The Earliest Gospel Manuscript? : The Qumran Fragment 7Q5 and It's Significance for New Testament St

Steven MacDonald

The Dead Sea Scrolls are back in the limelight. This is the right moment to reopen the case of Qumran Cave 7. Found in 1955, this cave contained a curious collection of exclusively Greek fragments on papyrus only - an exception among all caves discovered at this site. What might these unique documents be? When the well-known Spanish papyrologist Jose O'Callaghan suggested, in 1972, that some of them were passages from the New Testament, among them from Mark's Gospel, scholars worldwide were divided. Was this a breakthrough in the dating of the New Testament (since, for archeological and paleographical reasons, all the fragments must have been written before AD 68), or were the scraps too small for safe identification? A negative consensus seemed to prevail, until the German literary historian Carsten Peter Thiede began to reinvestigate the evidence in a series of articles and monographs. His new book (the first in English on the subject), analyzes and presents the material, using the latest evidence, for a balanced assessment of the case for New Testament writings at Qumran, the earliest extant Christian papyri.

Rick Mansfield (Logos)

@Steven MacDonald  unfortunately, this title is out of print.