From: jhpb@sarto.budd-lake.nj.us (Joseph H. Buehler)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: The 7Q5 "Coincidence"
Date: 3 Sep 92 04:15:20 GMT
Organization: none

The following is copyright "30 Days" magazine, and is posted here by
permission of their English language publisher.  It may not be
reproduced without permission of "30 Days".

"The 7Q5 'Coincidence'", from the September 1991 issue of 30DAYS.  (I
have some other material on the subject from 30DAYS and a French
Catholic publication, but have not OCR'd them, and don't have the time
to type them in.)

----------------------------------------------------

In October at long last, Fr. Jose O'Callaghan will be able to cross
swords with his opponents.  He considers it a victory because for the
past 20 years, they have refused to pick up the gauntlet, for the
outcome seems to have been decided long ago.

The Catholic University of Eichstaett in Germany, and Science of
Religions professor, Bernhard Maier in particular, have now decided to
set the scene for the challenge.  They have organized the first
scientific symposium on the "Fragment of Mark" and next October, in
the heart of Bavaria, experts from all over the world will join in the
7Q5 fray.  But the battle is not just over papyruses and dates.

The break in the silence marks the beginning of the end of the current
critical and historical method of interpretation and rationalist
prejudices that have been dominating the field of exegesis for
decades.  And the late dating of the Gospels has always been one of
the hingepins of the whole exegetic scaffolding.

Hugo Staudinger, an expert in ancient history and director of research
at the Institut fuer Bildung und Wissen of Paderborn, supports
O'Callaghan's discovery.  "The problem is exegesis today", he told
30DAYS.  "There is a fixation about a late dating of the Gospels and
it has permeated even schoolbooks on religion.  Now, many fear it is
too late to recant.  But these theories are doomed to die.  There is
too much evidence from different sources and it all points to an
earlier dating.  The only strategy left to the opponents is silence,
for there is no scientific way of confuting an earlier dating".

The time for doubt has passed according to papryologist Herbert
Hunger, the Professor Emeritus of Byzantine Studies at the University
of Vienna and an authority on the whole 7Q5 fragment case.  "It is my
conviction that in the field of papyrology, O'Callaghan's discovery is
now undeniable.  The real issue at stake is the exegetes' resistance
to the scientific dating".

The problem, then, is to ensure that this now certain dating by
papyrology penetrates the sphere of exegesis -- the very field in
which O'Callaghan's discovery constitutes a bombshell with
unpredictable consequences.

One exegete is 78-year-old Harald Riesenfeld, Professor Emeritus of
New Testament Studies at the University of Uppsala in Sweden.  He is
considered such an authority that he is the only exegete member of the
State Commission for the translation into Swedish of the Gospel that
was concluded in 1981.  He converted to Catholicism seven years ago
"because I could no longer accept the image of an historical Christ
that is dominant in Lutheranism -- that Christ is a pious creation, a
marvel more or less produced by the Christian community.  Christ has
now been reduced to theologoumenon".

In his pursuit of an exegetic path -- he rejects, for example, the
philological train of thought of the academics Jean Carmignac and
Claude Tresmontant although they have arrived at his same conclusions
-- Riesenfeld has long been convinced of the need to back-date the
Gospels.  He found O'Callaghan's discovery convincing although he
admits that the majority of exegetes do not agree.

"But it is the rationalist type of Christology which still dominates
today that is opposed to O'Callaghan's discovery", he said and warned,
"We should not illude ourselves by thinking that today's crisis of
faith can be resolved by back-dating.  Acceptance of the Gospel
message is as much an act of faith today as it was then and the degree
of credibility of the Gospels does not bring about acceptance.  For
even those who witnessed Christ's miracles rejected him.  Of course,
backdating would leave much less room for manipulation of the figure
of Christ.  Above all, the imaginative 'marvel' theory rife in the
Christian community would no longer stand up".

The most recent scientific work on this whole issue is that of
Ferdinand Rohrhirsch entitled "Markus in Qumran?  Eine
Auseinandersetzung mit den Argumenten fuer und gegen das Fragment 7Q5
mit Hilfe des methodischen Fallibilismusprinzip," Wuppertal 1990.
This work examines opinions for and against the authenticity of 7Q5 on
the eminently formal basis of trial and error.

"I did not go into the truth or otherwise of O'Callaghan's
hypothesis", Rohrhirsch told 30DAYS.  "I examined the methodological
precision behind his discovery and the theories of those who disagreed
with him.  The result was that by the time my research was completed,
O'Callaghan's hypothesis was still standing while all the rejections
of it proved to be inconsistent or imprecise.  They included that of
the renowned scholar Kurt Aland of Munster who neglected to insert an
elementary detail in the computer and thus prejudiced his whole
critical construction."

The most convinced standard-bearer of O'Callaghan's discovery is a
young German Protestant.  Carsten Peter Thiede was born in Berlin in
1952 and studied literature, history, medieval Latin and philology at
Berlin, Geneva and Oxford.  He has been the director of the
Christliche Medien-Akademie of Wetzlar since 1985.  In 1986, he wrote
a significant essay on the fragment of Mark and the next year, the
Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome translated it into Italian.

He came across O'Callaghan's discovery several years ago during a
study on the second letter of Peter and it fascinated him.  Years had
passed since the find in 1972 and Thiede asked O'Callaghan if after
examining the criticisms that had followed, he was still convinced of
its authenticity.  The Jesuit scholar's conviction that it was
authentic encouraged Thiede to explore such a winning theory "which in
the meantime I learned not to consider as a mere hypothesis but a
discovery in the true sense of the word", he told 30DAYS.

"When O'Callaghan first made his find known, no one believed that the
Gospel of Mark could have been written so early on and that Christian
texts could have been found at Qumran.  Even those who accepted that
from a papyrological point of view the discovery had been made after
sound research were skeptical about it.  But in recent years, an
increasing number of scholars have arrived at the conclusion that a)
the Gospel of Mark and other texts could have been written before the
year 68 when the Qumran grottoes were sealed; 2) many experts who are
not at all interested in the fragment are increasingly of the opinion
that there had been contact between the Christians and the Essenes.
This, of course, makes the existence of a fragment of Mark's Gospel at
Qumran more plausible.

"Today, therefore, O'Callaghan's theory has threefold support --
papryological, archeological and, probably, chronological.  A table
with three legs would stand up so O'Callaghan's is no longer a
hypothesis but a find".

Thiede, who was allowed to work three times on the fragment conserved
in Jerusalem, claims that all O'Callaghan's critics studied only
photographic reproductions which heightens the risk of error when the
task at hand is analysis of minute details.  As regards the Dominican
Fathers in Jerusalem, Thiede has heard reports from several
authoritative quarters of rivalry among religious orders.

But what would be the main consequences of the find if it were to be
authenticated? Thiede explains: "Apart from the obvious back-dating of
the Gospel of Mark, the discovery of the 7Q5 papyrus has wide-ranging
implications.  There are implications, for example, for the way in
which the Gospels were transmitted: this fragment is clearly part of a
scroll but the majority of New Testament exegetes and Church
historians sustain that from the outset Christians used a code form
and not scrolls.  I have always been of a different opinion.  I
believe that the first Christians used scrolls to affirm in a material
and formal way that their writings were as important as the Hebrew
texts contained in the "Tora".

"Prevalently Jewish, Christians initially considered themselves part
of Judaism and Jews themselves allowed them to pray in the Temple that
still existed at the time.  It was only later, between the year 70 and
90 that the radical separation between Jews and Judeo-Christians
began, sanctioned at about the year 90 with the insertion within
Jewish prayers of imprecations against Judeo-Christians.  It was then
that the Christians abandoned the scroll method for coded writings in
a public demonstration of this separation.

"So what emerges from O'Callaghan's find is a Christian community
missionary-oriented from its very beginnings and not only from the
moment of its 'paganization'.  It was a community that set out to
evangelize not by means of codes extraneous to Jewish tradition but
with scrolls.  It is reasonable to suppose that a member of the Essene
community converted to Christianity would have hidden the papyrus in
the Qumran grottoes.

"Moreover in Rome, traces remain of this missionary orientation from
the beginning: a second or third century image in the catacombs of
Domitilla features St. Paul and scrolls of writings lie at his feet.
This proves that at the outset it was of strategic importance for the
Christian community to be able to provide a counter-response with
their own scrolls.  This is a still unexplored field of research
because the impression we are given of Paul's extraordinary missionary
impulse has meant that we have overlooked what was happening at the
time within the Jewish community.  An additional object of research is
the relationship between Christians and the Essenes.  Some experts
believe, for example, that traces of the Essenses can be found in the
New Testament even though there is no explicit mention of them".

Another consequence of O'Callaghan's discovery is the reaffirmation of
Christ in historical terms which is perhaps even more important than
the missionary aspect.

"This is certainly true", Thiede continued.  "To date, we have
knowledge only of the text of St. Paul where, in the first letter to
the Corinthians, he writes of 500 witnesses to the Resurrection, many
of whom were still alive in his time.  It is as if he were saying: if
you do not believe me, go and ask those who witnessed it.  Now we have
a Gospel subject in a similar way to confirmation or denial by eye
witnesses.  This greatly increases its degree of credibility and this
is very significant today from a pastoral point of view."

Thiede added: "Under the influence of Bultmann's theories, the
impression has been created among many Christians that the less we
know about the historical Christ the more faith we will have in him.
For in this way, faith is not bound by or to concrete facts; faith
must be 'pure'.  Exegesis has fully adopted this perspective, this
escape from historical fact.  But this stance is no longer valid and
it is not by chance that in recent times, an increasing number of new
generation experts are focusing on research into the historical
aspects of the 'Jesus Christ affair'."

Although its implications are revolutionary, the "O'Callaghan issue"
does not seem to have stirred in any particular way the world of
Catholic exegesis which is currently at grips with a general crisis.

Indeed, "the Pontifical Biblical Commission is preparing a document on
the various exegetic methods that is expected to be released on the
occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1943 encyclical Divino
Afflante Spiritu", said Hubert Ritt, a Commission member.  What is
keeping Catholic exegetes awake nights is the "Drewermann phenomenon"
-- the application of the psychology of the subconscience to Scripture
to "revitalize" it.  This has all the appearances of an angry clash
between the historical and critical school of thought, guilty of
rendering the word of God inanimate, and an exegetic approach which is
criticized just because it is new.  The Drewermann method is really
just a degenerating phenomenon within the dominant exegetic school of
thought.  What the famed theologian from Paderborn has done is to
carry to extremes the consequences of that which his current
adversaries hope to do -- strip the Christian fact of its historical
reality.  Will the Pontifical Biblical Commission document touch on
the question of the fragment of Mark?  "No, the document's scope is
wider", Ritt said.  "The Commission does not usually deal with such
specific questions, except if a bishop expressly raises an issue".  To
Bavaria, then, in October when the next episode in the "O'Callaghan
case" opens.