Questions about “First Century Mark”

Discussion is beginning again about the claim that there is a first century manuscript of part of Mark’s Gospel. In particular LiveScience reports such a claim associated with Craig Evans and this has been reported positively elsewhere. The report in the International Business Times is a bit more critical.

So I thought it would be good to raise a few questions about this alleged “First Century Mark”, hereafter FCM.

If we begin with the LiveScience report, which is our most recent ‘source’ for information about FCM, we note that it has not been written with great care about accuracy. The second century is said to consist of dates between 101 and 200. It is suggested that ‘ordinary people’ had mummy masks.

It is said: “In recent years scientists have developed a technique that allows the glue of mummy masks to be undone without harming the ink on the paper”. It would be hard to harm the ink on the paper of a mummy mask, because one can be sure one will not find paper in one.

This and other features of the article mean that one must show extreme care about using this report as a source to gain information. I am not even confident that we can use it with any accuracy as a source for what Craig Evans has said.

Therefore although I’d be delighted if we could rely on the source to establish that we have a single sheet of papyrus, and that currently seems probable, it’s difficult to be certain.

We come now to a central paragraph:

“Evans says that the text was dated through a combination of carbon-14 dating, studying the handwriting on the fragment and studying the other documents found along with the gospel. These considerations led the researchers to conclude that the fragment was written before the year 90.”

As the source is demonstrably not particularly careful and as this is also not a direct quotation from Evans it is difficult to know what Evans actually said.

However, C14 dating will not render a date as precise as ‘before 90’; nor will palaeography. That leaves us with two other methods of dating: archaeological context and associated writings.

If for convenience we suppose that other manuscripts in the mask are ones with dates that survive (remembering that for a majority of texts no date survives) and that the mask luckily enough contains four texts with firm date formulae (which would be really nice, but quite unlikely) and that these date formulae show manuscripts from the years 50, 60, 70 and 80, that would still not mean that they could not be put together with a manuscript from considerably later than the year 90 to make a mummy mask.

Finally, it might be possible that archaeological context would date a mummy mask to a particular date, but that would be highly unusual, and would not accord well with Dan Wallace’s earlier emphasis on the expertise of an unnamed palaeographer as the basis for the dating. Palaeographers don’t normally deal with archaeological dating.

Therefore the public claims about the basis for dating this fragment appear incoherent.

Ethics
Something should be said about the ethics of extracting texts from mummy masks. I actually have no objection to this in principle. Obviously the process is somewhat destructive, but archaeology is inherently destructive. However, every effort must be made to minimise destruction and every step should be carefully recorded photographically and scholars should keep a record for posterity of exactly what they’ve done and explain why they chose to do so, and show a process of evaluation in which the benefits of what they do are shown to be superior to other options, including leaving the mask intact.

There are also ethical questions which surround the acquisition of such items.

It is common for researchers to have explicit statements on ethics and it is important for scholars to have an ethical code that they have written or one to which they publicly subscribe prior to handling such controversial matters.