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http://www.examiner.com/article/egyptian-mummy-mask-discovered-to-contain-verses-from-the-bible

An Egyptian mummy mask has been found to contain a text with purported verses from the New Testament Gospel of Mark, which is being touted as the "earliest known example" of any biblical gospel. Owen Jarus of LiveScience.com states that the "gospel fragment was written on a sheet of papyrus that was later reused to create a mask that was worn by a mummy." He further explains: "Although the mummies of Egyptian pharaohs wore masks made of gold, ordinary people had to settle for masks made out of papyrus (or linen), paint and glue."

 

The text was discovered by a group headed by evangelical New Testament expert Craig Evans of Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia, Canada. In 2012, news about the same fragment was "leaked" by Daniel B. Wallace, professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary, as confirmed by British historianRoberta Mazza.

At that time, the group had dated the fragment to the 80s but has revised it now to around 90 AD/CE, possibly based on previous criticisms. If genuinely from 90 AD/CE, this text would predate our oldest extant complete copies of Mark by two to three centuries.

Says Evans about his team's work:

"We're recovering ancient documents from the first, second and third centuries. Not just Christian documents, not just biblical documents, but classical Greek texts, business papers, various mundane papers, personal letters..."

LiveScience recounts that the accompanying documents include "philosophical texts and copies of stories by the Greek poet Homer." It is also reported that some of the documents have dates on them and that "the researchers dated the first-century gospel in part by analyzing the other documents found in the same mask."

This discovery is being trumpeted via sensational headlines which declare matter-of-factly that the Markan gospel fragment dates to the first century, based on the accompanying documents, hand-writing analysis/paleography and carbon-14 dating. There are several problems with this assertion, however.

In the first place, this claim of "earliest known gospel" has been made several times with a number of document fragments from antiquity, none of which has been dated with certainty to the first century but any or all of which indeed could be later.

Secondly, there exists no credible, scientific evidence that any of the canonical gospels were in existence until the last quarter of the second century, so this early date appears to be illusory and based on wishful thinking, rather than concrete scientific analysis.

Next, C-14 dating is not exact but has an error of +/- 80-150 years, so the fragment in question could date to the second or even third century, if the C-14 testing was done properly to begin with.

Moreover, as I wrote in my article concerning the announcement in 2012, it should be kept in mind that paleography is an imprecise science, especially when it comes to the era in question. The reality is that, similar to carbon-14 dating, paleography has a +/– factor of about 25 to 50 (or more) years, meaning that even if the paleographer placed the papyrus at the end of the first century, it could in fact date to the middle of the second or even later. As New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado remarks:

..because paleographical dating can rarely be more precise than +/- 25 to 50 years, the proposed dating of many manuscripts will lie across two centuries…

Palaeographical dating can ever only be approximate, perhaps as narrow as 50 yrs plus or minus. Expert palaeographers often disagree over a given item by as much as a century or more. It’s never wise to rest much upon one judgement, and confidence will be enhanced only when various experts have been given full access to the items.

It is particularly difficult to make a palaeographical dating of a fragment, the smaller it is the more difficult. For such dating requires as many characters of the alphabet as possible and as many instances of them in the copy as possible to form a good judgement about the “hand”.

Although it ratchets up potential sales of a publication to make large claims and posit sensational inferences about items, it doesn’t help the sober scholarly work involved. It also doesn’t actually accrue any credit or greater credibility for the items or those involved in handling them.

In a scientific analysis for dating, still other factors must be included, such as possible anachronisms, as well as the provenance, first appearance in the literary record, comparative literature and so on.

LiveScience.com also reports that the methodology used in the Markan papyrus's analysis has come under fire by other scholars:

...For instance, archaeologist Paul Barford, who writes about collecting and heritage issues, has written ascathing blog postcriticizing the work on the gospel.

Roberta Mazza, a lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Manchester, hasblogged her concerns about the text as has Brice Jones, a doctoral candidate in religion at Concordia University.

Recalling the earlier claims of the gospel fragment dating to the 80s, British archaeologist Barford asks, "[W]hat was the dating of the cartonnage, and was that dating from context or style/guesswork?" The "cartonnage" refers to the papier-mache type layers used for the mask that contained the writing, destroyed in the process of extracting the Markan fragment.

Mazza calls this discovery the "sadly famous papyrus fragment of the Gospel of Mark from mummy mask cartonnage," referring to the leak by Wallace in 2012. She further comments:

It is clear that papyri have officially entered into the rhetoric of apologists as the means through which they sell the idea that we can recover the original texts of the Gospels. These people are not doing any good service to the public and to our cultural heritage patrimony. The audience who attend their talks are told fantasy stories on the retrieval of papyrus fragments and their date, and on the quest for Christian original texts; apologists’ speeches are not only misinformed, but can even encourage more people to buy mummy masks on the antiquities market and dissolve them in Palmolive soap – a method suggested publicly by one of them, Josh McDowell...

All this said, I must confess this pseudo-scholarship is procuring me endless, astonished entertainment…

In his article, "The 'First Century' Gospel of Mark, Josh McDowell, and Mummy Masks: What They All Have in Common," Brice C. Jones expresses dismay that Josh McDowell, "a Christian evangelical apologist with no scholarly credentials," is involved in the decipherment of these mummy masks. He continues:

...apparently, McDowell is one of the main persons dismounting mummy masks. He states in the video that he doesn't know what he is doing and has to rely on what scholars tell him...

All of this is deeply disconcerting... The scholarly community needs to be more and more aware of these practices, how these artifacts are being used, and the religious agendas behind it all.

Jones continues with a point-by-point analysis and criticisms of McDowell's video description of the processes the Evans team has been using, indicating it is highly amateurish and the conclusions are biased towards evangelical and conservative Christian doctrinal positions.

Jones next remarks, somewhat cynically:

It is interesting that all these texts get dated earlier and earlier. I am still waiting for the day that someone explains to me these peoples' methods of dating. As it stands, they apparently have discovered many, many of the world's "earliest" papyri that remain unpublished.

He also includes an image of a fragment of one of the other texts that allegedly accompanied the Markan mummy mask papyrus, a piece of Homer's Iliad. Jones concludes tentatively that this text could date to the late first or early second century AD/CE.

Even if these accompanying texts do date to the first century, however, the mask and Markan fragment could have been later. We possess libraries with texts from widely different centuries: In this regard, a Superman comic book in a collection with an original Shakespeare would not date to the 16th or 17th century.

Furthermore, the accompanying texts could have been used in the mask's construction because they were old and worn out, rather than newly written. Their dating, therefore, does not serve as a concrete indication of when the mask was fabricated.

Although apologist McDowell claims that this type of mummy mask was made only until around 125 AD/CE, therefore the Markan fragment must be earlier, Baylor University reports thattexts found in mummy masks have dated up to the fourth century AD/CE, which means the mask construction would have been even later.

The bottom line is that the papyrus has not been examined by a team of credentialed and unbiased scholars and scientists, such that at this point the early dating represents speculation based on wishful thinking by vested Christian interests.

Since there is no credible scientific evidence for the clear emergence of the canonical gospels as we have them until the last half of the second century, when they suddenly burst onto the scene and are discussed obsessively by the Church fathers of the time and onward, it would be very surprising to find anygospel manuscripts prior to that time.

Mummy Mask May Reveal Oldest Known Gospel

Ancient Biblical text discovered in an Egyptian mummy mask

Mark strikes back: Mummy cartonnage and Christian apologetics, again…

The 'First Century' Gospel of Mark, Josh McDowell, and Mummy Masks: What They All Have in Common

1st-century Gospel of Mark fragment found?

Baylor Undergrad Students Get Rare Chance for In-Person Research on Ancient Manuscripts

When Were the Gospels Written?

The Gospel Dates: 2nd Century Compositions?