“There’s this kind of myth that all these gospels went underground around the year 400 and were destroyed or lost,” Jenkins said.No, those Coptic codices are termed the Nag Hammadi Library. The Dead Sea Scrolls are Jewish scrolls (not bound books) from centuries earlier. A few scholars have argued that the Dead Sea Scrolls included small Greek fragments of Christian texts from the New Testament, but these texts are so fragmentary that you can reconstruct them to make them into lots of things, and the vast majority of specialists have not found their arguments convincing.
But numerous have been found since the late 1770s—perhaps most notably in 1945, when farmers found a sealed jar near caves not far from the Egyptian city of Nag Hammadi. Inside were a dozen leather-bound papyrus books—termed the Dead Sea Scrolls— containing more than 50 texts, including some quotations attributed to Jesus.
Since this is attributed to Terry Goodrich, a media contact at Baylor, I did a little digging and found, just as I expected, that the original press release by her did not contain this error:
“There’s this kind of myth that all these gospels went underground around the year 400 and were destroyed or lost,” Jenkins said. But a number of texts have been found since the late 1770s — perhaps most notably in 1945, when farmers found a sealed jar near caves not far from the Egyptian city of Nag Hammadi. Inside were a dozen leather-bound papyrus books containing more than 50 texts — some of them including quotations attributed to Jesus.How on earth, and why, did the Baptist Standard introduce the change? Has someone been reading The Da Vinci Code?
UPDATE (21 December): The Baptist Standard has now published a correction: Letter: Nag Hammadi is not near the Dead Sea (Stephen Fox).
