More About First-Century Manuscripts

You can watch the recent debate between Bart Ehrman and Daniel Wallace, in which Wallace mentioned the first-century Mark fragment, here. Start watching at minutes 13 and 48 of the second hour. Notice that Wallace says, in the second segment I just referenced, that the first-century dating has also been attested by "others", not just the one scholar in question.

Regarding the alleged photograph of the Mark fragment posted at D.M. Murdock's site, here's a Yahoo list where Daniel Wallace and other individuals comment on it. The consensus seems to be that the photograph is unlikely to be authentic.

Ben Witherington has made some comments about multiple first-century New Testament manuscripts, not just the Mark fragment that's been discussed so much. He refers to "evidence of a first century copy of a NT text", which could be taken as referring to something other than a first-century manuscript. It could be something else that suggests the existence of such a manuscript rather than the manuscript itself. His comments are somewhat unclear, but here's what he said:

The brief lecture by Scott Carroll at GCTS Charlotte last Friday night highlighted some of the most exciting aspects of the Green Collection. It is possible that a very early copy of the Gospel of Mark in Greek, possibly the very earliest is a part of this collection. An epigrapher from Oxford has already prepared to say that it is a first century copy! While I doubt this, and various eyes will need to go over the manuscript before any firm conclusion can be drawn, even if it were from the second-third century it would still be the earliest evidence of this size (it does not include the whole Gospel, sadly it does not include Mark 16) that we have....

One interesting point made by Carroll was that there is evidence of a first century copy of a NT text in codex form, whereas various scholars thought Christians probably didn’t use this practice before the second century....

Yes apparently there is more in this mss [of Mark than there is in P45] and no I am not talking about the Mark mss iun the comment about the codex.