Bible Review

Thiede, Earliest Gospel Manuscript? p.55.

Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Major Publications and Tools for Study (Atlanta: Scholars Press 1990), p. 168.

This was the verdict of the original editor, Maurice Baillet, in Biblica 53 (1972), pp. 510–511. Similarly, see S.R. Pickering and R.R.E. Cook Fragment of Mark, pp. 11–12.

As Thiede readily concedes, O’Callaghan himself was more cautious; he admitted that this nu was “the most difficult point in the papyrus” (Earliest Gospel Manuscript? pp. 34–35).

Pickering and Cook, Fragment of Mark, p. 6.

For fuller information on this point, see S.R. Pickering and R.R.E. Cook, Has a Fragment of Mark been Found at Qumran? (Sydney, Australia: The Ancient History Documentary Research Centre, Macquarie University, 1989), pp. 12–13.

In Earliest Gospel Manuscript? (pp. 42–44), Thiede appeals to a fragment of Menander and a fragment of Virgil as comparable examples. While his point is well made, it is worth noting that both examples contain more certain letters than 7Q5.

It is documented fully by Thiede in Earliest Gospel Manuscript?

Maurice Baillet, Jozef T. Milik and Roland de Vaux, eds., Les ‘petites grottes’ de Qumran, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).