Teaser

The reasons I might personally be interested in ancient papyri and parchment are probably very different than for others. Everyone puts their spin on the news. Spinning history is no different. We pick up on the stories that magnify our beliefs and further our agendas.

When enough people do it history changes while the facts don't. That bugs me. Shouldn't the facts and history be one and the same?


Case in point, the oldest known fragment of the New Testament was discovered in 1920 and thought to date to the year 100 CE. On the front we have a portion of John 18:31-33 and on the back we get verses 37-38.



The verses in their entirety would say:

"So Pilate said to them, "Take Him yourselves, and judge Him according to
your law." The Jews said to him, "We are not permitted to put anyone to death,"
to fulfill the word of Jesus which He spoke, signifying by what kind of death He
was about to die. Therefore Pilate entered again into the Praetorium, and
summoned Jesus and said to Him, "Are you the King of the Jews?" (John
18:31-33)



"Therefore Pilate said to him, "So you are a king?" Jesus answered, "You
say correctly that I am a king. For this I have been born, and for this I have
come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears
my voice." Pilate said to him, "What is truth?" And when he had said this, he
went out again to the Jews and said to them, "I find no guilt in him." (John
18:37-38).

OK. So here are the politics. The Jews and skeptics say Jesus never claimed to be God and that they had nothing to do with killing him. They claim that anti-semitism crept into the New Testament in the centuries that followed the death of Jesus and that Jesus was an instigator, a claimant to a throne, a rebel against Rome, a political rather than simply a religious figurehead. And, of course, we know what most Christians maintain. So no need to repeat that.



But what does this little scrap show us?



Already jumping to conclusions, are we? Already on the defense?



Slow down. There are more than a handful of things to consider. I'll reduce it to these two ...

1. The dating to 100 CE is based on the style of the script - something certain geeks call "Alexandrian script." That's fair. Geeks rule! But some scholars date it as late as 150 CE. Why? Well, you'd have to do some research to find out. What did one geek say and then another. Are the reasons political? Good question. I'll be kind and say it simply calls for examination - which is to say, research. More on that below.


2. The fragment doesn't contain the entire text. You can see this at first glance for yourself. The good news is that Greek hasn't changed all that much from the Koine Greek a lot of people know and have provided dictionaries and InterLinear translations for. So even with my very lousy ability in Greek I can tell you here's what the actual fragment boils down to. The parts in red below are the preserved parts of the verses you can see on the manuscript pictured to the right. The rest is missing ...

"So Pilate said to them, "Take him yourselves, and judge him according to your law." The Jews said to him, "We are not permitted to put anyone to death," to fulfill the word of Jesus which he spoke, signifying by what kind of death he was about to die. Therefore Pilate entered again into the Praetorium, and summoned Jesus and said to him, "Are you the King of the Jews?" (John 18:31-33)

The back side is not showing here and I've taken some liberty in rendering this in English but the red parts above are pretty close. Those are the facts. So does this mean that Jesus was a rebel? Enter the story not of the Greeks, but of the geeks.

Geek 1 says the text proves the Jews had Jesus killed and that the Christians weren't lying.

Geek 2 says the Gospel of John wasn't written by the disciple of Jesus known as John but by somebody who wanted to start a new religion and became a priest, having followed John to Ephesus and filling in for him after he died, writing his Gospel.

Geek 3 agrees with Geek 2 and says that for sufficient time for John, Jesus' disciple to have died and a goodly amount of antisemitism to have crept in to what became a gentile church, the writing must not date back to 100 CE but must be of a later date.

Geek 4 agrees with Geek 3 and says that this portion isn't even from the Gospel, but an even later edition, no earlier than 150 CE. Hardly any, if any of the Gospel of John was written by John and the Christians were certainly antisemites. The Jewish Nazarenes, on the other hand, were devout Jews according to the party of James, which was the party of the circumcision.

And then we're back again to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Geek 5 has a plethora of theories about the Qumran community that stored up the Scrolls having been associated with the party of James. He has had almost exclusive access to the Dead Sea Scrolls for over fifty years, and while the whole world waits to check his theories or simply confirm them, he has been putting on presentations all over the world and has lots of books he's written. In Geek 5's eyes James was a far more prominent figure than the Jesus of history.

It's a theory that fits in well with the the claims of Jews for many centuries. Paul is the true founder of Christianity, not Jesus. The Way of the Nazarines was that of James, and James was his only proper successor.

So they say. But what are the facts? Surely you want to know. So stay tuned for the next exciting episode of blog teases by James... (and support 247scrolls.com so Geek 5 isn't the only person who has access to the answer).

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