A purported image of a 1st century Mark fragment was uploaded to Facebook.

In a discussion board, someone claims to have uploaded this image.

A person named Acharya S. , AKA D. M. Murdock, commented on the forum and also on her blog. She made an image comparing its text to Codex Sinaiticus:

This may well be a spoof or a facke- I am not an expert papyrologist or paleographer, and I am not stating an opinion about this image, whether it is a 1st century Mark fragment, but I can say that this Acharya S. person AKA D. M. Murdock is certainly not anyone who has the knowledge or expertise to date a Greek manuscript. She betrays this by stating that the RHO in line 8 is the wackiest RHO she had ever seen, I quote verbatim: “I wondered about that rho myself, obviously. I originally thought it was either a sigma or a zeta, but the Markan verse has it as a rho, so that’s what I went with.” This shows she hasn’t even looked at the plates of the freely available Edward Maunde Thompson book.

That funny looking RHO is in fact a perfectly fine RHO from the 1st century and earlier, according to the plates in “An Introduction to Greek and Latin Paleography” by Sir Edward Maunde Thompson. See plates on pp. 145, 146, 191, 192. If you look closely, you see that it actually looks like a sperm. There is a closed circle at the top, like a small omicron, and then with a stem. The top is called the “bow” of the RHO. From everything I can see as an amateur reading Thompson, the type of Rho with a closed circle or oval bow, and also a stem that curves leftward at the bottom, is found in the 1st century and earlier. After that, the stems were straight or curved rightward, and the bow was not usually round. This combination is 1st century BC to 1st century AD.

I have extracted the plates for you and uploaded them:

Greek Literary Alphabet, 2nd century BC to 1st century AD, p. 145

Greek Literary Alphabet, 1st century, p. 146

Greek Cursive Alphabet, 3rd century to 2nd century BC, p. 191

Greek Cursive Alphabet, 1st century BC, p. 192

The Rho looks most like the one on p. 192 in the middle column, headed “1st Cent.” The MU looks most similar to this column as well.

The Rho looks second most like the one on p. 191 in the right column, headed “2nd Cent. BC”

The Rho on line 8 looks a fair amount like the one on p. 146 in the column headed “1st Century Harris Homer.”

The MU looks like the two columns on the right of p. 146, 1st or 2nd century.

Another note: Nothing says that a 1st century Greek manuscript absolutely HAS to be on papyrus. The Thompson paleography book also says that animal skin documents were not unheard of, as early as a couple hundred years before Christ. The Ptolemaic kings embargoed papyrus exports now and then, and an alternate supply of writing materials made from animals skins was manufactured in Pergamum.

Paper was introduced to Europeans by Arabs in the 8th century. (They learned it from Chinese at Samarkand.) The Arab paper came to the west via Damascus, Syria, which was the paper capital of the Arab world.

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Imagine no religion. No heaven above us. No hell below. Don’t have to imagine. We have already had Josef Stalin and Pol Pot. NO THANK-YOU!!

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Owning a house in America is a bad investment.

As an investment, owning a house in America is terrible, returning 0.4% per year from 1890 to 2004. And that’s just housing prices. Remember cost of repairs, property taxes, stress, lost time, etc. Plus, you are trapped, not free to get that new job somewhere else, and not free to be what the Epistle to the Hebrews calls “pilgrims and sojourners on the earth, looking for a better country, one whose builder and maker is God.” See this link about owning a house.

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My father, Tom Palmer, made this recording in the year 1961 of a Hamtai man named Ätisä telling the story of Noah and the flood. He then gave it to Gospel Recordings. The Hamtai tribe is in Papua New Guinea, the tribe among which I was born and raised. My Father and his co-worker Geraldine Fitzgerald translated the New Testament into their language, and he is currently working on a revision of their New Testament.

A gold miner, or Australian government patrol officer, I can’t remember which, when he heard the Hamtai language, called it the “Kukukuku” language, because he said their speech sounded like when you pour out a CocaCola bottle onto the ground. I guess “Kukukuku” was his onomapoieic of the sound of a Coke bottle being poured.

Here is a picture of a Hamtai man that my Dad took with his Pentax Spotmatic and Kodachrome film (I don’t have one of Ätisä:

Here is a video of a re-enactment of the Hamtai / Kukukuku initiation into manhood:

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Six Ignatius Epistles uploaded

Now downloadable here and on my new Bible translation page: Ignatius: 6 Epistles in Greek- to the Ephesians, Magnesians, Philadelphians, Romans, Smyrnians, & Trallians, PDF, 244 KB. Download Ignatius Epistles here.

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Now downloadable: Irenaeus’ epistles concerning martyrdom of Polycarp, and to Florinus.

This is a pdf (in Greek only), 92 KB in size. Also downloadable on my new Bible translation page.

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Now downloadable here and on my new Bible translation page: Krans Refutation of Holland

Author: Jan Krans, Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, an expert on Erasmus, refutes Thomas Holland, especially exposing his lack of scholarship regarding the last verses of Revelation which Erasmus back-translated from Latin. Especially Revelation 22:19. Textus Receptus Onlyists and King James Onlyists rely on the “scholarship” of other King James Onlyists, so never come to the knowledge of the truth. This document is a PDF, 2 MB in size. Download Krans Refutation of Holland.

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