Loading...In my previous post — originally put up on the blog in April 2012 — I explained how in a debate I had in February of that year, evangelical New Testament scholar and textual critic Dan Wallace to my surprise (shock!) announced that now for the first time we actually have a copy of the Gospel of Mark from the first century, not long after the book was written, and that it confirms what he has said all along, that we have the original text of the New Testament. But he wouldn’t tell us anything about the copy — how big it was, who established its date, whether the date had been corroborated, etc.
Here I continue, again from the post in 2012, edited a bit.
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It would be significant if it was the ending of Mark and lacked the ending that later was attached to it, no?
Yup!
I remember this story (from this blog) and I think I recall how it turns out.
But at this point [in 2012] you say “Would it change anyone’s views about anything? No. ”
Just as a thought experiment, can’t you imagine something that would be huge, such as added verbiage at the baptism absolutely clarifying that until that moment, Jesus was NOT God’s son?
Would make harmonizing the gospels even more convoluting.
Yup. But then many scholars would say the fragment was obvioulsy not of the Gospel of Mark but of some other Gospel.
“Dan has gone on record as saying that this will be a discovery as significant as one of the Dead Sea Scrolls.” Ha! What a toon!
*More* significant. Ouch.
Bad things happened at Oxford, which I hope will teach us lessons!