The oldest copy of the Gospel of Mark, written in the first century, was found inside a mummy mask. The previously oldest known copy of a gospel dated back to the second century. The fragment of the gospel is all set to be published.

The texts that have been obtained through the mummy masks would be published in a first volume of the texts this year, 2015. It was initially supposed to be published in either 2013 or 2014, but the date was then moved to 2015.

According to Live Science, the fragment of the gospel was said to be written on a papyrus sheet, which was later used to create a mummy mask. Since papyrus was expensive, the sheets that had already been written on, had to be reused. Ordinary people had masks made of papyrus, paint and glue, while the mummies of Egyptian pharaohs had masks made out of gold.

A professor of New Testament studies at the Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia, Craig Evans, said that a team of scholars and scientists were working on uncovering and analysing the gospel, which was one of many texts that had been found. Scientists had worked on a technique through which the glue in the masks could be undone without any harm to the paper or the writing on it. This technique would give the scientists a good chance of being able to read the text.

The scholars had a debate regarding one drawback that the technique faced. The drawback was that of the mummy mask being destroyed, and so scholars are questioning if this method should be used for revealing the texts.

According to Evans, the masks that were being destroyed were not of high quality or ones that could be displayed in a museum. He exclaimed that they were not talking about destruction of a piece that was of museum quality. He said that a few of it were not masks at all but pieces of carton.

Evans explained that they were constantly recovering documents from the first, second as well as the third century. He said that the documents were not just Christian ones or biblical documents but also included business papers, personal letters as well as Greek texts copies of stories by Homer, a Greek poet. Evans added that the letters as well as the business papers had dates on them.

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