Charlotte Higgins, writing for The Guardian (UK):
On 1 February 2012, in Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, two theologians, Prof Bart Ehrman and Dr Daniel Wallace, were debating – to a rapt audience of 1,500 – whether the original text of the New Testament could be recovered. Suddenly, Wallace dropped a bombshell.
“The oldest manuscript of the New Testament is now a fragment of Mark’s Gospel that is from the first century,” he claimed. “My source is a papyrologist who worked on the manuscript, a man whose reputation is unimpeachable.” It was, recalled Ehrman at a recent conference in San Diego, “a real jaw-dropper”.
Ehrman was bursting with questions. How extensive was the fragment? Who was the papyrologist? Had the dating been corroborated by others? Wallace said he was sworn to secrecy. All he could reveal was that the fragment would soon be published by the academic imprint, Brill.
A few months later, Brill did indeed announce a new publication: the Green Scholars Initiative Papyri Series, edited by Obbink and Pattengale, a series of volumes of “rare unpublished papyri texts from the Green collection”. The mystery fragment of first-century Mark, then, must belong to the Greens, Ehrman reasoned. The only problem was that the fragment “wasn’t published that year, and it wasn’t published the next year, and it wasn’t published the next year,” said Ehrman. “I started to feel like it was the parousia (Christ’s second coming) – it’s coming soon, but we don’t know when.”
For the scholar sleuths – as they would soon become – alarm bells started ringing.
This is an almost unbelievable — and tragic— story, and well worth the read. It’s hard to understate the excitement among bibliophiles that surrounded the revelation of this alleged first-century fragment of Mark, especially after Wallace jumped the gun and ill-advisedly referenced it in his debate with Ehrman, which you can watch here.
Not only was this unfair to Ehrman from a debating perspective, who had not previously heard of the fragment’s existence, and who obviously had no opportunity to prepare any kind of response to Wallace’s assertions, but, as it turns out, Wallace (who is a world-class textual scholar) had trusted the word of Carroll on the fragment’s provenance. Carroll, for his part, had trusted the word of Obbink.
This article appears to be devastating to Obbink’s credibility. “We all trusted him”, as one senior professor privately expressed to me. That trust now lies shattered, along with, potentially, Obbink’s career.
Lost in all of this intrigue is the fact that this Markan fragment does, in fact, exist, and — whatever its backstory might be — it’s still quite possibly a second-century fragment, which would be a notable find on its own merits.
