Books in Brief

The First New Testament

David Estrada and William White, Jr. (Thomas Nelson Inc., 1978, $5.95)

This work is a popularly written account and analysis of the 1971 “discovery” of Father Jose O’Callaghan that certain fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls come from first century copies of New Testament documents. The authors are David Estrada, a graduate of Westminster Theological Seminary and a member of the faculty of the University of Barcelona, Spain, and William White, a Ph.D. graduate from the Dropsie College of Hebrew and Cognate Learning.

The fragments all come from Cave 7 of Qumran; thus scholars identify them as 7Q4, 7Q5, etc. Previously, they had been published as unidentified scraps of writing in volume III of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of Jordan, Les ‘petites grottes’ de Qumran (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), and in plate XXX in the accompanying volume of plates. Father O’Callaghan has now made the following identifications: