should have rested.

But Thiede is a great publicist. A few years earlier he had tried to capture a popular market with a book that resurrected a theory which said that some of the very fragmentary Greek texts found at Qumran (the site of the discovery of the main Dead Sea Scrolls) were from New Testament texts: one in particular, known as 7Q5, was said to be part of Mark’s gospel. The appearance of Christian texts in Qumran would be remarkable enough among the literary remains of a exclusive Jewish sect; the presence of a bit of Mark amid the remains of this library, apparently deposited there before 68 A.D. (that is, within a few years of the likely date of composition of this gospel), would be even more incredible. However, the identification of 7Q5 with verses from Mark is highly questionable as are other proposed identifications of these minute fragments with other New Testament texts. Thiede, though, accepts those identifications, and hence builds much about the history of Christian links with Qumran on a slender and highly controversial basis. His methodology is the same with the so-called Jesus papyrus: grand theories rest on uncertain foundations.

The acceptance of his article on Papyrus 64 in a forthcoming issue of a ‘trade journal’ was not enough for a publicist. The Christmas Eve issue of The Times in 1994 provided a timely and welcome platform, thanks to the intervention of Matthew d’Ancona, then a journalist on that paper. D’Ancona, who seems to have been either taken in by Thiede’s persuasiveness or merely alert to sniffing out a ‘good story’ became Thiede’s staunchest advocate and apologist not only in The Times but in The Daily Mail and elsewhere. Many column inches, reports, interviews and even a leader article in The Times gave Thiede’s claims an unwarranted attention, that shows little sign of abating nearly five years on.

The initial interest in 1994 subsequently gave rise to the book The Jesus Papyrus. Comparatively few of its 163 pages concentrate on the essence of the article in the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie. Instead, the book is padded out with background information, and extraneous detail, including the revisiting of the other lost cause - 7Q5 and Mark. The book is full of errors and howlers: the ideas are Thiede’s, the writing seems to have been ghosted by d’Ancona who has frequently ill-digested the necessary Biblical and textual background. I pointed out many of the errors in a review article in the quarterly Biblical journal Novum Testamentum 38 (1996) pp. 393-9. A paperback reprint of The Jesus Papyrus in 1997 added an ‘Afterword’ as an appendix which tackled me on my review but failed to address my main criticisms. The same technique of dodging and ignoring pertinent criticisms has characterised Thiede’s reactions elsewhere to his many academic reviewers.

But whereas the professional journals were consistently hostile to Thiede’s theories and to this book, the popular press was intrigued and sympathetic. …] Newspaper reports generally hyped the whole thing up, as is their style, but I doubt if any of this was unwelcome to the authors. Thiede could blind the non-professional with jargon and science, but when he spoke to professional palaeographers (of whom there are precious few in the world) none was convinced by Thiede’s scholarship in this matter. The popular media can obviously represent opposition by academics to Thiede as the professional jealousy of disgruntled scholars who have singularly failed to produce a manuscript as revolutionary as Thiede claims to have done! The acknowledged inexactness of the scientific evidence for dating texts and the redatings that had already taken place in the scholarly world with reference to Biblical manuscripts were all pointed to as evidence that Thiede could be right: “There must be something in it” gullible folk may say.

This is not the place to rehearse or repeat all the technical evidence about the characteristic shapes of the Greek alphabet or the history of handwriting styles bandied around in the differing publications to substantiate or demolish Thiede’s theories. These can be studied in the learned journals, reviews from some of which I include here. Suffice it to say that the most respected and experienced scholars who have examined the evidence are not convinced that the comparative texts which Thiede claims lead to his early dating actually do support his conclusions. (Often Thiede conceals this evidence, which, had he reproduced it amid his several publications on the matter, would have made the issues obvious to the reader - perhaps he was banking on ordinary readers not to be able to track down the texts he adduces in support of his dating.)

 

[patrick457]

(Continued)

In The Jesus Papyrus and in subsequent elaborations in the media Thiede’s aims are clearly not merely palaeographical but evangelical. He belongs to those conservatives who wish to date the original composition of the Christian gospels as close to the time of Jesus as possible in order to claim thereby that their witness must be all the more reliable. In the early years of this controversy Thiede courted attention from ultra-conservative Roman Catholics in Germany, but he also attracted support from various evangelical quarters worldwide. The exercise is part and parcel of that tireless and timeless quest for the ‘Jesus of History’ and the ongoing efforts of certain Christian believers to anchor their faith in the reliability of the canonical gospels as historical sources and as the foundation documents of their faith. Christian believers not of a fundamentalist persuasion do not generally require being convinced that the alleged veracity of the written Christian message is necessarily dependent on an early date of composition. The more sceptical would point out that the conventions of ancient historical composition or of theological writing do not depend on eyewitness reporting. A humanist reader of a Biblical text will wish to have as good a copy of the text as modern scholarship can create, just as he would wish as faithful a version of a Classical text or of Shakespeare. Even if such a text is based on early manuscripts this does not in itself tell in favour of its basic historicity -nor does it tell against.

The date of composition of a New Testament gospel in relation to the events reported is not relevant for its historicity. To have an early manuscript fragment of a copy of a text which was made close to the probable date of composition of that text is not relevant either. Good reliable copies of a text - not just a Biblical text - are good not because they are old and close to the date of writing: they are good only if they are faithful copies of the original. In any case, there is nowadays no dispute among Biblical scholars that all the four New Testament gospels were composed in the first century although the precise dates and relative sequence of the compositions are open questions. It is improbable that we have any extant copy of any part of any of them earlier than the second quarter of the second century.

 

[patrick457]

Before we move on, ever wonder what happened to Papyrus 7 - the papyrus Thiede conveniently ignored when he touted P64 as being from the 1st century?



To refresh people’s memories, Papyrus 4 (hereafter P04) is essentially a fragment of Luke’s gospel currently kept in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. What makes it interesting is that this manuscript shows a similar handwriting style and layout as P64 and P67 (two columns of text for one page, a rarity for NT manuscripts this early), not to mention that unlike P64 and 67, we have a more concrete provenance for P04: the fragment was used to stuff the binding of a late 3rd-century codex of the Jewish author Philo, which in turn was found in a jar walled up in a house in the town of Coptos (modern Qift) in Egypt. This codex of Philo could have been hidden in the late 290s or the early 300s during the time of the emperor Diocletian, when Coptos was beseieged and sacked.

Due to the very close similarities in handwriting style and layout, many scholars think that it’s highly likely that P64-67 and P04 were once part of the same codex (which could have contained all four gospels), though some other scholars are more cautious; while they admit that P04 and P64-67 could have very well been written by the same scribe (thus explaining the handwriting similarities), they argue that that’s not necessarily a sign that these two or three fragments belonged to the same quire (a set of sheets that were stitched together to form a booklet; a set of quires make up a book) or even the same book.

If these two manuscripts do turn out to be from the same codex, it would have serious implications for Thiede’s attempt to redate P64 to the 1st century (if we choose to follow the dating he pursued in The Jesus Papyri, the 60s). For one, it’s highly unlikely that you’d have a manuscript containing text from more than one gospel at so early a date. Our earliest surviving manuscripts that do contain more than one gospel (it’s usually all four canonical gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke, John; as of now we have no example of a codex that (originally) contains less than four gospels, or a codex that places a non-canonical gospel - say, Thomas - alongside or instead of the four canonical ones) date from the 3rd century - just around the same time as the conventional date assigned to P64-67. This practice could have started among Christians by the mid-2nd century, but it’s unlikely that it started way earlier than that, at least, a date so early as the 60s AD.

 

[patrick457]

In his scholarly paper, Thiede gave a more summary dismissal of P04:

Further attempts to link this codex to fragments of Luke’s gospel preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (Suppl. Gr. 1120 = Gregory-Aland P4), had to be abandoned:4 although the fragmentary codex at the Bibliothèque Nationale had, at one stage, contained Matthew – as seems to be obvious from a scrap with the title Εὐαγγέλιον κατὰ Ματθαῖον –, the Paris codex is written on much darker, brownish papyrus and is considerably later (by up to one-hundred years).

4 K. Aland’s suggestion, based on an observation by P. Weigandt, in his ‘Neue Neutestamentliche Papyri II’, New Testament Studies 12 (1965/66), here 193-5; repeated, as probable (“probablement”) by J. van Haelst, Catalogue des Papyrus littéraires juifs et chrétiens, Paris 1976, 146 (no. 403), and by C.H. Roberts/T.C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex, London 1983, 40-41.65-66, but discontinued by Aland himself in his and his wife’s Der Text des Neuen Testaments, Stuttgart 21989, 105, where P4 is categorized as “Normaltext”, but P64/67 as “fester Text” ‘strict text’], and 106/110, where the dates are given as “III” and “um 200” respectively.

In later works (cf. Rekindling the Word: In Search of Gospel Truth, p. 58-60), however, he had managed to produce the following arguments for why he believes P4 and P64-67 are not related to one another:

(1) The color of the two papyri: the papyrus of P4 is an organic dark brown, while that of P64-67 is a lighter brown. “The dark brown of the Paris fragments, over agaiinst the light hue of the Oxford/Barcelona scraps, is organic and cannot be ascribed to different means of preservation and conservation. This observation alone seems to exclude the possibility of the Paris fragment originally belonging to one and the same codex as the other two.”
(2) The fragment of a title page preserved with P4 (Euangelion kata Matthaion ‘Gospel according to Matthew’) is written in a different hand than P64-67: “It is broader and wider, with a flat Mu and markedly elongated upper horizontal strokes in the two Gammas.”
(3) The ekthesis (the projection of the first letter of the first full line of a new paragraph/section out into the left margin, usually to signify the first complete line of a new section which began in the preceding line): “The Paris scribe always used two letters, rather than one, for this purpose. …] While this would not necessarily rule out the identicality of the scribes - any scribe might change his ‘idiosyncrasies’ from time to time, perhaps even on behalf of a specific patron or customer - it would not happen within one and the same book.”
(4) Differences between the letters of P4 and P64-67. “For example, the scribe of P4 has a tendency to raise Omega and Omicron above the bottom line, but to keep his Rho right on the line, much in fact like his Tau, which in P4 and P67 extends underneath the bottom line in the same way as the Upsilon, and which always has a straight top bar in P4, but not always as on P64.”

In addition, Thiede claimed that NT textual critic Kurt Aland (of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament fame) and professor/author Philip Comfort (who have published books on NT manuscripts) arrived at the same conclusions as he does, that P4 and P64-67 are not related/do not belong to the same codex.

 

[patrick457]

On the other hand, here are responses to Thiede’s arguments by Roger Bagnall (Early Christian Books in Egypt, pp. 33-35):

In the article, Thiede voices the opinion that P4 comes from a date a century or so later than P64-67; he claims here and in the book that Kurt Aland, after initially embracing an identification, reversed himself in the matter. The citations offered, however, do not support this claim. Instead, the reality is that Aland never really argued this point and gave his reasons for a position; he just did not take up the identification into his book on the text of the New Testament. He did, it is true, regard the Oxford/Montserrat papyrus and the Paris fragments as different text types, “normal” in the case of P4, “strict” in the case of P64+67. But he elsewhere said that before the late third to early fourth century, the text was “not yet channeled into types”; so the different types mean little, especially with small fragments.

Wachtel points out the weakness of Thiede’s position regarding the Paris papyrus, that the style of writing “differs as little from P64 [the Magdalen papyrus] as P67 [the Montserrat papyrus] does,” and he notes that Thiede himself dates the Paris fragments around 200. Thiede seems to have recognized quickly that he had left himself exposed by his separation of these pieces, because in the book The Jesus Papyrus; ed.] he places the Paris fragments only a little later than his “earliest” fragments and even attacks others for putting P4 significantly later than the fragments.

Thiede continued, however, to reject the idea that these all came from the same original manuscript. In the book he claims (p. 68) that a study by Philip Comfort decisively disproved any connection (Comfort 1995). This is false. Comfort’s article is in fact by no means so definite. He says all three fragments are extremely similar, but he inclines to think P4 and P64+67 are works of the same scribe writing in different codices—but he admits that he is not sure. Thiede in effect plagiarized his arguments in the matter from Comfort: there are slightly thinner strokes in P64+67, there is ecthesis of two characters in P4 instead of one, and the color of the papyrus is darker in P4. But of these the last is irrelevant, easily the product of differing preservation contexts. As [French papyrologist] Hélène Cuvigny (2009) has observed, even pieces of the same document preserved very close to one another can look very different after many centuries. The other two characteristics are well within the normal range of variation inside a codex.

One other fact was adduced against identity, namely, the fact that the stray fragment bearing the title kata Matthaion (according to Matthew) with the Paris papyrus is in a different hand from that of the manuscript’s text. But this also is immaterial; it can have been a later addition on the flyleaf, as T.C. Skeat pointed out (1997: 18). It should be kept in mind that the Philo codex, in the binding of which P4 was reused, is dated to the later third century, thus providing a kind of terminus ante quem [latest possible date] for the Luke codex. And an honest scholar would have noted also that Comfort compared the hand of all three of these fragment groups to P.Oxy. 661, a Callimachus text generally dated to the late second or early third century.

The whole matter of the identity of the Paris fragments with the others was dealt with in enormous detail by Skeat the year after the book of Thiede and D’Ancona (Skeat 1997). He provides strong arguments in favor of a single multigospel codex as the source of all these fragments. Moreover, he believed that this was a single-quire codex, which forms a key part of his larger argument that the codex was adopted by Christians as a book form because a single-quire codex could accommodate the four canonical gospels. …] More recently, Scott Charlesworth has argued that the fiber directions on the surviving fragments of P64+67 and P4 are not consistent with a single-quire codex; although he accepts that they were written by the same scribe, he thinks that they can only belong to separate quires, whether in a single codex or (as he thinks more likely) separate codices (Charlesworth 2007).

 

[ericc]

Oh yeah, I just remembered this. Remember ‘The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife’ (and a supposed Coptic fragment of John from the same group as GoJW) that made the rounds a couple years back? The writing was highly likelyto be a modern fake, but the papyrus was ancient. (Though the two C14 tests gave two conflicting dates: one earlier than the time of Jesus - 404 to 209 BC - the other around AD 741.) That’s a technique some forgers use: they would take real ancient (blank) papyrus, write stuff on them, and then present them as ancient texts. But in this case, the forger’s style (not to mention the text he wrote, and the dialect it was written in - which was already extinct by 741) gave him away.

So if a modern forger, well versed in Ancient Greek or Hebrew, were to write something on ancient papyrus using ancient ink, it would be difficult to detect? Someone may decide to change history (or Bible) as we know it…In fact, with a clever use of a scanner could come up with something that looks like the handwriting of an existing well known scribe. I can’t imagine the damage that one can cause to one’s faith with these techniques.

 

[patrick457]

So if a modern forger, well versed in Ancient Greek or Hebrew, were to write something on ancient papyrus using ancient ink, it would be difficult to detect? Someone may decide to change history (or Bible) as we know it…In fact, with a clever use of a scanner could come up with something that looks like the handwriting of an existing well known scribe. I can’t imagine the damage that one can cause to one’s faith with these techniques.

Well, I don’t know if ancient papyrus would hold up on modern printers.

When manuscripts are judged, everything - the material, the writing implement, the style of the script, the handwriting, the grammar and syntax, the content - is scrutinized. If even one of these features is somewhat off, that’s a valid reason to question the manuscript’s authenticity.

The thing with modern forgers is that many of them aren’t that smart. Essentially, the ‘Gospel of Jesus’ Wife’ (the text at least) was recognized to be a fake because the forger was found to have simply copy-pasted words and phrases from the Coptic version of the Gospel of Thomas - specifically, a modern, internet version of the Gospel of Thomas. (The forger even copied a spelling error present in this internet version not found in the original manuscript.) Not to mention, he had a sloppy way of writing: in other words, the letters don’t really resemble how ancient scribes actually wrote. It’s as if he wrote them using a brush (instead of the calamus or reed-pen that ancient scribes actually used), and wrote them sloppily.

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
Compare the text with those of actual ancient manuscripts. Even a non-professional will notice the difference.

The thing about many early Christian manuscripts is that they were not written by professional scribes: they were written by amateurs who had at least basic writing skills. (Some, like the manuscript we’re discussing here - P4, 64-67 - are of decent enough quality; we might infer that professionals wrote these copies.)

It’s pretty common to have more than one writer working on a single manuscript (particularly if one of these scribes was a corrector/editor who corrected ‘mistakes’ made by the copyist), but AFAIK it’s very rare to have different manuscripts written by the same scribe. That’s why I think a manuscript written with “[what] looks like the handwriting of an existing well known scribe” turning up is enough to raise warning signals.

 

[dronald]

I did hear about a bit about it last year (or was it two years ago?), but the sources I’ve seen tend to associate Josh McDowell with it more than Mounce. The last things I heard about it are, well, these:

bricecjones.weebly.com/blog/the-first-century-gospel-of-mark-josh-mcdowell-and-mummy-masks-what-they-all-have-in-common
evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.jp/2014/05/breaking-news-first-century-fragment-of.html
triablogue.blogspot.jp/2014/05/update-on-possible-first-century-mark.html
earliestchristianity.wordpress.com/2014/05/08/green-scholars-initiative-papyrus-series-brill-publishing/
danielbwallace.com/2014/05/06/josh-mcdowells-discover-the-evidence/
earliestchristianity.wordpress.com/category/textual-criticism/

Do you believe the claims are legitimate that they came from the 1st century due to the mummy masks?

Also, how long would it take for this sort of thing to be published and dates to be proven? It’s now been two years.

Oddly Daniel B Wallace mentioned these fragments in a debate.

 

[patrick457]

Do you believe the claims are legitimate that they came from the 1st century due to the mummy masks?

Also, how long would it take for this sort of thing to be published and dates to be proven? It’s now been two years.

Oddly Daniel B Wallace mentioned these fragments in a debate.

I don’t know - if it comes out, it comes out. I’ll wait until the thing is published before I make a judgment on it.

(P.S. I think it’s unwise for Wallace to invoke the fragment before it even came to public scrutiny.)

 

[patrick457]

Raising this thread back up.

The P64-67 fiasco wasn’t the first time Thiede got embroiled in a controversy involving manuscripts. Slightly earlier, Thiede attempted to revive a theory first made by a Spanish Jesuit scholar (Fr. José O’Callaghan) in the early 1970s that certain scraps of papyrus with Greek writing found among the Dead Sea Scrolls were actually fragments of NT manuscripts. One of these specifically was touted as a fragment of Mark’s gospel.


This one.

Next stop: 7Q5.

 

[patrick457]

Just a little background before I go on.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in eleven caves from the immediate vicinity of the ancient settlement at Khirbet Qumran. Most of the writings discovered were either in Hebrew or Aramaic, but there were a few fragments (twenty-seven texts, out of the nine hundred and thirty discovered in total) in Greek, found in two caves (Caves 4 and 7). The fragments in Cave 7 in particular (which accounts for nineteen out of the twenty-seven Greek Qumran texts) are all of made of papyrus and are in Greek. Since they were made out of such a fragile material, they didn’t survive as well as many of the other manuscripts (which were made of parchment) did. So fragmentary are the Cave 7 fragments, in fact, that scholars can’t even be certain about the original text these manuscripts contained. (When you have nothing but letters, parts of certain words and a few common words - like the word kai ‘and’ - you do not have much to go on.)


ALL of the nineteen texts found in Cave 7, from here.

These fragments were first edited and published in 1962. Ten years after that, a Spanish Jesuit papyrologist, Fr. Jose O’Callaghan, made a controversial claim regarding the fragments: he believed that some of them were fragments of New Testament books. If they were, they would certainly be the earliest (these fragments could not have dated later than the mid-1st century). O’Callaghan paid particular attention to a single, small scrap (it’s just 3.3 x 2.3 cm) out of the nineteen: 7Q5, which he proposed was actually a fragment of Mark’s gospel (!)



As soon as his paper was published, O’Callaghan’s claims were criticized and almost-universally rejected for a number of reasons (which I’ll go into further depth in the following posts), until about in 1984, when Carsten Peter Thiede revived the theory, again ultimately leading to near-universal scholarly rejection. (This was before Thiede was ever involved with the Magdalen papyri: in fact, Thiede’s involvement with 7Q5 has a bit of influence over his later involvement with the Matthew fragments.)

 

[patrick457]

Do you believe the claims are legitimate that they came from the 1st century due to the mummy masks?

Also, how long would it take for this sort of thing to be published and dates to be proven? It’s now been two years.

Oddly Daniel B Wallace mentioned these fragments in a debate.

I’ll reply to your post again to report Larry Hurtado’s very sensible comments on the issue (which seems to have experienced a bit of a revival recently):

A First-Century Copy of the Gospel of Mark?
Early Manuscripts of Biblical Writings? What’s at Stake?

 

[patrick457]

The thing about 7Q5 is first, it’s very small (as mentioned, it only measures 3.3 x 2.3 cm; and even then, it’s one of the largest of the Cave 7 fragments!), it only contains writing on one side (which shows that it came from a scroll rather than a codex - in which case, you’d expect both sides to be written), and there is only one full Greek word in it: kai ‘and’, and traces of other letters (NH, for instance).

The first editors of the fragments proposed the following reconstruction (letters in brackets uncertain):

(col. 1) …
(col. 2) … Tω [A?]…
(col. 3) …[H?] KAI Tω?] …
(col. 4) … [N?]NH[C?] …
(col. 5) … Ɵ]H[EC?] …

Fr. O’Callaghan, however, after a study of the fragment’s photographs, claimed that 7Q5 actually contains the text of Mark 6:52-53. In his 1972 paper (¿Papiros neotestamentarios en la cueva 7 de Qumrân? ‘New Testament Papyri in Cave 7 at Qumran?’) he proposed that the transcription should actually be as follows:

(col. 1) [E] …
(col. 2) … [Y]Tω [H]…
(col. 3) …[H?] KAI T* …
(col. 4) … [N]NH[C] …
(col. 5) … Ɵ]H[CA] …

Which gives you the following:

… ου γαρ
(col. 1) συνηκαν επι τοις αρτοις,
(col. 2) αλλ ην αυτων η καρδια πεπωρω-
(col. 3) μενη. και τιαπερασαντες επι την γην]
(col. 4) ηλθον εις γεννησαρετ και
(col. 5) προσωρμισθησαν. και εξελ-
θοντων αυτων εκ του πλοιου ευθυς
επιγνοντες αυτον. (Mk. 6:52-53)

“… for they did not
understand concerning the loaves
but was their heart harden-
ed. And crossing over [unto the land]
they came unto Gennesaret and
drew to the shore. And com-
ing forth out of the boat immediately
they recognized him.”

Fr. O’Callaghan’s main basis for identifying the fragment with Mark seems to be pretty much the string of letters in the fourth column, …NNHC… which he identified with Gennesaret. He also identified the space just before the kai as a paragraph break, which introduces a new section. Hence Mark 6:52-53: “And when they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret…”

(You might notice that 7Q5 has a tau - T - where Mark 6:53 has a delta: the Greek word διαπερασαντες (diaperasantes ‘crossing over’). In other words, in Callaghan’s proposal, the word was misspelled. More on this later.)

7Q5 was hardly the only Qumran fragment Fr. O’Callaghan connected with an NT book. He identified nine of Greek fragments found in Cave 7 to be portions of NT books such as Mark, Acts, Romans, 1 Timothy, James, and 2 Peter. This was his identification:

Fragment = Contents; Identification; Date
7Q4 = 1 Timothy 3:16, 4:1-3; Certain; ca. 100
7Q5 = Mk. 6:52-53; Certain; ca. 50
7Q6.1 = Mk. 4:28; Certain; ca. 50
7Q6.2 = Acts 27:38; Probable; ca. 60
7Q7 = Mk. 12:17; Probable; ca. 50
7Q8 = James 1:23-24; Certain; ca. 50-70
7Q9 = Romans 5:11-12; Probable; ca. 50-60
7Q10 = 2 Peter 1:15; Possible; ca. 60
7Q15 = Mk. 6:48; Possible; ca. 50

https://imgur.com/4MOEvMd

 

[steve53]

Seems like he’s really stretching it with those fragments.

Weren’t there something like 900 documents found, with 30 copies of Genesis and other multiple copies of OT books?

With the Second Temple being a festival hub and money-maker year-round, and Jerusalem itself becoming a crowded and populous city, it makes sense that the High Priesthood would establish a copying “center” in a quiet and secluded place.

The Jewish population was booming in the years leading up to the revolt, and Holy Books would be needed for the scattered Synagogues.

Copying the Holy Books would be considered a religious ritual in and of itself, and might have necessitated a monastic-type place.

Assuming this, no reason for any Gospels to be found there- and there haven’t been.

 

[patrick457]

Seems like he’s really stretching it with those fragments.

Weren’t there something like 900 documents found, with 30 copies of Genesis and other multiple copies of OT books?

Around 981, to be more exact. Out of that, 225 (22%) are biblical texts. The other are either sectarian texts, commentaries (often also sectarian in bent), extrabiblical works (1 Enoch is a good example), or some other miscellanea.

(snip)

Assuming this, no reason for any Gospels to be found there- and there haven’t been.

Maybe they’ll disagree with you on Qumran’s nature, but most scholars will agree with you regarding the papyri at least.

The reason why almost nobody believed Fr. O’Callaghan was:

• First, because his identifications are all flimsy. As you can see from the picture in the last posts, most of the fragments he tried to identify as NT texts only contain letters and bits of letters. There are only three fragments which contain any full words (7Q3, 7Q5, 7Q15): and these words - kai (‘and’), ti (‘what/something’), tōi (‘for the’) - are not exactly the rarest words in Greek. In fact, Fr. O’Callaghan’s attempt to link …NNHC… in 7Q5 with Gennesaret isn’t very strong: it could also be the word egennēsen (“begot”) - which was in fact the original proposal. (In fact, his reconstructions of 7Q5’s letters rely on the theory that it was a copy of Mark.)
• Second, Fr. O’Callaghan dates the fragments too late. What you have here is essentially the opposite of what Thiede did with the Magdalen papyri: some of these fragments were earlier than the time of Jesus, way too early for them to be NT texts. In the official edition of the fragments, 7Q4 (supposedly 1 Timothy) is paleographically dated to 100 BC and 7Q5 (supposedly Mark) is dated to a period between 50 BC-AD 50, with a preference for the BC dating (the others were undated since they preserve so few letters). The biblical fragments - 7Q1’s Exodus, 7Q2’s Letter of Jeremiah - are both dated to 100 BC.
• Third, Fr. O’Callaghan’s proposal doesn’t quite fit Mark’s text. Line analysis shows that were the fragment a copy of Mark’s gospel, the traditional text of line 4 would be too long for a proper alignment in 7Q5. O’Callaghan’s reconstruction thus omits the phrase επι την γην (epi tēn gēn “to the land”) so that the words can line up correctly. However, this ‘land’-less variant reading is not supported by any significant NT manuscript; only a medieval Latin one (not really the best source).

And then there’s also the word διαπερασαντες (diaperasantes). Fr. O’Callaghan’s theory would require us to think that this copy misspelled it as τιαπερασαντες (tiaperasantes). It’s true that d- and t- sounds were sometimes confused in Koine Greek, but we have no evidence for a confusion at this level (the preposition dia- has no semantic overlap with tia - a non-existent word - and is so common that a schoolboy would have learned its correct spelling). It would be like misspelling the word ‘diameter’ as ‘tiameter’, or maybe ‘drive’ as ‘trive’.

 

[patrick457]

(Continued)

• Fourth, the latest possible date for these manuscripts was AD 68-70, when Qumran was destroyed. Now under the conventional dating, Mark’s gospel was written sometime roughly AD 65-75. If we follow ancient tradition here, Mark wrote his gospel around Peter’s death, AD 64-67. (In fact, many scholars still prefer a Roman origin for the gospel.) Another thing to note is that Mark is really the most unpopular gospel: we only have a single copy of Mark that predates the 4th century. As Larry Hurtado notes:

[T]he chance of fragments a first-century copy of Mark being found are very, very slim. In that very early period there would have been far fewer copies than, say from the third century AD. But, thus far, the only copy of the Gospel of Mark from the first three centuries is in the Chester Beatty Gospels Codex (P.Chester Beatty I, or P45). So, you see what I mean. Mark seems not to have been copied nearly as often as the other NT Gospels, so the statistical chances of any copy surviving are slim, and the chance of fragments of a first-century copy surviving very, very, very slim.

So what exactly are the odds of four very early, different copies of an ‘unpopular’ gospel originally written in Rome turning up in a cave deep within the Judaean desert just a year or so after the gospel was composed, much less copies of other NT books?

Even if we follow Fr. O’Callaghan’s proposal here - dating 7Q5 and the other fragments in general to AD 50s at the earliest, the question would still hold: never mind Mark, how in the world could copies of 2 Peter or 1 Timothy end up in Qumran just a year or two at the very least after Peter and Paul would have died? (To be fair, a lot of modern scholars don’t accept 1 Timothy or 2 Peter as authentic, but even if they are, we still have the issue of the scenario of these letters circulating to the wider Christian public and being copied too soon.)

• There’s also the issue of why Christian manuscripts would end up under the auspices of the Qumran Community, popularly thought to be Essenes or a related sect. One might imagine Christians in Palestine depositing copies of these NT books into their sectarian friends for safekeeping, but then again, the idea of explicitly connecting Christians with the Qumran Community or the Essenes is itself tenuous. We’re kind of past the ‘Jesus was an Essene’ theory now: nobody seriously holds that anymore except for people in the fringes.

I should note that five of the fragments found are allegedly from Mark and Romans, the two most anti-legalistic books within the New Testament: in fact, seven of the nine supposed NT fragments are works by Paul (1 Timothy, Romans) or his associates (Mark, Acts) - not exactly the guy who’ll encourage stringent obedience to the Mosaic Law. In light of this, is it really plausible that the early Christians would have entrusted these books to the Qumran Community, which were a sect who were very, very scrupulous about following the Law of Moses?

 

[patrick457]

As you might imagine, Fr. O’Callaghan’s hypothesis won very few, if any, supporters. That is, until Carsten Peter Thiede began to publish articles in defense of O’Callaghan’s theories in the early 1980s - which pretty much began his (rather infamous) association with scraps of papyri, finally culminating in a book published in 1992: The Earliest Gospel Manuscript? The Qumran Fragment 7Q5 and its Significance for New Testament Studies.

What Thiede did was essentially repeat much of O’Callaghan’s arguments (though he - rather wisely - mainly focused only on 7Q5 while sidelining the other papyri O’Callaghan identified as belonging to other NT books - mainly the Pauline epistles!) while adding some of his own, all the while castigating NT scholars and papyrologists who rejected O’Callaghan, who he casts in the role of innocent victim.

To repeat, the three main arguments against 7Q5 being a fragment of Mark are:

(1) 7Q5 has a tau (τ) where Mark 6:53 has a delta (δ): so one will suppose that the fragment read τιαπεράσαντες] tiaperasantes and not διαπεράσαντες diaperasantes (‘having crossed over’). But there is no such word as τιαπεράσαντες.
(2) In order for 7Q5 to be a fragment of Mark, one will have to suppose that this manuscript did not contain the phrase επι την γην (epi tēn gēn “to the land”) for the words to line up correctly. But the problem is, no manuscript of Mark we have omits these three words.
(3) O’Callaghan’s reconstruction of the more illegible letters are themselves questionable: really, the only full word preserved is KAI ‘and’, and at least four to five other letters.

To which he basically answered:

(1) Tau and delta can be interchanged in koine Greek - so who’s to say that this manuscript didn’t misspell diaperasantes as tiaperasantes?
(2) Other early papyri (for example, Papyrus 45 - the only manuscript of Mark that undisputedly predates the 4th century) omit material at times, even though such an omission is unique to that manuscript.
(3) If O’Callaghan’s critics had taken the time to look at the fragment itself instead of a photograph of it, their objections about his letter reconstructions would have vanished. In other words, “You don’t have a right to criticize O’Callaghan because you haven’t seen the fragment, but I did, so my argument has more weight.”

I’ll suggest this article which answers Thiede’s objections, since it already answers it better than I ever could.

7Q5: The Earliest NT Papyrus?