IIRC, the did this with the scrolls found at Nag Hammadi and the Dead Sea Scrolls decades ago. Wonder what took them so long to figure out that they could do it with other things?
I am so excited about this. I was babbling about it at my friends yesterday.
And then one of my friends said they should have stayed buried, after all, they were thrown away in the first place for a reason, and then, well, I don’t think we’re friends any more.
Or another play by Aristophanes or Menander.
This certainly is an exciting find.
My connection at work sucks, and I always get an error message. That, and meetings suck too.
Yeah, it would be awesome for people to have taken time out from worshiping goats (or whatever they worshiped) to specifically debunk the religions of today! Amazing! Now where did I put my gilded calf icon…
I knew as soon as I posted I didn’t say it right. I am much more excited about the other cool stuff. The Gospels stuff just kinda crossed my mind as I was reading the OP.
Speculation:
So the papyri range from 100-500 CE. I wonder if they’re victims that partially escaped the series of disasters that eventually destroyed the Library of Alexandria. These disasters reportedly started about the time of Julius Caesar, but the Library and Musaeum supposedly survived in one form or another until the anti-pagan purge of about 400 CE.
Another reason to hate Fundies, of course.
The papyri were reportedly discovered within a mummified crocodile. I wonder if they were being smuggled out of harm’s way, and were discovered? Oxyrhynchus is waaaaaaaaay upstream of Alexandria, but I suppose it’s just possible that someone was trying to move them upcountry.
Juicy side-note: Oxyrhychus once warred with it’s neighbor city Cynopolis, because the Cynopolites were catching and eating the sacred oxyrhynchus fish. In retaliation, the Oxyrhynchites began catching and eating the sacred animals of Cynopolis (the animal after which the city was named,) dogs. It escalated to open warfare, and the Roman legions had to be sent in to calm the fracas. The moral? Religion has always had the effect of making one’s brain all soft. 