Earliest manuscript fragment of Mark rumour

There's nothing more likely to get the blogs all talking than a rumour about a newly discovered manuscript fragment.  See Jim Davila on Paleojudaica, James McGrath on Exploring our Matrix, Peter Head on Evangelical Textual Criticism (with tons of comments), Joel Watts at Unsettled Christianity,  Jim West and others.  The basic gist is that Dan Wallace, in a debate last week with Bart Ehrman, made the following claim:

Bart had explicitly said that our earliest copy of Mark was from c. 200 CE, but this is now incorrect. It’s from the firstcentury. I mentioned these new manuscript finds and told the audience that a book will be published by E. J. Brill in about a year that gives all the data.

I'll throw in a couple of quick things in.  The first is that the claim is, of course, hopelessly vague, and that the promised Brill publication "in about a year" may well mean that the book in question is not even in press yet.  Authors are typically over-optimistic about when they think the press will publish their work and if the author is saying "about a year", my guess is that s/he has not let go of the manuscript yet.

It's also worth adding that it is a fair guess that this manuscript discovery is connected with Scott Carroll (HT Matthew Hamilton) who tweeted on 1 December 2011: 

For over 100 years the earliest known text of the New Testament has been the so-call John Rylands Papyrus. Not any more. Stay tuned .

I am staying tuned but there is nothing more yet.  I'd guess that Carroll is connected with Wallace's announcement given the unlikelihood that there are two such discoveries at the same time, and given the similar contacts the two figures have (e.g. both are part of a series on The Bible's Survival and Success).  However, it is worth noting that Wallace remarked that the "world-class paleographer" in question had "no religious affiliation" and this does not appear to be the case with Carroll, who is advertised as an expert on, among other topics, "the Authenticity of the Bible".

I would also add at this point that it is always good on these occasions to begin with a healthy scepticism.  As often, the hunt for the lost Doctor Who episodes provides a good analogy with New Testament textual criticism. There have been rumours over the years that a new discovery of one of the lost episodes is about to be discovered, and often these come to nothing.  As with manuscripts, we should wait for the physical evidence before we get our hopes up.

Update (Tuesday, 6.41): sage comments from Stephen Carlson on Hypotyposeis.

Update (Tuesday, 9.01): Larry Hurtado weighs in with similarly useful comments.

Doctor Who and Textual Criticism

I like to make it a personal challenge to find as many ways of relating Doctor Who and the academic study of Christian Origins as possible (e.g. Unreliability of Eye-witnesses of Doctor Who) so it is gratifying to see Chuck Grantham over on A 'Goula Blogger doing the same thing, relating Copies of copies of copies . . . . of Biblical manuscripts to copies of copies of copies of old VHS videos of Doctor Who among American fans in the 1980s.

Latest Harvard Theological Review

There is one NT related article in the latest Harvard Theological Review:

Fragments from the Cartonnage of P⁷⁵
James M. Robinson
Harvard Theological Review, Volume 101, Issue 02, April 2008, pp 231-252
doi: 10.1017/S001781600800179X, Published online by Cambridge University Press 12 May 2008

In November 1985, the British Museum turned over to me photographs in their files that they had made while conserving the leather binding of P75 for the Bibliothèque Bodmer, which contained fragments of Luke and John not previously published in the editio princeps or otherwise available to scholarship. This article reports on these fragments and includes three plates of the photographs.

Harvard Papyri Online

This is definitely worth a second mention: on Evangelical Textual Criticism, Peter Head writes:

The Houghton Library at Harvard have begun putting digital images of their papyri online (front page here). (HT PapyL also What's New in Papyrology?)
They haven't finished yet, but there are two of interest to NT scholars (and two more to come):

P10 (Rom 1.1-7; POxy 209 = Harvard MS Gr SM2218)
http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/7456384

Gospel of Thomas (POxy 655 = Harvard MS Gr SM4367)
http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/7456399

071 (Matt 1.21-24; 1.25-2.2; POxy 401 = Harvard MS Gr SM3735)
P9 (1 John 4.11-12, 14-17; POxy 402 = Harvard MS Gr SM3736)

It is great to have P.Oxy 655 in particular, and the quality is remarkably good.

Vetus Latina Updated

Hugh Houghton has been in touch to let me know that the Vetus Latina website has been updated, with more links to online manuscripts, and some older links have been removed:

Vetus Latina - Resources for the Old Latin Bible

I'll add a link to my TC pages in due course.

Codices Electronici Sangallenses (CESG) – Virtual Library

ITSEE News reports "this superb digitisation project" which "has expanded its collection to include 144 complete manuscripts, and over 57,000 high quality digital images":

Codices Electronici Sangallenses (CESG) – Virtual Library

More on Metzger

Evangelical Textual Criticism is collecting tributes to Bruce Metzger, so far Iain Torrance, Princeton Theological Seminary and Mike Holmes. No doubt there will be many more to come. Here's an obituary from the LA Times:

Bruce Manning Metzger, 93; New Testament scholar helped edit, update Bible translations
By Mary Rourke, Times Staff Writer

The piece focuses on some of the gender inclusive language in the NRSV translation:

. . . . Soon after Metzger and his colleagues completed their work in 1989, he pointed out some of the changes in an interview with The Times.

The phrase, "Man shall not live by bread alone," from the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy and the New Testament Gospels of Matthew and Luke, was adjusted to read, "One shall not live by bread alone."

"O men of little faith," in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, became "O you of little faith." The original Greek text did not use the word for man in that phrase, Metzger said. To insert it was "an unnecessary, restrictive" addition, he told The Times . . .

This reminds me of the one occasion I met Prof. Metzger. He came to lecture in Birmingham on the NRSV in 1996 and my colleague David Parker, a friend of Metzger's, introduced me -- and he was as delightful in person as everyone says he was. I remember one thing in particular from his lecture. When discussing the issue of gender inclusive translation, he explained the difficulties over translating sentences traditionally translated with male-specific language, like "Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear". Prof. Metzger explained that he had received a letter from someone strongly urging him to use the new gender inclusive pronoun "thon", thus "Whoever has ears to hear, let thon here." He said that he replied to her by saying that he would be willing to consider the use of "thon" as soon as it appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Bruce Metzger

On Evangelical Textual Criticism, P. J. Williams passes on the sad news of the death of Bruce Metzger yesterday. On the Novum Testamentum blog, Brandon Wason has links to news articles in the Home News Tribune and NewsDay.com