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Occasionally a collision of interests occurs when the limited, cautious gains of scholarship or the speculative theories of a scholar are spun into fantastic proportions by popular promoters and the media. Three scraps of papyrus at Magdalen College, Oxford, are offering enough drama to catch the eye of writers from the Times of London (Dec. 24, 1994) to Time magazine (Jan. 23, 1995). Now Doubleday is promoting a book with a barrage of brochures for bookstore distribution. "As important as the Dead Sea Scrolls," they announce. "A gripping human story," "a mysterious 2,000-year-old journey of papyrus," "startling discoveries." This is a story of an "inquisitive Victorian missionary," an "earthquake of biblical proportions," a "persistent German scientist," an "award-winning British journalist," and an "ancient writer who creates one of the world's most important documents," now valued at "over $10 million." Can another Indiana Jones sequel be far behind?

To stir the pot further, Eyewitness to Jesus is marketed as uncovering a "longtime feud between conservatives and liberals." The three papyrus pieces were allegedly "read and handled" by one of the eyewitnesses to the resurrected Christ! To deny their antiquity is apparently to deny something fundamental about Jesus and the New Testament. To reject the book's thesis is to betray one's liberalism.

The papyrus story behind this book is simple enough. In 1901 the British missionary Charles Huleatt purchased the pieces of papyrus in Luxor, Egypt, in the antiquities market and donated them to his alma mater, Magdalen College, in Oxford, England. They remained in a display case until 1953, when the well-known papyrologist
C. H. Roberts published them (with photographs) and—after consulting with many other scholars—dated them in the late second century a.d. Today they are known by scholars as P64. One fragment contains parts of Matthew 26:7-8 on one side and Matthew 26:31 on the reverse; the second fragment contains Matthew 26:10 and 26:32-33; the third shows 26:14-15 and 26:22-23. Since there is writing on both sides, we can deduce that the fragments came from a bound book (or codex) rather than a scroll.

In 1962 Roberts also published two fragments from Barcelona (P67, containing Matthew 3:9, 15; 5:20-22, 25-28) and successfully argued that these came from the same codex as Magdalen's P64. Both, he claimed, originated from the same book published about a.d. 200. There are scholars today who believe that another manuscript from Luxor, Egypt (called P4—which is now in Paris), comes from the same scribe and perhaps even from the same codex. In short, some have argued that P4 (Paris), P64 (Luxor), and P67 (Barcelona) come from the same source in the second century.

Then on December 24, 1994, the Times of London ran a sensationalist article penned by the journalist Matthew d'Ancona that "uncovered" the theories of Carsten Thiede, a German papyrologist. And the story spread like wildfire. According to Thiede's theory (first presented in a German journal, and reprinted in the Tyndale Bulletin, Vol. 46 [1995], pp. 29-42), the Magdalen scraps of Matthew had been misdated: they were actually our earliest papyrus fragments of the Gospels, stemming to the first century and coming from eyewitnesses to Jesus' ministry. In 1995 Thiede published Rekindling the Word: In Search of Gospel Truth (Trinity Press International), which offered a popular presentation of his views (along with about a dozen unrelated articles). Finally, in 1996, Eyewitness to Jesus appeared.

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October 28 1996, Vol. 40, No. 12