Ancient Book of Mark Found Not So Ancient After All

Ancient Book of Mark Found Not So Ancient After All

The so-called Archaic Mark was found to be a forgery from the Victorian era, or maybe a bit later. The parchment, however, actually dates back to the Renaissance, so the forger was a real pro! You have to wonder about the mind-set of someone who creates such a forgery, putting so much effort into it that scientists required more than 70 years to debunk it!

"Mitchell completed the analysis with a study of the textual edition the forger had used. She confirmed and refined Stephen C. Carlson's proposal that the modern edition from which the forger copied the text was the 1860 edition of the Greek New Testament by Philipp Buttmann. Mitchell identified telltale readings in the Archaic Mark that arose from the original 1856 edition of Buttmann's critical text, reproducing errors later corrected in the flurry of collations of the famous manuscript Vaticanus between 1857 and 1867."