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To: Verginius Rufus

You understand that I was using the word “stupid” off the cuff?

It is stoooooppppppidd for a scholar of her rank to announce this discovery while being unable or unwilling to give the provenance.

Unless she did it because she knew journolists would be too stoooooooppppppiiiiiidddddd to realize that without provenance, the piece of papyrus is useless for making any sort of claim about “what happened back then.”

Without provenance, there’s no way to know whether it comes from Gnostic circles or orthodox circles. If from Gnostic circles, then it’s ho-hum, nothing new.

Of course, she simply assumes that it is Gnostic (but didn’t bother to mention the implication of that to the journolists). Since she and her ilk have for 40 years now simply lumped Gnostic and orthodox texts together in a giant heap as equally authoritative historical sources, to her the (s)crap is momentous.

But only because she’s made that prior move (which has no historical basis, rather arises from the now discredited Bauer thesis).


24 posted on 09/18/2012 11:51:09 AM PDT by Houghton M.
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To: Houghton M.
I don't think she said it was Gnostic--just that it is similar to some previously-discovered Gnostic texts.

It's of no value for telling us anything about Jesus and the original disciples--it may shed light on what some divergent quasi-Christian group in Egypt thought 300 years later.

49 posted on 09/18/2012 12:19:57 PM PDT by Verginius Rufus
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