The Question of the Greek New Testament

[Aractus]

Speculative?  What the fuck are you talking about?

WHERE IS IT?   Your fucking jesus freak heroes are playing "I know something you don't know" and making a claim about a document and you fall for it.

Let them produce it and give reputable scholars a crack at it.  Then you can talk to me about "speculative."

Sometimes  you don't have the brains you were born with.

Min, all I said was that Evans and Wallace have a mss of Mark that to the best of their knowledge has been dated to the first century.

If Evans and Wallace were to testify in a court of law, and say that, then it would be accepted as evidence of the existence of the document.

What I provided is evidence (not proof) of a first century mss. Now it may well turn out in the future that they are mistaken, but to make that argument now assumes from the start that they're wrong. And that's not an assumption that I'm willing to make because are reputable New Testament scholars - in fact Ehrman calls Evans a friend of his.

Now the CNN article you linked to, and to a lesser extent the Ehrman one I linked to, criticise the destruction of archaeological artefacts in order to find manuscripts. I think that argument is rubbish - pages of first, second, third, fourth and fifth century papyrus texts are far more valuable and interesting than the mummified masks that they come from, particularly if they do contain some complete readings (i.e. full pages of text). And the reason I say that is because it is by the fact that they were fashioned into a mask that preserved them - otherwise most of them would have turned to dust never to be seen again.

And thanks to Nestor for reaffirming this for me by posting that video. If it's true they have a mss that is 38 pages from Corinthians it sounds very significant regardless of which early century it's from. I hadn't seen that video, but the small glimpse of what they're doing along with the descriptions is very exciting.