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7Q5: The Earliest NT
Papyrus?

by
Daniel B. Wallace,
Ph.D.

Review of
Carsten Peter
Thiede,
The Earliest Gospel Manuscript?
The Qumran Fragment 7Q5 and its
Significance for New Testament Studies1

(London: Paternoster, 1992)
74 pp. + 6 pp. bibliography

Introduction

In 1962 M. Baillet, J. T. Milik, and R. de Vaux
published the text and plates of manuscripts from six Qumran caves (caves 2, 3,
5, 6, 7, 10).2 The seventh
cave, in particular, had some interesting materials in that this was the only
cave with exclusively Greek fragments. For most of these manuscripts, including
7Q5, the editors did not have a clue as to their textual identity. (7Q5 is a
papyrus scrap with writing only on the recto side, having just five lines
of text with parts of no more than twenty letters visible.3 The only
complete word that can be detected is kaiv¾hardly a confidence-builder when it comes to a positive
identification.)

Ten years later, in 1972, the Spanish
papyrologist José O¢Callaghan published a controversial article, ²¿Papiros
neotestamentarios en la cueva 7 de Qumrân?²4 in which
he argued that the fifth manuscript from the seventh cave of Qumran was a
fragment from the Gospel of Mark (6:52-53). This produced a spate of scholarly
reviews5 and
interactions¾most of which rejected O¢Callaghan¢s identification. This rejection
rested on three grounds: (1) principally, the papyrus itself was so fragmentary
that any identification would be tenuous at best (not to mention the fact
that there were several textually intrinsic problems with O¢Callaghan¢s
proposal); (2) since the Qumran community almost certainly disbanded in 68
CE¾and hence the MS must be dated before that time (in fact, most likely, no
later than 50 CE)¾the majority of NT scholars felt that even the original draft
of Mark¢s Gospel was not this early, obviously precluding the possibility that a
copy of Mark could have existed before the fall of Jerusalem; and (3) the
differences between the Qumran community (usually considered to be identical
with the Essenes) and the nascent Christian community are so pronounced that
contact between the two seemed improbable (and a literary contact, as
O¢Callaghan proposed, seemed to imply that not only was there communication
between the two groups, but open and somewhat friendly
communication).

O¢Callaghan defended his views against virtually
every assailant. But until 1982 he found few, if any, real followers. In that
year Carsten Peter Thiede, a German scholar, began to publish in defense of the
O¢Callaghan hypothesis. In the last dozen years, in fact, he has surpassed his
mentor in periodical proliferation. The book under review is, in many respects,
the culmination of his efforts. The Earliest Gospel Manuscript?,
Thiede¢s first book in English on the subject, has been written to appeal to
a wider audience (since his earlier writings have almost completely fallen on
deaf German ears). There is today both interest in and sympathy toward the
O¢Callaghan hypothesis¾especially now that it has a fresh advocate in
Thiede.6 Indeed, at
the ETS national meeting in November 1992, even Alan Johnson pleaded the case
for Thiede¢s volume.7

Why all the furor? What is at stake? A number of
things: (1) If this identification is correct, it would be the earliest NT MS by
some 50-100 years;8 (2) on
paleographical grounds, since the upper limit of its date is 50 CE, this
would put Mark in the 40¢s at the latest; (3) one consequence of such an early
date for Mark would be to virtually silence advocates of Matthean priority; and
(4) finally, it would suggest, perhaps, that at least some of the New Testament
documents were regarded highly enough to be copied soon after publication¾a view
which lends itself to an early recognition of the NT as canon.9

Body of Review

There are five chapters to this slender volume.
The first, ²Introduction,² is both a selective tracing of the history of the
discussion and a rebuke of the scholarly community for not really listening to
the arguments put forth by O¢Callaghan. Chapter 2 (²Ì52¾The Most Famous
Papyrus²) is, in essence, an implicit yet not-so-subtle attempt to argue from
similarities: since Ì52 is accepted by the entire community of NT
scholars as a fragment of John¢s Gospel from the first half of the second
century10¾even
though it has itacisms and variants from the standard text¾we should also accept
7Q5 as a fragment of Mark, and dated no later than 68 CE, since it has similar
textual ²glitches.² One telling argument that the two are not that similar is
the fact that, as Thiede concedes, the identification and dating of Ì52 were ²accepted
without argument² (p. 12) by the scholarly community, while 7Q5¢s identification
has not been. Thiede spends an exorbitant amount of space demonstrating that 7Q5
should be dated no later than c. 50 CE. An interesting concession by the author,
however, is the fact that C. H. Roberts, on whose expertise he relies, gives a
variance of 100 years for the date of this MS: from 50 BCE to 50 CE.
Obviously, the earlier the date, the less likely is the possibility that this
fragment comes from the NT at all.11 Even the
most conservative NT scholars do not date the Gospel of Mark as early as this
upper limit set by Roberts.

Chapter 3 (²7Q5¾The Earliest New Testament
Fragment?²) is the most substantial of the booklet, covering nineteen pages
(23-41). Thiede puts forth a meticulously argued and somewhat technical case for
the identification of this fragment with Mark 6:52-53. He points out, among
other things, that even though at most ten of the twenty letters can be
positively identified, (1) the three-letter space before kai indicates the beginning of a new paragraph (a not
uncommon feature in ancient MSS), corresponding to the content break at Mark
6:53, and (2) line 4 apparently has the unusual combination of letters,
nnhs (although the
first and last letters are quite difficult to make out), corresponding to
gennhsaret in Mark 6:53.12

Thiede also responds at length to the three most
common (and most serious) objections to this identification: (1) 7Q5 has a
tau where Mark 6:53 has a delta (ti[aperavsante"] vs. diaperavsante"); (2) in order to
make the lines be of somewhat equal length and correspond to Mark¢s text, the
ejpiV thVn gh'n of
v. 53 must be omitted¾even though no extant MSS omit this expression; and (3) a
number of O¢Callaghan¢s identifications of the partially readable letters are
quite improbable. To those involved in the debate over 7Q5¢s identification,
Thiede¢s argument is more summary than new insight. In essence, he argues that
(1) there are frequent interchanges between tau and delta in koine
Greek,13
rendering such a possibility here hardly surprising; (2) other early papyri
(e.g., Ì52, Ì45) omit material at times, even though such
an omission is a singular reading; and (3) if O¢Callaghan¢s critics had taken
the time to look at the fragment instead of a photograph, their objections about
his letter reconstructions would have vanished.

These counter-charges by Thiede are not as
substantial as he supposes. We shall approach them chiastically. First, both the
original editors of this fragment and most who have followed disagree with
several of O¢Callaghan¢s letter reconstructions. At every point in which the
enlarged photograph of the fragment at the end of Thiede¢s booklet (p. 68) seems
to disprove O¢Callaghan¢s reconstructions, Thiede discounts the empirical
evidence which he himself provides and renders his own judgments untouchable by
any who have access only to a photograph. In other words, he is saying, ²You
don¢t have a right to criticize O¢Callaghan¢s reconstruction because you haven¢t
seen the fragment.² Such a stance is elitist at best; at worst, it moves the
entire discussion from a scholarly dialogue to a fideistic statement: Thiede
basically says ²Trust me.² A constant refrain is that O¢Callaghan¢s
reconstructions are possible. Perhaps this is so, but such are also
highly unlikely. In particular, an unbiased reader looking at the photograph
will almost certainly disagree with O¢Callaghan¢s reconstructed nu in
line 214 and
agree with the original editors¢ judgment about epsilon, sigma in
line 5 (against O¢Callaghan¢s sigma, alpha). Thiede is quite right
that examination of a document firsthand is to be preferred to examination of a
photograph.15 And this
is precisely where his and O¢Callaghan¢s approach falters: others have looked at
the MS firsthand and have disagreed with O¢Callaghan.

Second, although it is certainly possible that
ejpiV thVn gh'n is
legitimately omitted in O¢Callaghan¢s stichometric reconstruction,16 it
strikes me as too convenient for the hypothesis: in order to make this papyrus
fragment fit the text of Mark, the non-recoverable portion of the text needs to
be altered. This again makes the proposal non-falsifiable. Further¾and this
still looms as an important consideration¾such an omission is unattested in any
other MS for this verse.

Third, most damaging for O¢Callaghan¢s
identification is the tau in the place of a delta. Although,
admirably, both O¢Callaghan and Thiede provide examples of such interchange in
koine Greek due to the similar sound of the two letters (e.g., te for
dev), none of the examples produced involve the
preposition diav, whether standing
alone or in compound. Illustrations such as the interchange of te for
dev do not help the
case, because both were real words with some semantic overlap. And Thiede¢s
example of the interchange between druvfakton and truvfakton (pp. 28-29) is not very
convincing, because such a rare word would be expected to have variant
spellings. The preposition diav, however, has no semantic overlap with tia (there is, in fact, no such word) and is so common
that a schoolboy would have learned its correct spelling. Such a misspelling as
O¢Callaghan and Thiede envision this scribe as producing would be analogous to a
modern author writing ²tiameter² for ²diameter.² In light of this, surely it is
an overstatement for Thiede to assert that ²one might go so far as to say that
the peculiarities themselves support this view [that 7Q5 = Mark 6:52-53]² (p.
31).

One final point about chapter 3 can be
mentioned. In his final footnote of the chapter (n. 31, pp. 40-41), Thiede
states that ²a more recent computer check [than K. Aland¢s], using the most
elaborate Greek texts (Ibykus [sic]) has failed to yield any text
other than Mark 6:52-53 for the combination of letters identified by O¢Callaghan
et al. in 7Q5.² In other words, using a very powerful software search
engine17 which is
able to scan over 64 million words in hundreds of ancient Greek texts in a
matter of minutes, Thiede could not find any text, besides Mark 6, that
fit this Cinderella¢s shoe.

At first glance, this sounds very impressive.
But Thiede overlooked two things. First, the restriction of ²letters identified
by O¢Callaghan² assumes O¢Callaghan¢s problematic letter reconstructions to be
correct. But this manifold assumption is exceedingly gratuitous. It is like
observing a sheet of paper that has been left out in the rain. Only a handful of
letters can be made out clearly; all else is up for grabs. Now suppose I come
along and say that one or two of the clear letters need to be changed. And of
the unclear letters, I propose three or four nearly impossible suggestions. I do
this because I have a certain text in mind that I want this sheet to be a
copy of. Would it be so surprising when my Macintosh spits out that very
text¾after I have programmed it do so? In doing this kind of thing, Thiede has
fallen prey to the very argument he just leveled against Kurt Aland in
the same footnote!18

Second, when one allows for different
possibilities than just O¢Callaghan¢s for the partially legible letters, the
Ibycus program19 does,
indeed, seem to permit other texts to be identified with 7Q5. In my own cursory
examination of the TLG via Ibycus, I found sixteen texts which could
possibly fit (though only if one stretched both his or her imagination and the
textual evidence).20

Third, even if none of these is as impressive as
is Mark 6:52-53 (a point I would readily concede), there is no necessity in
identifying 7Q5 with any known text.21 As
possible as the O¢Callaghan/Thiede proposal is, it remains far more plausible to
see 7Q5 as a copy of some unknown text¾just like other papyri in cave
7.

Chapter 4 (three pages in length) is an attempt
to show, by analogy with two other fragments, that positive identification of
7Q5 can be made in spite of the paucity of letters.

The fifth chapter (²The Seventh Cave at
Qumran¾Its Text and Their Users²) (pp. 45-63) answers the historical question:
Why would Christian documents be concealed in a Qumran cave? Thiede summarizes
O¢Callaghan¢s case that some of the other fragments in this cave are portions
from the NT (e.g., 7Q6 = Mark 4:28; 7Q15 = Mark 6:48; 7Q8 = Jas 1:23-24; 7Q9 =
Rom 5:11-12; 7Q10 = 2 Pet 1:15; 7Q4 = 1 Tim 3:16-4:3).22 Such
equations were pursued by O¢Callaghan because he had already felt that his
identification of 7Q5 was certain. As would be expected, he has received quite a
bit of criticism for these speculations. Some of the arguments against his
proposals are that (1) the fragments involved have as few as three or four
clearly identified letters; (2) one of the documents, 7Q6, has two fragments,
yet O¢Callaghan assigned the first to Mark 4, the second to Acts 27; (3) on
higher critical grounds, that 2 Peter and 1 Timothy especially could have had
copies by 68 CE seemed impossible;23 (4) four
fragments identified as copies of Mark by four different scribes seemed to go
beyond even the realm of ²Phantasie²;24 (5)
textual emendations and/or less than probable reconstructions of letters were
forced on the fragments to make them fit the theory; and (6) 7Q4 (= 1
Tim 3:16-4:3) is, paleographically, so much like 7Q5, that it
should likewise be dated no later than 50 CE¾and this is an impossible
date for any pastoral epistle. In my judgment, Thiede does not adequately
address these concerns (many of which are completely ignored).

Regarding the historical situation, Thiede
devotes ten pages (54-63) to his defense of a Christian cave among the
Qumran caves. He builds an ingenious case for geographical contact between
Christians and the Essenes in Jerusalem, with many of his points containing an
element of truth. From this he extrapolates that when the Christians left
Jerusalem for Pella (c. 66 CE), they would have ²entrusted them [their sacred
documents], or some of them, to their Essene neighbours for safekeeping, and
they, in turn, [would have] hid them in a separate cave at Qumran² (p. 58).
Although this reconstruction is in the realm of possibility, it is barely so.

Even if we were to grant geographical contact
between Christians and Essenes in Jerusalem, it is too much to assume that there
was a friendly familiarity between the two communities. Two
considerations seem to argue against this. First, the Essenes were the most
extreme separatists of any Jewish sect in the first century¾so much so that they
established a celibate community away from Jerusalem. If they hardly
communicated with other Jews, how much less would they do so with Christians?
Second, the Essenes were extreme legalists.25 The
Christians were at the other end of the spectrum. And it is significant that
five of the fragments found in cave 7 are allegedly from Mark and Romans¾two
books which are about as anti-legalistic as can be found in the NT canon. In
light of these two considerations, is it really plausible that the early
Christians ²entrusted [these documents] to their Essene neighbours for
safekeeping²?

The book concludes with several illustrations
(including 7Q5, Ì52, et al), inviting the reader to see
exactly what it is that the experts have been debating.

Conclusion

To sum up: Not only are O¢Callaghan and Thiede
arguing that 7Q5 is a fragment from Mark¢s Gospel, but they are also appealing
to Kurt Aland to list this document officially as a NT papyrus: ²Future editions
of the Greek New Testament will have to include 7Q5. It should, at long last,
receive a ¢p¢ number, it must be recognized in the apparatus, with its variants²
(p. 41). Here is no detached plea; rather, it is an indictment. And this
not-so-subtle indictment takes on parabolic overtones in the concluding
statement of the book, where Thiede comments about the alleged early Christians
who orchestrated the burying of these documents in Qumran¢s Cave 7 (p. 63):

Using papyrus instead of the more expensive
parchment, these first Christians were eager to share the first fruits of
their own literary harvest with those who were hungry for the good news. When
it was a question of promoting the gospel about Jesus they showed a spirit
which was at the same time innovative and open-minded. Of them, it could not
be said what Mark writes, preserved in 7Q5, about the first disciples after
the feeding of the five thousand: ¢Their minds were closed.¢

Putting all this in perspective, we conclude
this review by addressing two concerns: evidence and attitudes. First, what is
the hard evidence on which O¢Callaghan¢s identification is based? A scrap of
papyrus smaller than a man¢s thumb with only one unambiguous word¾kai. Only six other letters are
undisputed: tw (line
2), t (line 3,
immediately after the kai), nh (line 4), h (line 5). To build a case on such slender evidence would
seem almost impossible even if all other conditions were favorable to it. But to
identify this as Mark 6:52-53 requires (1) two significant textual emendations
(tau for delta in a manner which is unparalleled; and the dropping
of ejpiV thVn gh'n
even though no other MSS omit this phrase);
and (2) unlikely reconstructions of several other letters. Add to this that the
MS is from a Qumran cave and that it is to be dated no later than 50 CE
and the case against the Marcan proposal seems overwhelming. If it were
not for the fact that José O¢Callaghan is a reputable papyrologist and that C.
P. Thiede is a German scholar, one has to wonder whether this hypothesis would
ever have gotten more than an amused glance from the scholarly community.

Second, regarding attitude, I find it disturbing
that many conservatives have been so uncritically eager to accept the
O¢Callaghan hypothesis. 7Q5 does not, as one conservative put it, mean ²that
seven tons of German scholarship may now be consigned to the flames.²26 On the
other hand, I find it equally disturbing that many liberal scholars have
uncritically rejected O¢Callaghan¢s proposal without even examining the
evidence. Higher criticism must of course have a say in this discussion; but it
must not preclude discussion. Both attitudes, in their most extreme
forms, betray an arrogance, an unwillingness to learn, a fear of truth while
clinging to tradition, a fortress mentality¾none of which is in the spirit of
genuine biblical scholarship. When the next sensational archaeological find is
made, should not conservatives and liberals alike ask the question: Will we
fairly examine the evidence, or will we hold the party line at all
costs? 27

1 There is some confusion
over the title. The title listed above is what appears on the book¢s cover.
However, on the title page ²Papyrus² has replaced ²Fragment.²

2 Les ¢Petites Grottes¢
de Qumrân, DJD III.

3 Its dimensions are, in
Thiede¢s words, ²at the most 3.9 cm high and 2.7 cm wide. At most, visible text
covers an area measuring 3.3 cm high and 2.3 cm wide² (p. 25). In other words,
7Q5 is smaller than two standard U.S. postage stamps.

4 Bib 53
(1972)91-100. Translated into English in the JBL 91 (1972) supplement no.
2.

5 See Thiede¢s bibliography
for a listing of the reviews, which are in any case too numerous to mention in a
footnote. Among the specific reviews in scholarly journals alone (i.e., neither
books nor essays where 7Q5 is only a part of the discussion), New Testament
Abstracts lists more than thirty¾not to mention one dozen responses by
O¢Callaghan!

6 Fifteen years ago, David
Estrada and William White, Jr., argued his case in The First New Testament.
In 1980, Wilbur Pickering added his support in his The Identity of the
New Testament Text , 2nd ed. (Nashville: Nelson), 155-158. This supports his
majority text theory of textual criticism in the following way: ²That someone
should have such a collection of New Testament writings at such an early date
may suggest their early recognition as Scripture and even imply an early notion
of a New Testament canon² (158).

7 One should note at the
outset that this work is marred by scores of not insignificant typographical
errors, including grammar and spelling mistakes, several misquoted statements,
and worst of all, a discrepancy in the very title of the book. Such a
casual approach to the form of presentation can give the reader a natural
temptation to see an equally imprecise handling of the data on Thiede¢s part. A
second, corrected edition ought to be published as soon as possible, if for no
other reason than to remove an unnecessary stumbling block for the viewpoint
espoused.

8 Ì52 is to be dated c. 100-150 CE, while 7Q5 is
dated c. 50 BCE-50 CE.

9 Another possible
implication would have to do with the ending of Mark. Since the fragment 7Q5 was
written only on one side, it was doubtless a scroll rather than a codex. If so,
then the original of Mark would most likely have been a scroll. And if this is
the case, it is extremely unlikely that the ending of Mark would have somehow
become lost¾since the ending of a scroll would, under normal circumstances, be
the most protected part of the document. In this case the most plausible
scenario for the ending of Mark is that the author chose to end his
gospel at 16:8. This argument can certainly be sustained without 7Q5, though it
would not hurt to have this MS lend its voice.

10 Thiede makes the
repeated assertions that this papyrus should be dated ²to the first quarter of
the second century (at the very latest)² (p. 2; cf. also p. 21), in spite of the
fact that most textual critics today would be more comfortable dating it more
generally, c. 100-150 CE (cf. B. M. Metzger, Manuscripts of the Greek Bible:
An Introduction to Greek Palaeography [Oxford: Clarendon, 1981] 62). One of
the reasons for this is that a scribe¢s handwriting is not going to change very
much over the duration of his career. Thus, on palaeographical grounds, it is
difficult to pinpoint the date of a MS within a period smaller than 50 years
(ibid., p. 50).

11 Thiede makes the
remarkable statement that ²leaving theological arguments aside, the earliest
possible date for this gospel, historically speaking, is AD 30, the year of the
last event recorded in it, the resurrection of Jesus² (p. 25). Thiede¢s
assessment that higher critical reconstructions¾especially as regards the
synoptic problem¾are merely ²theological arguments² strikes me as a bit naïve
and ought to signal the reader to Thiede¢s antecedent eagerness to accept
O¢Callaghan¢s identification of 7Q5. No reputable NT scholar¾regardless of his
theological underpinnings or views of gospel priorities¾dates Mark this
early.

12 On the basis primarily
of these two points Thiede asserts: ²Even without considering other aspects of
the fragment in detail, it should be clear to any unbiased observer that on the
basis of these findings, the indentification [sic] of the fragment as Mk
6:52-53 is more than merely probably [sic]² (p. 27).

13 See especially
O¢Callaghan, ²El cambio d>t en los papiros biblicos,²
Bib 54 (1973) 415-16, as a demonstration of this point. O¢Callaghan finds
twenty places in biblical papyri (18 for LXX, two for NT) where this interchange
takes place.

14 See especially G. D.
Fee, ²Some Dissenting Notes on 7Q5 = Mark 6:52-53,² JBL 92 (1973)
109-12.

15 Actually, the ideal is
to examine both the original document and a photograph side-by-side. The
advantages of a photograph involve enlargement and contrast especially. I
recently discovered this in a fresh examination of Ì26: the photograph
revealed at least eight more letters than could be detected by looking at the
papyrus alone.

16 With the omission of
the expression, the letters per line are as follows: 20/23/20/21/21. If the
phrase is left intact, the lines are 20/23/29/21/21.

17 The search engine was
in fact Ibycus, but the database being searched was the Thesaurus Linguae
Graecae, developed by the Packard Humanities Institute. There are now
several search engines available to search the TLG, both for Mac and
Windows platforms, but there is only one TLG.

18 Thiede points out that
²Aland used the computer at his institute in Münster in order to analyse two
different combinations of letters which he thought were possible ²minimal²
readings of the fragment 7Q5 . . . But . . . Aland¢s efforts had to fail
for a methodological reason . . . : no existing edition of the Greek text of
Mark has the variant tau for delta in the ¢diaperasantes¢.
Thus, Aland¢s computer programme of the Greek New Testament, based here on the
delta, had to miss Mark 6:52-53 as a possible passage, and it
promptly did.²

19 A lexical search engine
canvassing over sixty million words in Greek literature (based on the
Thesaurus Linguae Graecae), from Homer to 1453 CE.

20 The search involved the
following pattern: twn, kait, nnh, corresponding to lines two,
three, and four of 7Q5 (and even allowing O¢Callaghan his nu in line 2).
The passages found include Ezek 23:36; Josephus, Vita 42-3; Vita
236; Bellum 5.528; 7.380-1; Philo Cher. 44; 119; Plant.
135; Plant. 136; Mut. 173; Thucydides, Hist. 1.10.2;
1.60.1; 3.109.2; 4.67.4; 5.82.5; 8.55.1. I would not be so rash as to suggest
that 7Q5 is a copy of any of these passages, but just that the identification
with Mark 6 is not unparalleled. Almost all of these passages¾like Mark
6¾involve what I consider to be insuperable problems: date (in the case of the
Josephus texts), length of line, and manipulation of partially legible letters.
With a little imagination, however, I was able to emend several of the texts
(even finding plausible homoioteleuta, metatheses, etc.) and make the data fit.
In fact, in one text this was not even necessary. In Philo, Plant. 135
the three lines of text can be reconstructed, without any textual emendation, in
a 16/14/16 stichometry:

qwmatwn apantwn ar (16)

iston kai teleio (14)

taton gennhma o eis (16)

ton patera . . .

There is a certain advantage of this text over
Mark 6: whereas O¢Callaghan¢s reconstruction involves twenty or twenty-one
letters per line as the norm¾including line 3 which has a three-letter gap and
ought therefore to have fewer letters, the Philonic text has two letters fewer
in line 3, taking into account the gap in 7Q5 at this point.

Of course, there is still the problem of forcing
the partially legible letters into the theory¾but this suffers no disadvantage
over against the Marcan proposal.

21 Other potential
identifications have been suggested on occasion. Cf., e.g., Gordon D. Fee, ²Some
Dissenting Notes on 7Q5 = Mark 6:52-53,² JBL 92 (1973) 109-112; Conan
DiPonio Parson, 7Q5: An Ancient ²Honey Do² List? (Snowflake,
Saskatchewan: Technasma Press, 1975); Kurt Aland, ²Über die Möglichkeit der
Identifikation kleiner Fragmente neutestamentlicher Handschriften mit Hilfe des
Computers,² in Studies in New Testament Language and Text, ed. J. K.
Elliott (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976) 14-38; V. Spottorno, ²Una nueva posible
identificación de 7Q5,² Sefarad 52 (1992) 541-43.

22 O¢Callaghan¢s most
certain (in his mind, that is) identification was that 7Q4 = 1 Tim
3:16-4:3.

23 This is true even if
one holds to apostolic authorship. Some date Paul¢s death at 67 CE, and Peter¢s
at 68.

24 So K. Aland, ²Neue
neutestamentliche Papyri III,² NTS 20 (1974) 363.

25 So much so that they
even refused to urinate on the Sabbath, regarding even that as ²work²!
Ironically, in Thiede¢s own reconstruction the Essenes¢ latrine wall was in
close proximity to where the Christians met for prayer. One can only wonder if
friendly associations should truly be implied from such evidence.

26 Anonymous, ²Eyewitness
Mark?² Time, 1 May 1972, 54.

27 This essay was
originally delivered at the Evangelical Theological Society Southwestern
Regional Meeting, held at John Brown University in March, 1994.

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