A Contentious Gospel of Mark Fragment and its Even More Contentious Provenance

There have been a lot of rumours floating around the  blogosphere about a so-called "1st Century Fragment of Mark", discovered by Scott Carroll (announced on a Facebook post on 1 December 2011, "a sensational discover [sic] I made yesterday. Stay tuned for the update"). This was reportedly initially dated by the handwriting to within the first century AD - so just a few years after the original is thought by mainstream scholars to have been written (c. 70AD). The document has yet to be published, apparently, it forms part of the Green (Hobby Lobby) Collection . Apparently the people studying it (Dan Wallace is one of them)  have signed some kind of a confidentiality agreement covering that and the several other early fragments found (see  Daniel B. Wallace, 'First-Century Fragment of Mark’s Gospel Found!?', 22 March 2012, and Brice C. Jones, 'On the Supposed 1st Century Fragment of Mark', The Quaternion Thursday, June 21, 2012).

Then there was a new development in this story. Some information on the provenance of this papyrus fragment started  unofficially to surface In fact the beans had been spilled a while ago (Mar 24, 2013) but it was only this month that people began taking a hard look at the problematic provenance.The papyrus had been retrieved from the dissolution of Roman period cartonnage from middle Egypt, and had been found in an assemblage of other fragments, of the Iliad, Homer, Sapphos, and some Jewish writings.

As one commentator on a theology forum points out: 

In this video from last month http://vimeo.com/92964208, McDowell mentions that scholars from Cambridge, Oxford, and Baylor supervised the destruction of the masks. He claims that the copy of Mark is currently being published and will be available in 1 and a half to 2 years. Its allegedly a copy of chapter 1, currently dated to 85-98 CE. Later in the same video he talks about the team discovering one of the oldest copies of the Republic by Plato dating to the 4th century. I don't know. It all sounds a little too good to be true, but we are dealing with the world's largest private collection, so who knows.