Roger Pearse has a welcome text questioning ' A first century fragment of Mark’s gospel? Some thoughts by an outsider' (January 20th, 2015) which makes some good points about the hoo-ha on the first century Mark Gospel, until you get down to:
the way in which this supposed first century fragment is being made known raises in me the worst suspicions. The papyrus trade is a secretive one, partly because of the foolishness of the Egyptian government in declaring all finds the property of state officials, and partly because of the stupidity of western activists, who harass those involved in the black market that has inevitably arisen.It is actually called 'obeying the law' Mr Pearse. But I think we can all agree with his main proposition which is that the new pieces need to be published and made available as soon as possible, and not the subject of wait-and-see confidentiality agreements and slowly leaked hype from secondary sources.
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3 comments:
If you look at recent comments, you'll see that some papyrologists cannot understand why anyone is bothered about destroying "cheap and ugly" mummy cartonnage. Pearse agrees. Apparently, anyone complaining is just "motivated by envy and spite".
"motivated by envy and spite" ah, the halfwit detectorist mantra
Well, they both have a point. After all, what right-thinking person would not jump at the chance to trash ancient Egyptian artefacts by annihilating them or trash the archaeological record by grabbing all the metal evidence? Why on earth would anyone be concerned about wholesome activities like those? The only possible reason must be envy and spite.
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