This is a story of the identification of some papyrus fragments dating from the time of Jesus to some of the New Testament books themselves! The article is written by a layman, not a papyrus expert. However, sometimes the obvious is overlooked by the educated and observed by the simple. Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself once said, 'Let him hear who has ears to hear.'
In their controversial 1978 book The First New Testament,, (Nashville, TN.:Thomas Nelson, Inc.) Professor David Estrada and linguist William White, Jr., have described in a popular format the evidence to believe that papyrus manuscripts found in Cave 7 at Qumran include several New Testament manuscripts. Their thesis is controversial because long before the identification was attempted, scholars agreed that the script on them was written between 50 B.C. and A.D. 50! Therefore, if they contain New Testament texts either the scholarly community has been seriously wrong in its dating, or the New Testament was begun to be written not long after the time that Jesus of Nazareth died. Obviously, contemporary documents deserve much greater credence than documents written generations after the events they describe because eyewitnesses can refute them if in error or substantiate them if accurate.
The most important of these papyrus fragments had Greek letters equivalent to the following English ones, in all probability:
The identification of some of these letters is disputed by scholars, but the disagreements are not as great as might be expected. Practically all of the letters were identified long before the suggested identification of the document was made. If the Greek words with which these letters have been identified were translated into English, and a similar fragmentary record remained only of the English words, the fragment might appear as follows:
Estrada and White have reconstructed in English what the Greek words of the papyrus might be, and have shown which portions of the words would remain if the text had been in English:
[UNDERSTOOD ]A[BOUT THE LOAVES]
[BUT WERE O ]F THEM [THEIR MINDS CLO-]
[SE ]D AND F[INISHED THE CROSSING]
[THEY CAME TO GE ]NNES[ARET AND THEY]
[MADE FAST ]WHE[RE AND GOT]
This is fragment 5 and appears to be a part of Mark 6:52, 53. The first person to identify this fragment with that passage was a Jesuit scholar at the University of Barcelona, Father Jose O'Callaghan. Father O'Callaghan was a well respected scholar of Greek papyrus documents, and the story of his identification of 7Q5 is remarkable.
O'Callaghan one day in 1971 was routinely reading books about the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered about 1947-48. He noticed one set of unidentified papyrus documents with Greek letters and, among them, was 7Q5. He saw that the combination with double letter 'NNES' on the next to the last line seemed the sort of combination which could be identified. What Greek words have a double N followed by ES? It had been suggested by earlier scholars that the word originally had been EGENNESEN, which means to beget. However, O'Callaghan could find no known Greek texts (or translations of Hebrew texts into Greek) with the word EGENNESEN and other words surrounding it which would fit into the context of fragment 5 from Cave 7.
Some days later, as O'Callaghan himself tells it, as he relaxed after a busy day, his mind ranged over the day's activities and he thought again of the tiny fragment. Suddenly, as if from heaven itself, he thought of the word GENNESARET which had the same letter combination as EGENNESEN. As soon as he thought of the word, however, he realized that such a word could not occur in this fragment since it is a place name found in the New Testament, not the Old Testament. However, on a hunch he began to search the New Testament occurences of the word GENNESARET.
Lo, and behold, O'Callaghan discovered that the word GENNESARET in fact occurred in a place in the Gospel of Mark where the surrounding letters in the fragment from Qumran would fit! This seemed like an extraordinary coincidence, since the mathematical likelihood that 15 or 20 letters and spaces in a set order would occur at more than one place in classical Greek literature was extremely remote.
The only way to be sure that the identification was correct would be to look at the other fragments in Cave 7. What if others could also be identified as New Testament fragments? Although this seemed even more remote than identifying fragment 5, O'Callaghan set out as any good scholar to examine the remote possibility. After all, there was no one who could suggest any alternative identification.
In February, 1972, O'Callaghan anounced his identification at a public talk given in Barcelona. Soon thereafter he began work at the Pontifical Institute at Vatican City in Rome, and there he worked with Carlo M. Martini, Rector of that Institute and one of the top half-dozen text critics in the world. After many hours of discussion and critical challenge, Martini himself was convinced that 7Q5 in fact represents a fragment from the Gospel of Mark.
O'Callaghan soon was able to marshall compelling scholarly arguments that 2 or 3 of the other fragments were from New Testament documents, and that another half dozen might be from other New Testament books! One was from I Timothy 3 and 4, one was from James 1, and others possible from Acts, Romans, and II Peter! The scholarly world fell into an uproar. This 'discovery', if it might be called that, would be revolutionary to the dating of the New Testament documents. It would have the effect of establishing a date of origin generations before scholars were willing to admit that the books had been written.
It is important to note that of all the many documents found in the Qumran region of the Dead Sea, the Cave 7 documents included writing in the Greek language. Documents in most of the caves are in a script of Hebrew. Further, of all the ancient Greek texts which have been preserved through the ages, no scholar has been able to identify any ancient Greek text with any other passage which could fit into the letters of fragment 5 in cave 7.
Establishment scholars, by and large, continue to be skeptical of the identification of fragment 5 with the Gospel of Mark. However, it was the scholarly community which taught for many years that Moses could not have written the Pentateuch because, so they said, writing had not yet been invented in his day. We know now that long before Moses lived there was writing in Egypt and other places around the world.
Scholars long disputed that characters in the Bible, like Pontius Pilate, were true historical figures. However, when an ancient stone monument was found in 1961 with the name Pontius Pilate engraved upon it, the doubts as to his existence quickly were forgotten
Here is an experiment you can perform to convince yourself that the identification is correct, and, therefore, that papyrus fragment 7Q5 probably is from a copy of the Gospel of Mark written shortly after the Lord Jesus Christ died. Open any Bible at random. Put your finger on one letter or space. Then write it down on a piece of paper. Copy the letters or spaces to the left and right, so now three letters or spaces are written. (For purposes of this exercise, ignore periods and commas since ancient Greek had no such punctuation.)
Follow the same procedure for the letters or spaces above and below the first letter, so the combination is in the shape of a cross. Then copy the four other letters to the right and left of the upper and lower character. When you are finished, you should have nine space/letters written on the paper.
Now, here is the tell-tale part. Open your Bible elsewhere and look for the same nine letter/space combination! Before you find it, you will be convinced that fragment 7Q5 from Qumran is part of the gospel of Mark. The odds of finding the same combination of letters/spaces in any other ancient document are astronomical. If you think about it, you will realize that for the first letter there were 27 possibilities (26 letters or a space). For each of the others, there were the same 27 possibilities.
The way to determine the odds of a nine letter/space combination would be to multiply 27 by itself eight times! The product would be 1 in more than 7.5 trillion! Granted, some letter combinations are impossible, such as zcd or ywq in English. However, even eliminating the impossible letter combinations, the likelihood that fragment 7Q5 from Qumran is anything else but a New Testament document is extremely remote.
What does this mean? The meaning depends on the dating. However, as previously noted, long before anyone suspected the fragment was part of the New Testament, scholars who date documents from the form of the letters, the type of writing materials used, and similar things, had estimated that the latest this document was written was within 20 years after the death of Christ Jesus! Because of margins on some of the manuscripts, these seem to be only copies, too, not the originals. Therefore, they were already being circulated in duplicate form, at such an early date!
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Lessons from Papyrus Fragment 7Q5 / July 2001