B. H. Manners

Is it true that they found parts of the New Testament in the Dead Sea Scrolls. There is a Christian site affirming they did.


Also, just how many manuscripts of the Bible do we have in existence, say 90% complete?

How many fragments are there?

Apikorus

Scholars overwhelmingly agree that there are no New Testament fragments among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and no mention of Jesus anywhere in the scrolls.

B. H. Manners

Can you provide a link or two from these scholars. I am going to use them to embarrass a little Christian wanna be apologist

Geoff Hudson

There are important parallels between the two.

1QH is an anomalous document that shows belief in the Spirit and that its writer was rejected by the majority of the Qumran community. For my money, this document is closely related to what the original NT documents were about before the later editors introduced Jesus. The NT as we have it is a development of earlier Jewish documents which had no reference to Jesus.

Geoff

Answerer

Hey BH, you asked the same question as I once did. Anyway, did the prophecy in the dead sea scroll mention anything regarding the Messian?

not a theist

I bet they're alluding to 7Q5. Carsten Peter Thiede claims that it's a fragment of Mark. It's very probably not, and very few scholars agree with his position. Dr. Daniel Wallace (a very conservative Christian) refutes the claims of Theide here:
<a href="http://www.bible.org/docs/soapbox/7q5.htm" target="_blank">7Q5: The Earliest NT Papyrus?</a>

Here's an English synopsis of a German book on the subject:
<a href="http://www.stefan-enste.de/Rezensionen7Q5.htm" target="_blank">Rezension in: Dead Sea Discoveries 8, 3, S. 312 - 315</a>

Theide's argument is here:
<a href="http://members.aol.com/egweimi/7q5.htm" target="_blank">Greek Qumran Fragment 7Q5: Possibilities and Impossibilities</a>

And a rebuttal of it is here:
<a href="ftp://ftp.lehigh.edu/pub/listserv/ioudaios-l/Articles/spthiede.Z" target="_blank">Media Papyri: Examining Carsten Thiede's Rediscovered Fragments</a>. (You'll need WinZip to open this one. Just hit "Okay when WinZip asks for the file name and then use the internal viewer to see it.)

Here's a picture of one of the doubtful letters:
<a href="http://www-user.uni-bremen.de/~wie/texte/7Q5.html" target="_blank">Thiede's Nu</a>. (It doesn't look like a nu to me.)

And here's an article from Christianity Today that calls Theide's attempt "sensationalist":
<a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/6tc/6tc026.html" target="_blank">Indiana Jones and the Gospel Parchments</a>.

An overview of the debate in Catholic circles:
<a href="http://www.catholic.net/RCC/Periodicals/Inside-0995/sep95/gospels4.html" target="_blank">Fact and Meaning Are Inseparable In Christianity</a>.

So what should we conclude? It just might be a fragment of Mark but is a very long way from being established as such. The person that you are debating probably thinks that it definately is, but the majority of the scholarly community disagrees with that. So he'll probably claim that they're biased when in fact he has a persecution complex.

[ October 30, 2002: Message edited by: not a theist ]</p>

Geoff Hudson

In the Scrolls, there were two Messiahs who would come, both at the same time - at least in the imagination of the writers. They were the Messiah of Israel (the lay kingly one), and the Priest Messiah. But, strangely for Christians today, the King Messiah would take second place to the Priest Messiah who was the boss - See the Messianic Rule, 1QSa. There was a third figure, the Prophet, whose arrival was expected together withwith the Messiahs (1QS 9.11). The Prophet was probably seen by the writers as the one promised by God to Moses (Deut 18.15). John the Baptist (really the Prophet - he never was a baptist) was seen by some as that Prophet, but his message of the Spirit was much closer to Moses wishes than the writers of the Scrolls would have liked - "I wish that all God's people were prophets, and that God would put his Spirit on them." (Num. 11.29).

Geoff

Butters

Posted by BH,
Good luck, I had this same argument. When I asked her to show me these NT documents she said; The church has them and is suppressing them because they contratict church dogma. Where did she get this idea? Christian web-site! Proof? none! BUT It is a FACT!

CX

There are on the order of 5600 Greek MSS that attest, in one way or another, to the NT. Most are highly fragmentary. There is no MSS which contains all the books of the NT canon prior to aleph, a codex from the 4th century. There are 2 or 3 MSS fragments dating solidly in the second century (P52, P90 and possibly P98) accounting for approximately .003% of the text in the entire NT. There are 4 more that scholars generally date around 200 C.E. (P32, P46, P66, P64). Two more MSS (P77 and 0189) are dated by scholars somewhere between the II and III centuries C.E. which, combined with the MSS already mentioned, brings the total to around 30% of the entire NT. Notably absent from these 7 earliest MSS are GLk, GMk, 2 Thess, 1&2 Tim, James, 1&2 Peter, 1,2&3 John and Jude.

There is a proliferation of MSS in the 3rd century on the order of around 30 individual MSS, but none is anything like a 90% attestation to the NT. As already mentioned, we do not even get all the books in the canon until aleph. If memory serves there are approximately 7 books of the NT (mostly the catholic letters)which are not attested anywhere before the major 4th century codices, with the possible exception of citations in the Church fathers (I've not carefully studied the church fathers yet).

I really need to get around to finishing the article I'm working on regarding NT MSS attestation.

[ October 30, 2002: Message edited by: CX ]</p>

B. H. Manners

CX,

What amount of that 5600 partial or mostly complete mss can be dated before say 300 A.D.?