Something odd in ms 2892

Darrell, to distract us from other matters, asked a question about an odd feature in 2892 (from the comments to the previous post).
The second to last line ends Colossians 2:12. But then the next line begins with Colossians 3:4, meaning 14 verses were omitted. I am trying to determine what went wrong. The only thing I thought possible here is perhaps a missing leaf from the exemplar. The missing content amounts to about 90% of the content found on a regular page of 2892, meaning the exemplar would have been a little smaller, if this theory is true. However, what are the chances that such a missing leaf would happen to start and end at the beginning and end of a verse?

Pseudo-Gospel of Jesus Wife as Case Study

In his article in the Wall Street Journal entitled 'How the 'Jesus' Wife' Hoax Fell Apart', Jerry Pattengale concludes with an interesting comment: 'this episode is not totally without merit. It will provide a valuable case study for research classes long after we're gone and the biblical texts remain.'

So, given that the whole debacle is basically over (except for mopping up exercises), what lessons can be learnt?

a) It is possible for a forger to get hold of papyri, mix ink according to ancient conventions, compose a semi-plausible pastiche of a text, and mislead scholars, academic institutions, the media, and the public. Exactly what he (or she) hoped to gain from it is not clear, but if it was simply mischief, then he has probably far exceeded his wildest dreams. Given this possibility it is important that if someone approaches you with an unpublished text which meshes in with your own academic interests, then critical skepticism rather than credulity should control your responses. Nothing is innocent until proven guilty in this scenario. Also the forger will target a scholar who he thinks is persuadable, not a manuscript expert, and who has wider credibility to make the discovery known (remember that in this case Prof King at first didn't respond to the invitation, but the forger didn't go to some other scholar, he waited a year and then went back to reel in Prof King).

b) Get the back story straight and get all the documents involved. Although at the time and in retrospect we may think that the problems of palaeography, subject matter, and textual composition with the Pseudo-Gospel of Jesus' Wife* were sufficient to conclude it was a fake; the additional confirmation of that came from the Pseudo-Gospel of John Fragment and the proof that it was copied from a published form of a text. That conclusive anachronism becomes the nail in the coffin which is universally convincing (just as its demonstrable dependence on a published edition of Mark finally did for 2427). So the people calling for access to the whole collection in 2012 are vindicated.

c) The results of scientific tests need to be carefully interpreted. Don't just read the summaries that are repeated in the press releases. Get hold of the full scientific reports. Again, that was an incidental key step in this process (because the scientific ink report also happened to have a photo of Ps-John).

d) Careful observation of the actual manuscript (or good images) may generate suspicion and even offer pointers to forgery which may be individually persuasive, but generating a consensus requires multiple points of suspicion (and/or clearcut anachronism).

e) Get high resolution images on the internet and let some crowd-sourcing do the critical work. In this episode the scholarly blogs on the subject come out pretty well, while the Harvard folk are looking a little gullible. The blogs sorted in a month what Harvard couldn't. We all know when bloggers get their teeth into something they can be tenacious and feed off each other. Surely there will now be scholarly articles on this mess, in NTS and hopefully in HTR, but I doubt they'll offer more than the blogs have already done.

f) Composing a plausible ancient text by free composition is difficult. Several recent forgeries have involved creating text by copying and adapting existing published texts of similar type (both of these obviously Ps-GJW as Watson, Bernhard and others showed; Ps-John as Askeland, Suciu, have now shown, and presumably some of the others in the same collection which haven't been made public yet; the lead codices, etc.). So scholars should look, not only at comparing new documentary finds with other ancient texts, but also with published forms of similar texts. Here tell-tale anachronisms (like following the Grondin misprint or having 17 line endings agree except when a page is turned) are perhaps the most generally conclusive bits of the evidence.

g) Forgers invent fake histories, provenance and documents to bolster the authenticity of the forgery, but these are a potential weak link. No surprise that in this case all these documents have been kept from the scholarly community. 

h) don't worry if your PhD is in something other people think is obscure (like Coptic manuscripts of John) one day you might have the very bit of information that the rest of us need. 

Breaking News on the First-Century (?) Fragment of Mark

Over at Brice C. Jones’ blog there is more news about the alleged first-century fragment of Mark, and many other recently discovered manuscripts (a 38 page manuscript of 1 or 2 Corinthians, the oldest copy of Romans, etc). Apparently, all the information is disclosed in a video featuring evangelist Josh McDowell, who has been involved in working on this fantastic discovery and even in the process of extracting the manuscripts from Egyptian mummy masks(!).

It seems that the Markan fragment is soon to be published. McDowell assumed it would be in November last year. We certainly look forward to that.

Update: photos of some of these manuscripts:

Rodger's New Novel, The Sign of the Dolphin

My new novel, The Sign of the Dolphin, the second volume in the SCRIBES series, is now available in both electronic and printed form through Amazon.com. It wrestles with the problem of the text of the Acts of the Apostles, and is the story of a missionary journey in the late second century through Gaul and Britain. I have used history and legend, manuscripts, artworks and imagination to introduce readers to the world of the early Christian scribes and the challenges they face. I hope my fellow members of this blogspot and other readers will find in it “a novel approach to New Testament textual criticism.”

The forgery of the Lycopolitan gospel of John

Introduction

A second fragment containing the gospel of John traveled with the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife fragment (GJW), and this Gospel of John fragment (GJohn) is clearly a forgery.  Because both fragments share the same writing, the GJW must also be a forgery.  I am grateful for the input that Alin Suciu, Mark Goodacre and many others have offered concerning the newly available Gospel of John fragment.  I will use the present page to post photographs, a comparative transcription and relevant links. Please note, this will be a dynamic page, and I will no doubt update the transcriptions and main points.  Over the course of the next week, I will write an article for the June 2014 Tyndale Bulletin discussing the paleography and text of this fragment.

Photographs

Mark Goodacre has identified clearer photographs which I share, here (Jn 5:26-30 and 6:11-14, respectively).  The dimensions are ca. 11 × 8 cm (versus ca. 7.5 × 4 cm for GJW.)

Qau compared

The following transcription represents in green the extant text of the forgery.  Mark Goodacre offers an eloquent discussion of how this inauthenticates both this fragment and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife fragment which were created through the same scribal event (font).

1. Notably, seventeen of seventeen line breaks are the same.  This defies coincidence.  
2. Alin Suciu first announced the relevance of Sahidic ⲉⲃⲟⲗ for Lycopolitan ⲁⲃⲁⲗ.  The Sahidic spelling is not possible given the extant dialectal orthography which, for example, otherwise consistently has the Lycopolitan Alpha in lieu of the distinctly Sahidic Omicron.
3. I note here that the omitted ⲕⲣⲓⲛⲉ results in total nonsense. 
4. Likewise, the one instance where the forger has not copied every second line (verso, ll. 7–8), is an instance in which the intermediary text is a secure stock phrase “they were saying that”.  The presence of additional text here is impossible.  The forger erred when he turned from page eight of Thompson’s PDF to page nine, having also passed plate 25/26.
5. Naturally, the fact that we are seeing Lycopolitan in a fragment radiometrically dated to the seventh to ninth centuries is a huge problem.  The minor dialects (Achmimic, Lycopolitan and Middle Egyptian) are not present in the extensive documentary tradition from the sixth to eighth centuries.

Radiometric dating

The fragment under discussion was carbon-dated twice by labs in Arizona and Massachusetts.  The resultant rounded, callibrated two sigma dates are, respectively, 680–880 and 640–800 CE (fract.mod. results: 0.85680±0.0033 and 0.85030±0.00410).  Along with the results for the GJW wife fragment, I have graphed the results using OxCal, here:

Codex Qau

Codex Qau, Jn 16:33–17:19

The most recent discussion of codex Qau may be found in a recent award-winning contribution to the subject of the Coptic versions of John’s gospel (esp. pp. 141–143, also 94–105, 195–208).  Therein, one learns that the jar and linen cloth which protected this manuscript of John’s gospel have recently been rediscovered in Cambridge.  The manuscript was apparently buried in a cemetery used “in Predynastic, early Dynastic and Roman times”  (Thompson, 1924, ix).

Brunton, Qau, vol.3, xlii

According to the archeological publication, a group of coins was also found buried in a pot nearby, “No. 33 contained the papyrus of St. John’s gospel (late fourth century), and 28, 29, contained the hoard of gold coins” (Brunton, Qau and Badari III, 26; cf. also 31).  The coin hoard contains mint condition dated coins up to the year 361 CE (ibid., 29–30).  The idea that an ancient scribe copied our current fragment from Qau is problematic, given the provenance.  Whereas Qau had 33–37 lines per page, GJW-GJohn apparently would have had about 60 lines per page.  Stephen Emmel has demonstrated the absurdity of the forgery by reconstructing it hypothetical original and by comparing the reconstruction to known codices, here.

Peter Munro’s typed note

In her primary GJW article (p. 154, fn. 107), Karen King has provided the following information:

The second document is a photocopy of a typed and signed letter addressed to H. U. Laukamp dated July 15, 1982, from Prof. Dr. Peter Munro (Freie Universität, Ägyptologisches Seminar, Berlin), stating that a colleague, Professor Fecht, has identified one of Mr. Laukamp’s papyri as having nine lines of writing, measuring approximately 110 by 80 mm, and containing text from the Gospel of John. Fecht is said to have suggested a probable date from the 2nd to 5th cents. c.e. Munro declines to give Laukamp an appraisal of its value but advises that this fragment be preserved between glass plates in order to protect it from further damage. The letter makes no mention of the GJW fragment. The collection of the GJW’s owner does contain a fragment of the Gospel of John fitting this description, which was subsequently received on loan by Harvard University for examination and publication (November 13, 2012).

Conclusion

Unless compelling counter-arguments arise, both this fragment and the Gospel of Jesus Wife fragment should now be considered forgeries beyond any doubt.  Furthermore, the inauthenticity of the present fragment draws into question the broader group of documentation surrounding the Gospel of Jesus Wife which the owner provided to Karen King (contract of sale, typed note from Munro, handwritten note).  This was already problematic, as the bill of sale is dated to 1999, three years before Grondin’s GThomas PDF was available online.

Links (suggestions by email welcome)

• Codex Qau online PDF
• Harvard spectroscopy results with images
• Goodacre’s summary
• Suciu’s final summary
• Depuydt’s summary
• Conan O’Brian’s evidence
• Summary by Carrie Schroeder
• May 5 Smithsonian documentary
• Livescience article
• Wall Street Journal opinion article
• Hagen on scribal habits
• Goranson’s Chronology
• New York Times article
• PBS NewsHour video clip
• Washington Post article
• Mashable article
• ABC News article (Spanish)
• Slate article
• CNN video clip
• Harvard Crimson article

Live Update from the Pericope of the Adulteress Conference

This is a quick live update from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminar hosting the Pericpoe Adulterae symposium.

Image HT: Jacob Cerone

Right now Jennifer Knust is presenting her paper, "Neither Add Nor Take Away..."(photo by Chris Keith)

You can follow a live twitterstream at @ceronej  hashtag: paconf#

Update: There is liveblogging at www.jacobcerone.com and www.thomashudgins.com (with videoblog).

Second update: David A. Black summarizes the conference.