Text from Gospel of Mark found in Egyptian mummy mask

January 19, 2015

Researchers have found what might be the oldest copy of a gospel—a fragment of the Gospel of Mark—in the papyrus used to make a mummy mask. They speculate that the fragment may date back to the first century CE.

Pharaoh mummy masks are usually made of gold, but masks worn by ordinary people were made of papyrus or linen, and glue. People usually reused sheets because papyrus was expensive during that time.

 

Scientists have recently developed a way to dissolve the glue holding a mummy mask together, allowing them to separate sheets of papyrus without harming the ink used to write on them.

 

Craig Evans, professor of New Testament studies at Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia, said that the first-century gospel is just one of hundreds of new texts being uncovered using this new technique. Some of the documents discovered had dates on them, allowing the researchers to estimate the age of the other documents in the same mask... the rest