Carsten Thiede’s Nonsense Refuted

NEW TESTAMENT AMONG DEAD SEA SCROLLS?

Attempts have been made by Christians to corrupt scholarship to push back the dating of the New Testament closer to the time of Christ. This study examines them. We will see that we are forced to conclude that their efforts are not about concern for truth but concern for dogma and power and to dodge the embarrassment of having gospels that were written too long after the alleged events to be worthy of taking seriously.

NEW TESTAMENT AMONG DEAD SEA SCROLLS?

Carsten Thiede has claimed that in the caves of Qumran where the Dead Sea Scrolls were uncovered there are tiny fragments that can be identified as New Testament writings.

“Not long ago, an attempt was made to identify a few very small parchment fragments found at Qumran with several minute portions of the New Testament, especially in the Gospel of Mark. This, it was charged, is proof-positive that the ancient sect possessed in its library at least part of the New Testament. Perhaps it shows that the sect was itself Christian. But when the fragments were examined closely, all that could be made out were just a few Greek letters, which could have come from just about any document. It would be like claiming to have found the original copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, based on a single piece of Elizabethan parchment, bearing the words, “…to be…”. How do we know that the next words in the missing line would read, “or not to be… that is the question”? The scholarly community has not taken this claim seriously, and the consensus remains that no New Testament manuscript fragments have ever been found among the many thousands of parchments and papyri which have come to light in the vicinity of the Dead Sea” (page 211, Dead Sea Scrolls). Thiede is the Christian crank author of the silly book The Jesus Papyrus who claims to have found that the New Testament was among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Even if snippets of the New Testament were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in the caves where the Scrolls were placed so long ago it would mean they got there after the scrolls were put there perhaps even a century after Jesus died. The evidence is that most of the Gospel material was hidden in the first century and the other New Testament writings would not have been copied well enough. Christianity was a tiny sect in those years and its writings would not have been sought after much.

Why would Essenes who wanted to protect their holy books by putting them away waste time storing any New Testament books? The Essenes were not Christians and would have seen Jesus as a threat for he grounded himself in the Pharisee side and ignored their holy teacher of righteousness. The Essenes believed that God could abandon his people to the extent that the true faith and scripture would be lost but the New Testament did not share this paranoia. Jesus said he would be with his Church forever.

It is mad to suggest like Thiede that a hunted people would store Christian documents and ask for trouble! They left their documents there for Jews to find them. To have gospels there risked the whole thing being burnt and regarded as bastardised scripture. The Jews had an aversion to any book that altered the word of God. The Law of Moses required zero tolerance for heresy.

Nothing was deposited in the cave after 68 AD when the Romans ruined the settlement in that area. Archaeology has shown that the caves were uninhabited from that year on. Some think that during the thirties of the next century that scrolls were deposited there because of the need to keep texts safe during the rebellion of Bar Kochba. The objection to this is that scrolls were not used any more then. They used books. But the caves would have been visited after the attack in 68 AD to be checked on and for more materials to be added. And if anybody was going to write texts and put them in the cave it would have been communities that liked to stand aloof from the world like the Qumran community did. Some would still have used scrolls just like some people like to use Lifebuoy soap today though there are fancier and better soaps. This would account for the old-fashioned way of recording.

Since testing the allegedly New Testament bits would destroy them it is impossible to determine if the texts are forgeries which were slipped in when nobody was looking after the Scrolls grabbed the world’s attention. That is just what the Christian Church which treated the scrolls as if it had a monopoly on them for decades would want somebody to do. All you had to do was to scrape a bit off here and write a bit there to alter them. If a scholar gets a fragment that could look like a match with the New Testament all he has to do to make it fit is break a tiny piece off here and there and scrape off some ink and presto a perfect or near-perfect fit!

It does not matter if some of the epistles were found for they give no evidence for Jesus or the existence of the gospels. The only worrying alleged quote among the scrolls is Mark 12:17, “Jesus answered them saying, Give to Caesar…etc”. But Jesus means the Saviour. It could well be part of something like, “Jacob is my saviour for he saved me from drowning and I asked him about giving Caesar the girl. The saviour answered, ‘Give to Caesar the girl he wants.’” Since the text is so fragmented you can make any construction you wish of it out of suitable writings but they all add up to being mere speculation.

Think about this. A fragment was found among the Scrolls that seemed to quote James 1:23,24, “Don’t just listen to the word but do it.” How could something Christians often say like this spontaneously be provably a quote from James? We all say, “Practice what you preach”. The alleged quote from Acts 27:38, “When they had eaten they left the ship”, could have come from any number of books. There are seven such fragments.

It is a fact that some of the material in the writings was stolen by the New Testament authors. The Son of God scroll is close to Luke 1:32-35. This is plagiarism. If that scroll had been a bit more tattered Christians would be thinking that it was from Luke’s gospel even if the wording was not exactly the same.

The Jesus Papyrus devotes a chapter to consideration of the idea that bits of the NT were happened upon in Cave 7 at Qumran. Jose O Callaghan claimed this in 1972. 7Q5 was taken to be Mark 6:52-53 and 7Q4 was thought to be from the first letter to Timothy. The other seven fragments can be traced to a much later time.

There is a word that starts off with the wrong letter making many believe the text is not Mark. It has what may be a spelling error (page 79). But The Jesus Papyrus says that it is more probably a change of spelling to reflect how the misspelled word was vocalised in Jerusalem! (page 80). So the book even turns errors into evidences that the fragment really is from Mark! It says it proves that gospel was written before 70 AD when people talked that way (page 82). Really! It could be a spelling error or it could be an indication that the fragment is not Mark. Two possibilities against and one for the text. It is still most probable then that the text is not pre-70AD. A warning notice for the Temple is supposed to have altered spelling to fit how the people pronounced the words (page 79). The notice was destroyed in 70 AD. So this notice is insanely supposed to prove or indicate that this gospel was written before that time in 70 AD! But Mark was just going to use whatever was handy for him even if it was forty years later. So a notice with spelling errors on it is used to defend the view that Jerusalem which had many Greeks about it according to the book of Acts wrote signs to those same Gentiles to fit the way how Jerusalem people spoke Greek! It is like spelling centre as center when Americans are not indigenous to the area. It doesn’t happen. Mark was not even written for Jews but for Gentiles and Rome is the most likely place of authorship.

The fragment, 7Q5, according to Thiede, gives Mark 6:53 with three words missing. It says Jesus went to Gennesaret whereas our text says Jesus went to the land of Gennesaret (page 77). The cave was allegedly sealed in 68 AD so The Jesus Papyrus supposes that this was an earlier version of Mark that predates 68 AD. It states that the three words which mean “to the land of” were omitted before the destruction of the land in 70 AD and were inserted after the disaster because the living area of the land would be mixed up with the lake Gennesaret (page 77-79). Thiede supposes that the words the land of were added to the Mark we have after 70 AD when it was necessary to be more specific for the land had met much destruction and people needed to be told that Genneseret was a land. But the ridiculous thing is that if this were true the words would have been added years after the event for in the aftermath of the disaster people would still remember what Genneseret was. Mark then must have got some drastic rewriting then decades later which no true Christian can admit. If that happened then there is no point in trying to prove that an early edition of Mark existed at Qumran before 68 AD. Thiede’s clarification argument is hogwash. If you read the verse you see that no such clarification was necessary. Also, Mark was not writing for people who needed a geography lesson and if he said Gennesaret that was enough and nobody needed to clarify that it was townland. The three words are a bit awkward where they are now which seems to suggest that an alteration was made. But Mark wrote in sloppy Greek anyway.

Since part of the surface of the papyrus have worn off one letter is indistinct and might or might not be a nu. If it is not then the scroll is not from Mark. In the photograph of the reconstruction in The Jesus Papyrus the nu looks very big and does not match the size and design of the nu two lines below. This is why I doubt the reconstruction. The fragment is so small that you only have eight or nine letters on each side. It could be from anything which may be why it differs from Mark. If it is from Mark it only proves that our Mark was drastically altered. They even put in words there was no need for so heaven knows what else they did. It could have been a very short and unconvincing gospel. Perhaps the early Christians used the stories in the scrolls to make the Jesus story. The story could have been about John the Baptist and the Christians changed the name to Jesus in their version. Portions of the gospels can be proved to have been stolen from the Qumran writings. The fragment offers no hope to anybody who wants to prove the gospels are old or near the time of Jesus.

So Thiede has to posit some words not being in the original Mark, excuse a spelling difference from our Mark and pretend that a disputed letter is a nu to excuse identifying the scrap as the gospel of Mark. When all this has to be done it is clear that the fragment that only contains a few letters could easily not be Mark at all.

7Q5 was first on a scroll not a codex for it only has one side with writing on it. The end of Mark was lost indicating that the original Mark may have been a codex and the codex arrived in the second century. You cannot lose the end of a scroll for it is all one piece.

THE JESUS PAPYRUS

Carsten Thiede and Matthew D’Ancona wrote The Jesus Papyrus to state and defend the unlikely notion that three tiny scraps of papyrus which came from a book or codex of Matthew’s Gospel are the most ancient sample of the New Testament in existence and date from 70 AD or before (page 58) and possibly as early as the year after Jesus died to be specific. These fragments are called The Magdalen Papyrus. Few scholars find the book convincing and it is agreed universally that they are third century. An able and intelligent pro-Christian book, The Original Jesus, rejects Thiede’s thesis and his batty conspiracy theories with which he rails against those who contradict his dating of the Magdalen Papyrus to the 60’s of the first century. The book shows that the dating is wholly dependent on the dating of the Qumran fragments he thinks are from Mark which is compared to a huge weight hanging by a light string.

If The Jesus Papyrus had been right it is not too alarming because Matthew could still have been written when the Jews were in too much trouble to bother refuting or to remember his lies and Jesus was forty years off the picture which left plenty of time for memories to corrupt and for history to be rewritten. The presence of the fragments in Egypt and not in Palestine means that Matthew could have lied. The Jesus Papyrus stupidly assumes that Matthew is more probably true the earlier it appeared.

Most scholars are sure that these Magdalen texts are not that old because they turned up in Egypt.

The Jesus Papyrus insists that somebody could have taken the codex they were in to Egypt or Matthew could have been copied there (page 127) because the Mark Gospel was copied in Egypt. It is thought that the text must have been made for distribution when it was found there and there must have been a lot of copies when that bit was able to survive against all the odds. The Church was not as strong in Egypt in the first century as it was where Paul established it and it dwindled to almost nothing in Israel through war, exile, emigration and persecution. So it was hardly the place to find many scriptoriums for the copying of the gospel.

Another reason why the texts are younger than The Jesus Papyrus says is because any Christian writings made for distribution in the first century would have been put together in shorthand. The Christians were being persecuted and so they would not copy out a long manuscript and waste time and when it might only be burnt. Tachography was a form of shorthand that was used then and even into the Middle Ages and was extremely widespread. It would have been used.

Thiede ignores the fact that the Magdalen Papyrus came from a book using two columns while the first books that came about had one column and that was in the second century and conservative Christians think the first time the gospels were bound into books was about 150 AD.

Thiede used fragments that might not date from the first century in an attempt to prove that the writing on the Magdalen Papyrus must have been first century as his ridiculous third chapter shows. In it he surmises that his redating of the Magalene Papyrus is plausible for fragments of Mark were found at Qumran that date Mark as much earlier than the 70 AD that scholars accept.

The Magdalen Papyrus shows a writing habit not used in the third century (page 133, The Jesus Papyrus). But a third century copy of something old would have some archaic traits. The book admits that the fragments have some of the style of the second century but attributes this to the style surviving into the second from the first saying this survival is probable (page 136). It is trying to make you believe that the Papyrus copies a very old version of the gospel so that they can push the time of origin of the original gospel further back. When it admits that styles can be carried into the following centuries it has to admit that its early dating is uncertain.

The texts have abbreviations for Lord and Jesus and other words. This suggests that they were written with speed and for a demanding audience and when few could do the copying. This never happened until late in the second century. There is no evidence for the shortcuts being devised before 70 AD no matter what this silly book claims (page 136-137).

We are told that the design of the letters is not enough to work out the date (page 138). And because of affinities with a first century leather Leviticus scroll from Qumran, The Jesus Papyrus ends up claiming that the fragments match a form of writing that was high fashion in the middle of the first century. But are the affinities enough or are they there at all? Maybe they are just coincidence. The Magdalen fragments come from a codex and the book says it is probable that the codex was not used among Christians until the Jewish insistence upon scrolls started to diminish until 70 AD. The book then says that as the Jews began to throw the Christians out of Judaism in about 62 AD the Christians would have made codices and would have shelved the Jewish tradition for scrolls then (page 95). This is more speculative nonsense seeking to make the fragments and the gospel itself far older. The Christians did not want the hostile Jews to find their scriptures so they would have be done in scroll form which was the Jewish tradition making the Jews assume that they were just Jewish scriptures.

The internal evidence for a late date for Matthew is too strong for The Jesus Papyrus to be right. What the gospel itself says comes before any style of writing in regard to dating and more so when the writing is concerned with a copy of the gospel.

The Magdalene Fragments are three. 1 has Matthew 26:7-8 on one side and Matthew 26:31 on the other. 2 has Matthew 26:10 on one side and 26:32-33 on the other. 3 has Matthew 26:14-15 on one side and 26:22,23 on the other.

An error was found on one of them (page 110). This refutes an early date of about 70 AD or before. Following Judaism, Christian copyists of religious books had to have them perfect or destroyed. And the smallest and squarest of the three pieces has smaller writing and the letters are almost squashed together. It is from a different work that makes an early date more unlikely. It is unlikely for bits of two rare first century books which would only get less rare as time went on to have formed the trio of Magdalen fragments. Such a combination would be more likely as the Church got more powerful like it did in the third century as it would have loads of manuscripts and copies then.

The alleged mates of the Magdalen fragments, the two Barcelona Fragments which Thiede claims may have come from the same codex (page 115, 145), do not prove that Jesus existed or put the gospels closer to the time of Jesus for they might have come from a separate book that just had his teaching in them. The scraps simply give teaching from Jesus in the four gospels. Jesus means saviour so the Jesus could be anybody. Matthew 3:9 is on the front of Fragment 1. Matthew 3:15 on the back. Matthew 5:20-22 is on the front of Fragment 2 and Matthew 5:25-28 is on the back. When you compare and contrast how many verses every batch is apart you see that the idea that both batches came from the same codex (page 103, 115) is incorrect.

The website of Professor JK Elliot of the University of Leeds, The Jesus Papyrus – Five Years On, shows how after Thiede made his claims, that it was found that other lots of the manuscript the Magdalene Papyrus was a part of existed in Barcelona and Paris. Thiede focuses on the Magdalene ones and pays little attention to the other fragments which is a dishonest and biased approach. All he did was make a fool of himself.

The website discloses that the book, The Jesus Papyrus, is full of errors and sloppy research. No expert palaeographers agree with Thiede’s dating. And it is childish the way they are accused by Thiede of being jealous for Thiede has proven them wrong for he has not and does not have the knowledge and training they have had. Worse, the Magdalene fragments are no different textually from any other ancient copies of the scriptures. The claim that pieces of the gospels turned up in Qumran has also been rejected.

It is correct that the title, The Jesus Papyrus and the American title, Witness to Jesus, are just pure hype and tacky advertising. The dishonesty is obvious for the impression is deliberately created that we have the actual original writings of people who saw Jesus. The website shows that Thiede simply ignores the criticisms of his work especially when they refute him.

It is only because Thiede has been good at getting publicity that he has any kind of hearing at all.

HIGHER CRITICAL REVIEW

Please read the site Higher Critical Review in which Daryl D. Schmidt reviews Rekindling the Word: In Search of the Gospel by Thiede. The essential points of the review are:

a) that Thiede maintains that the Magdalen Papyrus is a direct copy of the original scroll that Matthew composed which is a fantastical assumption and shows how biased he is.

b) that Thiede argued that the fact that the text has an abbreviated word for Lord which was applied to Jesus showing that Jesus was considered to be God for his full Lord title was too sacred to be written out in full. That is a lie for the Christians in the early days habitually abbreviated words, even words like Jerusalem and Israel, in their texts. Moreover the context of Matthew that he is only about shows that Jesus was only called Lord in the sense of master or sir just like many other men of prestige were. Thiede twists things.

c) Thiede says that a fragment from the Dead Sea Scrolls is Mark 6:52-53 which has only one word in it kai and everything else is just less than a dozen letters. This alone tells you he is worth watching out for because it is so small it could be from any number of works. He forced this fragment to fit Mark by filling in missing letters, pretending there was a difference in spelling from the original Greek version of the Mark that we have and he even had to invent an explanation for a phrase missing. Why go to all that trouble when the simplest answer is that the fragment is not from Mark?

d) Thiede once wrote that the long speeches Jesus makes in Matthew indicate that Matthew was writing down what Jesus said in shorthand and then putting it in the gospel years later. It could indicate any number of things. That is the kind of garbage Thiede uses to make Christianity look intelligent.

e) Thiede said that since John mentioned a pool that was lost after 70AD that it means that John was written before that time. That is not logic. Thiede does not know how to think though he can think clearly enough to try and hoodwink.

Another good page is Seven Greek Fragments of the Epistle of Enoch. As it has been proven that the New Testament writers were inspired by many of the writings of Qumran to make their scriptures, it would be no surprise if there seemed to be fragments of the New Testament at Qumran. When say the author of Luke copies somebody else’s work and only fragments survive of the other man’s work it is easy to mistake the other man’s writing for Luke’s.

It was found that the fragments identified as part of the first Epistle to Timothy were from the First Book of Enoch which is not in the Bible.

The research in this page was undertaken by Fr. Emile Puech who found that one fragment shows clear signs of the scribe squeezing text in where it should not be with the result that it seems to match Timothy. This match is incorrect when part of the text is out of place. In all cases, those who wanted to identify any of the seven fragments with the New Testament were resorting to distortion to do it. Puech finds none of them to be New Testament fragments at all.

Conclusion

No fragments of the New Testament that urge us to give any of its books an earlier dating than it has exist.

BOOKS CONSULTED

ANSWERS TO TOUGH QUESTIONS, Josh McDowell and Don Stewart, Scripture Press, Bucks, 1988

CHRISTIANITY FOR THE TOUGH-MINDED, Editor John Warwick Montgomery, Bethany Fellowship Inc, Minneapolis, 1973

CONTROVERSY, Hector Hawton, Pemberton Books, London, 1971

DICTIONARY OF SECTS, HERESIES, ECCLESIASTICAL PARTIES AND SCHOOLS OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT, by Blunt, Gale Research Company, Book Tower, Detroit, undated

DEAD SEA SCROLLS, Kenneth Hanson, Ph.D, Council Oak Books, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1997

EARLY CHRISTIAN WRITINGS, Editor Maxwell Staniforth, Penguin, London, 1988

EVIDENCE THAT DEMANDS A VERDICT, VOLUME 1, Josh McDowell, Alpha, Scripture Press Foundation, Bucks, 1995

JESUS AND THE FOUR GOSPELS, John Drane, Lion, Herts, 1984

JESUS HYPOTHESES, V Messori, St Paul Publications, Slough, 1977

JESUS LIFE OR LEGEND Carsten Thiede, Lion, Oxford, 1990

JESUS ONE HUNDRED YEARS BEFORE CHRIST, Professor Alvar Ellegard, Century, London, 1999

JESUS THE EVIDENCE, Ian Wilson, Pan, London, 1985

JESUS, A N Wilson, Flamingo, London, 1993

PUTTING AWAY CHILDISH THINGS, Uta Ranke-Heinemann, HarperCollins, San Francisco, 1994

REASONS FOR HOPE, Editor Jeffrey A Mirus, Christendom College Press, Virginia, 1982

REKINDLING THE WORD: IN SEARCH OF THE GOSPEL, Carsten Peter Thied,e Valley Forge, Trinity Press, 1995

THE CANON OF SCRIPTURE, FF Bruce, Chapter House, Glasgow, 1988

THE CONCISE DICTIONARY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH, Editor Elizabeth Livingstone, Omega Books, London, 1988

THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH, Eusebius, Penguin, London, 1989

THE HOLY BLOOD AND THE HOLY GRAIL, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh & Henry Lincoln, Corgi, London, 1982

THE JESUS EVENT AND OUR RESPONSE, Martin R Tripole SJ, Alba House, New York 1980

THE JESUS MYSTERIES, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, Thorsons, London, 1999

THE JESUS PAPYRUS, Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew D’Ancona, Phoenix, London, 1997

THE MESSIANIC LEGACY, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh & Henry Lincoln, Corgi, London, 1987

THE ORIGINAL JESUS, Tom Wright, Lion, Oxford, 1996

THE PASSOVER PLOT, Hugh Schonfield, Element Books, Dorset, 1996

THE TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY, WH Turton, Wells Gardner, Darton & Co Ltd, London, 1905

THE UNAUTHORISED VERSION, Robin Lane Fox, Middlesex, 1992

WHY BELIEVE? A Rendle Short, The Intervarsity Fellowship, London, 1938

WILLIAM NEIL’S ONE VOLUME BIBLE COMMENTARY, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1962

THE WEB

THE JESUS PAPYRUS – FIVE YEARS ON Professor JK Elliott

www.bowness.demon.co.uk/thiede.htm

This informs us that Thiede ignored the main objections Elliott made to his silly theories in a response added to The Jesus Papyrus. Thiede uses the work of scholars that does not support his conclusions at all and twists them and misquotes them to make it look like it does.

THE CASE FOR CHRISTIANITY EXAMINED (THE PROVENANCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

www.askwhy.co.uk/truth/040ChristianCase.html

MARK: FIRST GOSPEL OR PIOUS FORGERY? Dr M Magee

www.askwhy.co.uk/Christianity/080TheGospels4.html

SEVEN GREEK FRAGMENTS OF THE EPISTLE OF ENOCH FROM QUMRAN CAVE SEVEN

www.breadofangels.com/7quenoch/article2.html

HIGHER CRITICAL REVIEW, By Daryl D Schmidt

www.depts.drew.edu/jhc/thiede.html

THE JESUS PAPYRUS: EYEWITNESS TO JESUS?

www.askwhy.co.uk/awstruth/Thiede.html#TheJesusPapyrus:EyewitnesstoJesus?

THE GOSPEL OF MARCION AND THE GOSPEL OF LUKE COMPARED, CHARLES B WAITE

www.geocities.com/Athens/Ithaca/3827/wait2.htm

CHALLENGING THE VERDICT by Earl Doherty

A Cross-Examination of Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ

http://humanists.net/jesuspuzzle/CTVExcerptsThree.htm

7Q5: THE EARLIEST NT PAPYRUS? Daniel Wallace Ph.D

www.bible.org/docs/soapbox/7q5.htm

22 Aug 08