[wagglebee]

I agree that the dates for Mark differ. However, John's gospel, epistles and the Revelation certainly were decades after Paul's death and Acts covers Pauls death so it had to have been written later.

[xzins]

The Book of Acts does not cover Paul's death.

It ends with him awaiting trial in Rome.

There is history that says it was at his 2nd trial in Rome that he was slain. There is a line of scholarship supporting that, but it is not definitive so far as I remember.

[xzins]

One other really interesting archeological note is the fragment known as 7Q5 discovered by one of your own Catholic priests.

This is fragment 5 and appears to be a part of Mark 6:52, 53. The first person to identify this fragment with that passage was a Jesuit scholar at the University of Barcelona, Father Jose O'Callaghan. Father O'Callaghan was a well respected scholar of Greek papyrus documents, and the story of his identification of 7Q5 is remarkable.

O'Callaghan one day in 1971 was routinely reading books about the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered about 1947-48. He noticed one set of unidentified papyrus documents with Greek letters and, among them, was 7Q5. He saw that the combination with double letter 'NNES' on the next to the last line seemed the sort of combination which could be identified. What Greek words have a double N followed by ES? It had been suggested by earlier scholars that the word originally had been EGENNESEN, which means to beget. However, O'Callaghan could find no known Greek texts (or translations of Hebrew texts into Greek) with the word EGENNESEN and other words surrounding it which would fit into the context of fragment 5 from Cave 7.

....snip....What does this mean? The meaning depends on the dating. However, as previously noted, long before anyone suspected the fragment was part of the New Testament, scholars who date documents from the form of the letters, the type of writing materials used, and similar things, had estimated that the latest this document was written was within 20 years after the death of Christ Jesus! Because of margins on some of the manuscripts, these seem to be only copies, too, not the originals. Therefore, they were already being circulated in duplicate form, at such an early date!

see the link at http://members.aol.com/Judiciary/O.Callaghan.html

[blue-duncan]

"Acts covers Pauls death so it had to have been written later."

You have posted this twice, now where in the book of Acts do you find this. The Acts in my bible only goes up to chapter 28 and ends with Paul's first prison stay in Rome. That would be around 61 A.D. Maybe I didn't get all of Acts. I know I got a good price on the bible, maybe too good.