Gospel of Mark in Herculaneum!

WARNING: THIS POST IS A JOKE FOR APRIL FOOLS DAY!

 

Since Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor, and Julian Schilliger won the Vesuvius
Challenge, we've seen more and more of the carbonized scrolls from Herculaneum identified and read. The Herculaneum Papyri have a firm terminus ante quem of A.D. 79—the date of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.

The latest identification was very unexpected—a copy of Mark's Gospel from the A.D. 70s at the absolute latest! I can't wait to find out of there's enough to tell if it contains Mark 16:9–20 yet so we can know if those verses are in the Bible or not.

Read more about it here.

Vesuvius Challenge Finds a Winner

You’ve probably already seen the news that the Vesuvius Challenge just announced a winner for their contest to read CT scans of carbonized scrolls from Herculaneum. The contest focused on about 5% of one scroll that turns out to be an Epicurean text. This is a big breakthrough that builds on the work done back in 2015 to digitally unroll the En Gedi scroll (blogged about here) and opens the possibility of reading more of the 800 or so carbonized scrolls recovered from the library of Herculaneum that was destroyed in AD 79. Naturally for ETC readers, the question arises whether there might be some biblical manuscripts among these 800.

You can read more about the prize and the prize winning team at scrollprize.org.

A section of scroll read for the first time since AD 79

Xray imaging and the Herculaneum Papyri

New article: Vito Mocella, Emmanuel Brun, Claudio Ferrero & Daniel Delattre, 'Revealing letters in rolled Herculaneum papyri by X-ray phase-contrast imaging' Nature Communications 6, Article number: 5895 doi:10.1038/ncomms6895 (20.1.2015). 

Abstract: 

Hundreds of papyrus rolls, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD and belonging to the only library passed on from Antiquity, were discovered 260 years ago at Herculaneum. These carbonized papyri are extremely fragile and are inevitably damaged or destroyed in the process of trying to open them to read their contents. In recent years, new imaging techniques have been developed to read the texts without unwrapping the rolls. Until now, specialists have been unable to view the carbon-based ink of these papyri, even when they could penetrate the different layers of their spiral structure. Here for the first time, we show that X-ray phase-contrast tomography can reveal various letters hidden inside the precious papyri without unrolling them. This attempt opens up new opportunities to read many Herculaneum papyri, which are still rolled up, thus enhancing our knowledge of ancient Greek literature and philosophy.

This article has been widely picked up in the news (e.g. here from the BBC [from where I have copied the pictures], the New York Times, National Geographic) [HT: Henryk Glogowski, thanks for the email]