Five Years Ago

Given what we are now being told about "First Century Mark", this on Dirk Obbink and Mahmoud Elder's Castle Folio Facebook page, published exactly five years ago, is rather interesting.

A print of the ancient Gospel of Mark has been discovered inside of an ancient Egyptian mummy mask that had been fashioned with recycled papyri.
Researchers have dated this fragment to be from before the year 90 A.D., making this fragment the oldest known copy of the Gospel of Mark!
#History #Egypt #GospelOfMark #MummyMask #AncientEgypt #AncientHistory #Recycled #Papyri #Egyptian #Discovery #Papyrus #Archaeology #AncientCivilizations
THECASTLEFOLIO.COM
Mummy Mask Reveals Fragments of the Past

The link is dead. But a copy has been preserved: (it was found by Lynda Albertson and also discussed on Reddit by u/AractusP)

Mummy Mask Reveals Fragments of the Past
A print of the ancient Gospel of Mark has been discovered inside of an ancient Egyptian mummy mask that had been fashioned with recycled papyri. Researchers have dated this fragment to be from before the year 90 A.D.! While preceding copies of the New Testament Biblical gospel text only goes back to 101 to 200 A.D., making this fragment the oldest known copy of the Gospel of Mark! It may come to a shock to some that a mummy mask was made from recycled papyrus sheets, but not all of the dead in Egypt received such fine burial ornamentations, as the jewels and masks of gold were only used for the wealthy. Otherwise, if you were just an ordinary person, mummy masks were typically created from materials like linen, as well as papyrus, and since papyrus was not cheap, sheets that typically had writing on it were recycled back into the mask. These materials were then combined with glue to bind everything together into a “paper-mâché” mask.

This could very well could be considered to be another ‘holy grail’ discovery as the Gospel of Mark fragment is just one of the hundreds of new transcripts being revealed, as additional antique documents have also been recovered from the first, second, and third centuries. However, these papers are not just Christian or biblical texts, as classical Greek texts have also been discovered, in addition to personal letters, business papers, and other various mundane fragments. In order to retrieve the information out of the glued mummy masks, researchers are utilizing a combination of paleography (handwriting analysis), carbon dating, in addition to using a method in which they can unglue the papyrus without obscuring the paper’s ink. As of right now, the research team claims to have its first volume of texts available sometime later this year.

When released, this might help solve the debate over recovery methods, as the process of extracting the papyrus ultimately destroys the mummy masks. Nonetheless, when these texts are published it will help settle the controversy surrounding this practice, as some feel that this process is licentiously ruining historical ancient artifacts. Another motivation for the controversy is that some are questioning the value of these texts, asking is it worth it to destroy an artifact for a document that turned out to be just an everyday, mundane note? But on the other hand, these masks that are being destroyed are not considered to be museum quality pieces, and the end product could be hundreds, if not thousands, of documents that could be very beneficial to biblical scholars, historians, as well as archaeologists in putting together the pieces of the past! 

and who is "Daisy LoCascio" of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) and what is their role in this story? Links to this story were reposted to a relatively large number of other social media portals on the same day, spreading the 'mummy mask' story:

‎Daisy LoCascio‎ do Ars Longa 28 stycznia 2015 ·
I can't wait for these findings to be published! Turns out they found the oldest known copy of the Gospel of Mark inside a papyrus mummy mask-pretty cool stuff!
I am just curious to why they would use religious text, in addition to other mundane pieces of paper; I thought the religious texts would have been held more sacred. The mixture of random notes, to religious texts baffles me a bit-what do you guys think?

Is this genuinely scatter-brain, or is it written like that to elicit comment (like "scatter-brain"?) to get people discussing the mummy mask provenance? If the latter, it seems to have failed, following the links shows that few took the bait.

Going back to the Castle Folio  Facebook page, there is a lot of very superficial chitchatty links, lots of Voynich manuscript and ancient Egypt stuff, and a disturbing number of memes about backstabbing and conspiracies. I do not have much first hand knowledge of Obbink's written style, but this does not look like a page that he has compiled, more like an intern. So who put this mummy mask article up and why?