"It is unclear why anyone would start talking about a text like this, a year, indeed now at least two years, in advance."
Because apologists are facing an unprecedented wave of skepticism via the Internet generation, and are even more defensive and insecure now than they've ever been before, and are clinging to this mad idea that if they find the earliest papyrus to mention their god-man 'Jesus', that will be the ultimate weapon to silence the skeptics.
“The only sensible response to fragmented, slowly but randomly accruing evidence is radical open-mindedness. A single, simple explanation for a historical event is generally a failure of imagination, not a triumph of induction.” William H.C. Propp
This article, in Italian, describes new methods of seeing the writing on inner surfaces of the carbonized scrolls from Herculaneum. The method does not require unrolling, and thus, destroying the scrolls.
Diogenes the Cynic wrote:I admit that I am more interested in the texts than the masks. Right or wrong, I'll own it.
But Mazza says the texts can be read without destroying the masks anyway.
Yes but articulating outrage gives us an angle on the manuscript absent any real evidence, and it's always handy to have a timely thing to comment on in this field. Otherwise we're just slogging over the same old stuff eh.
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
