Truth
The Jesus Papyrus
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, August 31, 2000
The Jesus Papyrus: Eyewitness to Jesus?
In a press conference in December 1994, Carsten Thiede announced his discovery of first century AD fragments of the gospel of Matthew. The fragments were held in various museums but Thiede reclassified and redated them.
- He used palæography to redate them to the first century AD, around 70 AD
- He claimed an instance of the nomen sacrum—IS for IHSOUS—in Matthew 26:31
- He concluded the first century followers of Jesus, as bearing a name requiring special written symbolism, already thought of Jesus as divine.
Thiede argued that the three pieces of Matthew that make up the Magdalen Papyrus (P64), usually dated “c 200,” share similarities with handwriting from earlier papyri and should be redated between 70 and 100 AD. Thiede therefore puts the Magdalen Papyrus back before 70 AD to “the lifetime of disciples, apostles, contemporaries” of Jesus. This allows him to picture the Magdalen Papyrus as a direct copy of the original scroll written by the apostle, Matthew, and, because the Magdalen Papyrus uses a “sacred name” abbreviation when Jesus is called “kyrios”, “lord” or “master,"
Thiede’s redating on all these grounds is seriously flawed. He must know the tendentiousness of his method, and that it overturns most modern scholarship on the synoptic gospels, so what is his point? Thiede hopes to strengthen the evidence that Jesus was known to be divine by his contemporaries. If Thiede’s downdating is true, and if nomina sacra are used for the name of Jesus, he wants to argue these fragments show that some of the early Jesus movement thought that Jesus was like God, Moses or David, and his name treated as sacred. If the practice can be seen in a version of Matthew as early as 70 AD, Thiede wants to persuade us the first Christians used the nomen sacra for the name of a man they had witnessed as a god. Within the lifetime of some of the disciples, Matthew therefore recorded an eyewitness account of the deeds of a god.
Media Response
The media were not critical and said things like, “new papyrus fragment shows that followers of Jesus knew he was divine”. Later Thiede with a hack called Matthew d’Ancona wrote a bestselling book, The Jesus Papyrus, (Eyewitness to Jesus, in the USA). Yet, Thiede’s redating would not qualify the fragments as pieces of an “eyewitness” account, a claim Thiede and his hack accomplice had made. Daryl D Schmidt, in the Journal of Higher Criticism in 1996 said in exasperation, “What is so amazing is that there is no evidence here whatsoever."
The Times of London wrote, “not since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 has there been such a potentially important breakthrough in biblical scholarship.” Such a prestigious weekly as Time was utterly sycophantic about the book even though scholar, Graham Stanton, had been interviewed and explained to the editor the worthlessness of it. His views were scarcely mentioned, while Thiede was made out to be a Robin Hood fighting the cynical establishment. Robin Hoods are needed but Thiede is trying to buttress the “Adamandevers” of the Christian establishment—he is a Sheriff of Nottingham not a Robin Hood!
Der Spiegel, the German popular magazine, gave a much more balanced and scholarly account, notwithstanding its populist appeal. Spiegel rejected Thiede’s claims. Biblical Archaeology Review called Thiede’s work, “junk scholarship”, earning a letter from Thiede himself, but Hershel Shanks, the editor, politely replied that even scholars to whom Thiede appeals reject his claims. Meanwhile Graham Stanton had written his own popular but scholarly refutation in his book, Gospel Truth? Buy it! Especially if you have been gulled by d’Ancona and Thiede.
So, ignoring all the hype, the whole caboodle is a confidence trick. Sigrid Peterson of the University of Pennsylvania has comprehensively shown in Judaios Thiede’s lowering of the date for P64—P Magdalen Gr 17—is methodologically unsound. Mistaken methods invalidate Thiede’s inference about the date of the copy of Matthew from the P Magdalen Gr fragments. His redating is opposed to those of Bell, Skeat, Turner, and Roberts, all of whom agree that these fragments should indeed be redated but from the third or fourth centuries to c 200 AD, not the first century. Thiede does not explain why these authorities on papyrology are wrong. Skeat completely ignores Thiede in a 1997 review of work of these papyri in New Testament Studies. Thiede’s is a minor contribution—he has shown simply that what was once P Magdalen Gr 18 is now P Magdalen Gr 17.
Palæography
The seminal work on the Matthew fragments was done by Roberts in 1953. Thiede’s work makes a few necessary corrections, thus apparently going beyond the original. However, Thiede barely notes that the three Matthew fragments, P64, come from a two-column codex. He obscures this in his transcription, though the accompanying plate is similar to Roberts’ in presentation. Roberts notes the two-column format, and clearly labels his transcription according to columns. Had Thiede noted it, he would not have been able to claim that the Matthew fragments stem from an Egyptian copy of the gospel written around 70 AD. The earlier codices are written in one column rather than two. Thiede could have challenged this but did not recognize it. Thiede has not used the Roberts method to make inferences from two-column codices.
Thiede gives the history of dating the fragments. They were acquired at Luxor, in 1901, by the Rev Charles B Huleatt, who suggested third century. A S Hunt, who with Grenfell assigned manuscripts which came from codices to third century or later, thought the fourth century was more likely. While Hunt and Grenfell were wrong to think that codices did not appear until the third century, codicological information is important. No one disputes that these fragments come from a codex. Eric G Turner set a lower bound for codex development as the second century AD based on the dating of “Christian” materials, with Greek literary codices becoming prevalent a century later. Thiede does not address the implications of his findings for codicology. Should Turner’s dates for codices be lowered? One assumes they should but Thiede, knowing his work is feeble, will not say.
Roberts, with the agreement of Bell, Skeat and Turner, all authorities in the palæography of Greek manuscripts, reassigned P64 to c 200 AD from its palæography. Thiede does not say why these eminent people were incorrect. Instead, he argues that new papyri, published since Roberts’ work, allow an earlier date. He mentions the Greek Minor Prophets Scroll, texts from Herculaneum before 79 AD, the eruption of Vesuvius, and a recent publication that lowers the date of Bodmer-Chester Beatty Papyrus II (P46) from c 200 to c 100 AD. From these examples some of which might be datable to the first century, he looks for individual letter forms from the Matthew fragments which are not unlike letter forms in his samples chosen only by their date. In short, he adduces likenesses of individual letters in the Matthew fragments to these early papyri from various parts of the Mediterranean, even seeing resemblances between serifed letters from serif-style manuscripts and unserifed letters from P64, where overall the style is lacking in serifs or other ornamentation.
Even then all his data do not fit his conclusion. The letter epsilon is squared off before 200 BC and after 200 AD, and is rounded during the 400 years in between. In these fragments of Matthew, the epsilon is not usually rounded but is squared off, and so the fragments were not written between 200 BC and 200 AD. The doubt in some cases makes the date of 200 AD just tenable. Without the knowledge gained in this way, Thiede’s redating contradicts what is known. It does not follow accepted standards of practice, and is therefore suspect.
Reliance solely on individual letter forms is unsound. A sound method would assemble a group of related manuscripts without regard to their date, then place the specific manuscript at its optimum place in the series. This method has good results in palæographically dating the Hebrew-Aramaic manuscripts of the Dead Sea. Where there are few examples, good palæographical comparisons cannot be made and dating is hazardous. Thiede’s assembly of manuscripts for comparisons is not a coherent set, and was apparently chosen primarily as a group of manuscripts which could be dated in the first century AD, regardless of their other features. To use the Greek Minor Prophets Scroll as a basis for dating, as Thiede has done, is to compound the unreliability of his palæographical dating. There is no reason to think that Thiede has been striving for objectivity, when the methodology is so closely related to the results obtained.
Nomina Sacra
Thiede concludes his argumentation with a discussion of nomina sacra, two or three letter representations of holy names such as for Iesous and Kyrie. Early Christian manuscripts abbreviated “sacred names” used for Jesus, God, and Spirit, as well as a dozen other associated nouns, such as Father, Son, Heaven, David, Israel and Jerusalem. Thiede contends that the very act of using such an abbreviation was a visual way for Christians to show that “Jesus was Lord and God”. On this basis alone rests the claim repeated in the news media that Thiede had discovered evidence that Jesus was considered divine by his own disciples. There is of course no such evidence. Thiede’s argument, from Roberts’ suggestion, that nomina sacra, might have been used—but cannot now be seen because the papyrus is broken—is flimsy. Usually they are denoted by an overhead line, and none can be seen on these fragments.
Typical of Thiede’s disingenuousness, the evidence argues against him. The context of the abbreviation in Matthew 26:22 is someone calling Jesus Kyrie, which can mean merely “Sir” or “master”, rather than “Lord.” In the other earliest surviving New Testament papyri, this word gets abbreviated regardless of what it means, including when it is addressed to Philip in John 12:21 and when Jesus uses it in parables about masters and slaves. Likewise the name Jesus gets abbreviated even when it refers to Joshua (Heb 4:8) and to Justus (Col 4:11). Such mundane uses of the “sacred name” abbreviations would totally surprise the naïve reader who might well assume that Thiede was telling the whole truth.
Thiede argues that Kim’s lowered dating of P46 (Bodmer II), which has clear nomina sacra, supports Roberts’s speculation that nomina sacra were used in the first century AD. Roberts and Thiede both reconstruct nomina sacra in unclear or missing portions of the fragments of P64. Where documents have similar phraseology, such as legal and commercial documents, one document can be reconstructed from another. In specific cases, there is no such basis. Basing an argument on reconstruction then is arguing from uncertain evidence.
Roberts is methodologically within bounds in so doing for a manuscript of c 200 AD, because other evidence exists to support the practice. Thiede is methodologically less secure in reconstructing nomina sacra for a date around 70 AD, since he relies on their plain existence only in Kim’s redating of P46. Thiede’s hypothesis depends on nomina sacra in the text of these fragments of Matthew 26, and specifically on the nomen sacrum IS for IHSOUS. Thiede and Roberts both transcribed the fragments as though they contained nomina sacra, and as though the use of nomina sacra was not restricted to KURIOS, KURIE, or THEOS, THEOU, but rather extended to abbreviations of IHSOUS. There is no independent support for reconstructing nomina sacra of IS or IH.
Alternative lines can be constructed in every case where Thiede sees abbreviation except for use of letters instead of a word to signify the number 12, where IB (Greek letters for 12) must be read. The layout of visible letters (stichometry or line length), using the relevant verses of Matthew 26, in this one case supports Thiede. In the other cases, other plausible reconstructions of the lines are also possible. Elsewhere, the possibilities for reconstruction are many.
In the case of Matthew 26:31 in the fragment, many argue that the name IHSOUS must be suspended, using IH, or abbreviated, using IS, for the line lengths to come out right. The text we now have suggests that the first line would read “autoisoiesouspanteshumeis” for an impossible 25 letters. Thiede suggested “autoiso[ISpantes]” at 15 letters. But “autoiso[iesouspantes]” at 19 letters is possible. The word “autois” enters the margin by one letter, and the next five letters occupy the space of four in the following line. This would mean that a line of 19 letters would be no longer than a line of 16 or 17 letters even with IHSOUS written out.
In the absence of more data, such as the Barcelona fragments Thiede mentions but does not use—P67 which is part of the same manuscript—might provide, these fragments do not give any firm evidence for nomina sacra from either Roberts’s date of c 200, or Thiede’s first century dating. He also provides no reason for dropping P4, the Paris Luke fragment, which C H Roberts assigned to the same manuscript:
There can in my opinion be no doubt that all these fragments come from the same codex which was reused as packing for the binding of the late third century codex of Philo.
Graham Stanton has found that binding the four gospels into one codex bagan no earlier than about 150 AD. If the fragments P4, P64 and P67 prove to be from the same codex as Roberts thinks they are then Thiede’s hypothesis is dealt another heavy blow. T C Skeat, after 60 years of experience, declares that the script of the three papyri “agree even in the smallest details, so far as these can be checked,” P64 and P67 being such small fragments. Thiede’s research is flawed in its conception and its presentation, and his findings therefore have no basis. It is another lunatic attempt by a Christian to do God’s work by cheating. Thiede has admitted that his purpose was to promote belief. It serves as an example of what Christians have often done and continue to do. Issue bogus research and fabrications to fool the gullible.
Thiede is interested too in a fourth piece of Greek papyrus, a tiny fragment from Qumran Cave 7. He champions the proposal that this belongs to the gospel of Mark (Mk 6:52-53) as against other identifications, such as Jeremy 7:3b-5. The Qumran fragment has fewer than a dozen complete letters and the only complete word is “kai” (“and”). To make it match Mark 6, Thiede has to justify a spelling variation, an entire missing phrase, and special reconstructions of broken-off letters.
Thiede’s forte is creating scenarios that answer critics’ objections to his astonishing suggestions. How would Mark end up in a Qumran cave? As Jewish Christians fled Jerusalem for Pella in 62 or 66 AD, they dropped their scrolls off for the Essenes to deposit in the caves! Thiede further speculates that when they returned to Jerusalem a decade after the war they built the first synagogal church on Mount Zion on “the rubble of their former living quarters”.
Gasping in Astonishment
Daryl D Schmidt, reviewing Thiede’s work, says he defends his approach with language that leaves the critical reader gasping in astonishment at his sheer cheek—we need “to take the sources seriously, to bid good-bye to presuppositions… and vested interests,” to use the “often amazing amount of first-hand evidence” and “the growing awareness of circumstantial evidence”.
Thiede seeks to “do justice to idiosyncrasies” in the biblical texts. Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount in Matthew is evidence that “Matthew/Levy the customs official” may well have “taken down in shorthand words spoken by Jesus!” He cites John 5:2: “Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Bethesda, which has five porticoes.” The author is writing in the present tense, yet the pool was destroyed after the war ended in 70 AD. “It follows logically and conclusively that this text was written before AD 70."
That might be true, but not necessarily as part of the gospel. Thiede does not consider such elementary possibilities that the author of John had an earlier source to copy from one hundred years later. He does not consider any of the internal evidence that convinces even cautious scholars that John was written early in the second century. He does not allow for the use of the historic present tense, not unusual in old documents of this kind to give immediacy to the narrative. Thiede puts on spectacles that stop him from seeing anything other than his own theses which are therefore absolutely plain—the New Testament was written in its present form before 70, and by the apostles whose names are attached to their texts.
Such theories are eagerly consumed by an ever larger audience, even of non-Christians, and quickly lead to bestselling books, a tribute to the gullibility of people despite over a hundred years of public education. According to Schmidt, Thiede has no credentials, has never held an academic post, is self-appointed, and has no credibility in scholarly circles, who dismiss his claims as groundless. Buyers of his books should demand their money back on the grounds that they were defrauded into buying fiction.
