Eyewitness to Jesus: Amazing New Manuscript Evidence About the Origin of the Gospels, by Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew D’Ancona

Retrieved from: the library
(0385480512)

Hmmm.... This was one of those books that I felt like I missed something at the beginning that would make the book coherent. Sometimes authors come back around to it in chapter two, but not this time. It just felt like I walked into the room after the discussion started so not only didn’t I hear the beginning of the conversation, I didn’t even know the cast of characters or what everyone was all upset about. Ultimately, I made it to p. 108, just after the chapter on Charles Bousfield Huleatt, the man who discovered in Egypt three small (like thumbprint-sized) fragments of papyrus on which is written parts of St. Matt. He’s the real drama here: these fragments sat in the collection of miscellany at Magdelan College for almost 70 years before anyone even bothered to look them over closely. They then proceeded to turn biblical scholarship on its head. Huleatt himself was an Evangelical cleric in Luxor in the 1890s who was also interested in the field of textual criticism. He was transferred to Messina in Italy where he, his wife, and all of his children died in an earthquake in 1902. He was quickly forgotten, only to be rediscovered in the latter part of the last century, almost by accident.

I wish the book hadn’t been so hard to figure out. I didn’t finish it, which is extraordinarily unusual for a book like this. Oh, well. Less arguing about what the fragments mean and more explanation of what they say would be my suggestion!