Definitive report on the “First Century Gospel of Mark”

Update: an earlier version of this article had noted that Brill Publishing played a role in establishing the identity of this manuscript fragment; it has been updated to note that the overseeing publisher is the Egypt Exploration Society. In addition, the image has been removed at the request of the publisher (via Mr. Hixson).

In addition, there is a large and growing comments thread at the Hixson blog post that offers far more relevant detail about the history and ownership of the fragment than I can provide here. In short:

The EES (Egypt Exploration Society) confirms that the Mark fragment comes from Grenfell and Hunt’s excavation at Oxyrhynchus, probably in 1903 (on the basis of the inventory number), and that it has never been for sale, whatever claims may have been made arising from individual conversations in the past.

* * *

Daniel Wallace and Elijah Hixson (and the publisher of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, the Egypt Exploration Society) have confirmed that the papyrus fragment that has at various times in the past been reported as “the First Century Gospel of Mark” (by Wallace himself and Josh McDowell) has actually been confirmed to be a “(later) second or (earlier) third century” fragment of the Gospel of Mark.

From the Hixson article:

In summary, it looks very much like:
* FCM (the “First Century of Mark Fragment”) is finally being published as P.Oxy. LXXXIII 5345.
* The fragment is very small. It has only parts of six verses from Mark 1.
* The fragment tells us nothing about the famous textual variants in Mark 1:1, Mark 1:41 or the Ending of Mark.

There’s more intrigue in the articles, but a lot of the rest of it is not so spectacular.

While there is some disappointment that it’s not the first-century fragment that was reported, it is still the earliest (or one of the two earliest) fragments of the Gospel of Mark that is available.