A 1st-century fragment from the Gospel of Mark?

Early in my broadcast career I interviewed Robert Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar which was for a time considered an interesting and important revisionist project which purported to sort the Gospels into reliable v. unreliable categories. Preparation for that interview and then for the work on Searching for God in America, my mid-90s series for PBS, led me to the scholars who had rather quickly discredited the Seminar, including my friend Dr. Mark D. Roberts. Roberts’ work “Can We Trust The Gospels” is a wonderful example of accessible yet very scholarly apologetics which demolishes the pseudo-science of the Seminar and similar undertakings.

This background and friendship equipped me with a fairly well-developed radar for a layman when it comes to stories about manuscript evidence for the reliability of the Gospel accounts of the life of Christ. If true, this alleged discovery is one of those stories that will reverberate through the world of New Testament scholars very quickly and then into the popular culture soon thereafter.