Subject: Re: 7Q5

From: "Stephen C. Carlson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 1997 22:12:23 -0500

At 09:52  1/27/97 -0500, Nichael Lynn Cramer wrote:
>At 7:00 PM 1/27/97, Ronald L. Minton wrote:
>>Someone brought up the O'Callahan theory that ms 7Q5 dates to the first
>>century and is from the Gospels.  What have papyrologists concluded on
>>this in the last few years?  What do some you you who have studied this
>>issue say?  Thanks ahead of time for the info .
>
>For a good --and easily accessible-- discussion of 7Q5 and why
>O'Callaghan's identification is almost certainly not correct, see the
>disucssion in Graham Stanton's  _Gospel Truth?: New light on Jesus and the
>Gospels_ (Trinity, 1995).

Thiede, the leading champion now of the 7Q5 identification, has answered
some of Stanton's criticisms in a popularized book with Matthew D'Ancona,
EYEWITNESS TO JESUS: Amazing New Manuscript Evidence About the Origin
of the Gospels (Doubleday, 1996).  The last plate before page 81 is a
picture of the fragment.

>I think it's safe to say that Stanton's (negative) appraisal is in
>agreement with the overwhelming majority of scholarly opinion on the topic.

The biggest problem with the 7Q5 identification is that the scrap
contains a spelling error and a hitherto unknown textual variant in
the space of about a dozen identifiable letters but only one certain
word, KAI ("and").

Stephen Carlson
--
Stephen C. Carlson                   : Poetry speaks of aspirations,
[email-masked]              : and songs chant the words.
http://www.mindspring.com/~scarlson/ :               -- Shujing 2.35