gmatthews said
From the blog of Brice Jones:

** you do not have permission to see this link **

So what does this say about the long awaited Mark fragment

gmatthews said
Was that just a random question?

No G. Since the texts were actually discovered authenticated etc, I think we can say something about why this Gospel of Mark fragment is taking so long. Don’t you agree? Did they run out of Palmolive? Did Josh Mc Dowell need to write a new book?

Is it really as important as Dan Wallace intimated when he compared it to the Dead sea scrolls

gmatthews said
The blog I linked doesn’t have anything to do with the Mark fragment.  There’s another post here somewhere that I probably linked about the Mark fragment.

Yes, I know. I’m not sure why the blog would have to have anything to do with the Mark fragment in order to compare its discovery, authentication etc with that of the fragment Brice Jones  discusses. Certainly a document, if you will, recently discovered would go through a similar, if not identical, process.  From Jones’ discussion it seems that the text he is writing about is still in the process of being sorted out. But is available to scholars for examination. I guess I was thinking of what sort of problems- apart from the ones we might be tempted to infer- might keep the Mark fragment secluded for so long.

G:

  I had forgotten about the Dead Sea Scrolls. Quite a story! I can’t help but wonder if this is what Dan Wallace meant 

when he compared the Mark Fragment to them . Ehrman argued in one of his posts on the subject that if the text was different than expected, They would be describing it as, in some way, inauthentic. But suppose for the sake of argument, they rushed to authenticate the date but later found that the text was as Ehrman has been arguing it might be?  Now you have a document declared authentic by this special group that supports Ehrman’s  hypothesis. 

PURE SPECULATION, I know.  Clearly this group was assembled to “protect” it from secular influence.  We’ll call this the Shroud of Turin tactic: Incidentally, there was a story not too long ago that some “Historian” the Vatican gave free reign in its archives, purportedly found a first hand account of, I think, by a non believer, of a Jesus miracle!  The story quickly disappeared, but will, no doubt, remain in the back of people’s minds.  

“What do you mean there were no first hand accounts of Jesus miracles. There was a historian that proved Jesus did miracles. I don’t know why your so intent on picking on Jesus, you accept the historians word when it comes to Plato etc. You”re just a bigot.

I’m trying to be fair here, but any charitable explanation, I can think of quickly leads me back to the sense that the delay is, in the words of the first of my parents friends, I ever heard swear, “C’mon maaan, that’s BULLL SHIT. Aw that’s BULLL SHIT!

Hmmm… yea Wallace strikes me that way too. I also agree about the NDA. Also we can cite Ehrman’s own experience with NDA as it pertains to The Gospel of Judas. 

Yet Ehrman et al seem to have been selected on scholarly merit as opposed to having the right ideas. The  NDA seems to have been so National Geographic could recoup its money. 

In the end I guess we’ll have to rely on the reputation of Wallace et al.