From: ncramer@bbn.com (Nichael Cramer)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: Jesus is a Prophet, not Son of God
Date: 11 Nov 1992 05:45:58 GMT
Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA
Reply-To: ncramer@labs-n.bbn.com (Nichael Cramer)
NNTP-Posting-Host: bbn.com

lungtt@gus26.ecn.purdue.edu (Terence T. Lung) writes:
>It's too bad for this so-called *proven* theory that fragments of a copy
>of the Gospel of Mark have been dated *by scientific methods* as having
>been *copied* in *50* a.d.  In other words, the thing was well in
>circulation by that time period.  These fragments are in the custody
>of Professor Jose O'Callaghan at the Pontifical Biblical Institute
>in Rome.  You can go date the fragments yourself.

O'Callaghan's claims concerning NT fragments found at Q`mran have come up
here before (this is just one of several).

In short, they are given virtually no credence by any other serious scholar
in the field (they have, however, been gotten a _lot_ of popular press).

Appended below is an article that I posted previously on this subject.
Included are quotations from the works of Bruce Metzger providing 1]
specific, detailed evidence why O'Callaghan's claims concerning the
purported fragment of Mark cannot be correct and 2] pointers to
bibliography for anyone interested in following this up.

Nichael

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 [...] I can offer some input on O'Callaghan's findings.

In short, O'Callaghan found a small (17 Greek letters) fragment, known as
7Q5.  He claimed that this fragment contained parts of Mark 6:52-53 and
that it had been written in the mid-to-late '40s.

Now, one should always be careful when making the claim that no counter-
examples exist, but in this case we are about as close to being 100%
accurate as we can reasonably expect to be if we point out that this claim
found _no_ support in the scholarly literature.

Attached below is a brief, but detailed, semi-technical discussion of some
of the problems with O'Callaghan's claim.  Furthermore, when this topic was
discussed a few months back on another mail-list someone quoted some
additional results in which the text of 7Q5 was compared (by computer) with
the the text of the LXX.  In that case several (I seem to recall the number
being on the order of a dozen or so) examples were found that matched the
text better than did the supposed passage in Mark.  (If I can dig out more
information I'll pass it along.  Any other readers of nt-greek recall
this?)

Nichael

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[The following is quoted from Bruce M. Metzger, _The Text of the New
Testament_, 3rd Edition, pp 264f.]

... a tiny scrap of papyrus found in Cave VII at Qumran that preserves
seventeen Greek letters; this was identified by Jose O'Callaghan as having
been written about A.D. 45-50 and containing a portion of Mark vi. 52-53.
As would be expected, a flurry or responses soon appears in popular as well
as learned journals[*], followed later by several books that reiterate the
original views of O'callaghan.  The implications of O'Callaghan's
identification were such that some of the reactions to his article were
predictably partisan.

That there are interesting coincidences between 7Q5 and Mark vi. 52-53
cannot be denied.  On the other hand, however, whether these coincidences
amount to decisive evidence for the identification that O'Callaghan
proposed is a different matter.  There are three prima facie objections to
his solution:  (a) it depends on the assumption of a variant reading that
omits three of the words (EPI THN GHN); (b) it depends on the assumption
that the only complete letter preserved of the word DIAPEPASANTES is an
orthographic variation of initial <TAU> for <DELTA> and (c) it postulate in
at least two places unlikely readings of doubtful letters (to judge from
the published notes and facsimiles), namely, the <NU> in line 1 and the
second <IOTA> in line 3.  On balance, one must conclude that it is not
likely that the fragment is from the Second Gospel --and in any case the
date assigned to the fragment is certainly overly precise and too narrowly
defined.

   [* For a list of more than fifty articles published during the three
      years following O'Callaghan initial publication, see Jospeh A. 
      Fitzmyer, _The Dead Sea Scrolls: Major Publications and TOols for 
      Study_ (Missoula, 1975), pp.  119-23.  Most of the popular articles 
      accepted O'Callaghan opinion; almost all scholarly articles rejected 
      it... ]

[NOTE: The conclusion of this footnote and two other footnotes --containing
additional bibliographic information-- have been omitted.  If you are
interested, please see the original.]


Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc