Eyewitness Mark?

Wheeler's eyes were shining. "[It's] the greatest story of our time, the one that will dazzle the entire Christian world, the one that will cause a rebirth in religion and a revival of faith. The papyri that were found--that we now possess--are the lost source of the Synoptic Gospels, the so-called Q document, a fifth but actually the first and original Gospel--the Gospel According to James."

--The Word, by Irving Wallace

It does not quite happen that way in real life, of course. Even in Wallace's overblown novel, the "Gospel According to James" turns out to be a possible forgery. But just as the source of the Nile was an irresistible magnet for 19th century explorers, the sources of the four Gospels that relate the life of Jesus remain irresistible lures to 20th century biblical scholars, and every so often some patient scriptural sleuth turns up another important piece of evidence. Recently, a Roman Catholic scholar arrived at a finding that could turn out to be this century's most important development in New Testament scholarship. He has concluded that a hitherto neglected fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls, written within two decades of the crucifixion of Christ, is actually a passage from the Gospel of Mark.

Though most liberal scripture scholars consider Mark the first Gospel (TIME, Dec. 27), the earliest extant Gospel manuscript now known dates from A.D. 135, a full century after Christ's death. New Testament scholarship in modern times has therefore assumed that the Gospels were later compilations of stories about Jesus, drawn from several sources and including both pious legend and at least some philosophy and social ethics that developed after his death.

A Gospel of Mark that existed before A.D. 50--and could have been written as early as A.D. 35--would be a firsthand and possibly an eyewitness report. For the ordinary believer, it would mean that the stories of Jesus' words and actions are more likely to be accurate historical descriptions than just a core of truth embroidered through years of retelling. Jesus' teachings on the indissolubility of marriage (Mark 10: 9) would, for instance, carry more weight if it could be shown that they had not been filtered through the prism of a Hellenistic church in a Roman setting. For scholars the finding could mean the end of some cherished theories. Sighs one biblical researcher: "This means that seven tons of German scholarship may now be consigned to the flames."

Thigh Bone. So far, however, the man who has linked the scrolls fragment to the Gospel of Mark makes no such extravagant claims for his theory. Spanish Jesuit Joso O'Callaghan, 49, a highly regarded papyrologist at Rome's Pontifical Biblical Institute, offers his finding in the current issue of the institute's quarterly, Biblica, only as a hypothesis. The most important fragment he has studied is a jagged, thumbnail-sized piece of papyrus containing only 17 letters, which cut vertically across five lines of text. His technique for identifying it and other fragments--a standard method that Dead Sea Scroll scholars have used to identify an Exodus fragment, among others--is therefore the rough equivalent of reconstructing prehistoric skeleton from a single thigh bone.

O'Callaghan made his discovery while routinely examining official facsimiles of fragments found among the Dead Sea Scrolls 25 years ago. The batch he was studying, he explained to TIME'S Wilton Wynn in Rome, was "a collection we had all assumed could not possibly contain any New Testament writing. I was working on the assumption they were all Old Testament." What put him on the trail of the Gospels was four letters of one word, which scholars had thought to be a Greek verb referring to genealogy. O'Callaghan began to wonder if they might not be part of the word Gennesaret, the name of a valley on the northwest corner of the Sea of Galilee.

Taking various mentions of Gennesaret from Matthew, Mark and Luke, O'Callaghan set them in Greek lines of 20 to 23 characters (the form in which the scrolls were written). Finally he found one that with the omission of three short words fit the fragment: Mark 6:52-53. In the same way, O'Callaghan linked a five-letter fragment with Mark 4: 28 and a seven-letter fragment with James 1: 23-24. In follow-up articles in Biblica, he will report three more "probable" identifications (Acts 27: 38, Mark 12:17, Romans 5:11-12) and two "possibles" (11 Peter 1:15, Mark 6: 48). O'Callaghan is confident of the dating because the fragments are written in the Zierstil Greek script that according to paleographers was used roughly between the years 50 B.C. and A.D. 50.

New Questions. O'Callaghan's theory has met with some scholarly skepticism. Frank Cross of Harvard, a Dead Sea Scrolls expert, points out that many of the letters on the tiny fragment are dim, and that the theory is based on "a number of coincidences and variants." Biblical Scholar David Flusser of Israel calls the Jesuit's hypothesis "wild speculation"; he believes the fragment is part of a treatise against women. Even Jesuit Roderick McKenzie, editor of Biblica, fears that the O'Callaghan article is "producing premature judgments." McKenzie suggests that the letters could well fit some unknown text.

Should O'Callaghan's thesis eventually come to gain acceptance among scholars, however, it will open a new set of biblical questions. How, for instance, did the Gospel of Mark, assumed to have been written by an evangelist who accompanied Peter to Rome, wind up in a cave in the Judean desert? Might not the fragment be simply a part of the mysterious "Q," an early protoGospel that some scholars believe may have been the basic source of Matthew, Mark and Lukel O'Callaghan already has his answer to the latter question: the style of the fragment, he argues, is typically Mark--part of a literary work, not a mere record. The other answers, he hopes, may lie in larger, undiscovered portions of the Gospel somewhere out in the Judean wilderness.

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