I have been following this story about a new find of what might be the oldest extant manuscripts of the Biblical New Testament. That something had been found was known to the general public several years ago, but it was not known that the partial manuscripts were from papyrus used to make mummy masks in Egypt until very recently. One of the manuscript fragments is from the Gospel of Mark and dates back to 90 A.D. Here is an excerpt from the article:
[Craig] Evans says that the text was dated through a combination of carbon-14 dating, studying the handwriting on the fragment and studying the other documents found along with the gospel. These considerations led the researchers to conclude that the fragment was written before the year 90. With the nondisclosure agreement in place, Evans said that he can’t say much more about the text’s date until the papyrus is published.
Betty Blonde #259 – 07/16/2009
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Nice! Part of a copy of Mark pre-90? That’s really cool.
~Luke
That is exactly what I thought Luke. I guess there is a boat load more and it is not just Mark, but I am not sure how old is the other stuff. The really interesting thing is that I guess there a lot of mummies that could yield this stuff, but they do not want to ruin them so we might never know how far back they actually go. I am excited to hear what else they have and what the actual texts say.