Post by Maggie on May 2, 2014 21:05:04 GMT -6
It seems like some serious absurdity rears its head every decade about Jesus. This latest manuscript fragment has been thoroughly, like 100%, debunked. I feel bad for those who wanted it to be true but that is the way the cookie crumbles.
The evidence is described in a Wall Street Journal article. It is short, well-written and quite interesting. In my opinion the money quote is this:
But do read the whole. It opens a window into how manuscripts are dated which is quite an interesting field of study.
The evidence is described in a Wall Street Journal article. It is short, well-written and quite interesting. In my opinion the money quote is this:
Then last week the story began to crumble faster than an ancient papyrus exposed in the windy Sudan. Mr. Askeland found, among the online links that Harvard used as part of its publicity push, images of another fragment, of the Gospel of John, that turned out to share many similarities—including the handwriting, ink and writing instrument used—with the "wife" fragment. The Gospel of John text, he discovered, had been directly copied from a 1924 publication.
"Two factors immediately indicated that this was a forgery," Mr. Askeland tells me. "First, the fragment shared the same line breaks as the 1924 publication. Second, the fragment contained a peculiar dialect of Coptic called Lycopolitan, which fell out of use during or before the sixth century." Ms. King had done two radiometric tests, he noted, and "concluded that the papyrus plants used for this fragment had been harvested in the seventh to ninth centuries." In other words, the fragment that came from the same material as the "Jesus' wife" fragment was written in a dialect that didn't exist when the papyrus it appears on was made.
But do read the whole. It opens a window into how manuscripts are dated which is quite an interesting field of study.