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Three Contested Fragments Whose Authenticity Remains an Open Scholarly Argument

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Three Contested Fragments Whose Authenticity Remains an Open Scholarly Argument

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Manuscript Leaves gathers three isolated texts whose authenticity or origin remains genuinely contested, each surviving only in a small number of leaves with no wider manuscript tradition behind it.

The Mar Saba Letter is two and a half pages of Greek copied into the endpapers of a printed book, found at the monastery of Mar Saba in 1958 and presenting itself as a letter of Clement of Alexandria quoting a secret gospel of Mark. If genuine it is evidence for an otherwise unrecorded Alexandrian tradition; if not, a highly accomplished forgery. Scholars have argued both positions in print for fifty years, and the dispute cannot be settled by ordinary means because the physical leaves have not been available for examination since 1983.

The Egerton Gospel is a small group of fragmentary papyrus leaves acquired by the British Museum in 1934, carrying sayings, a healing miracle and a controversy dialogue that resemble all four canonical gospels without matching any of their wording closely enough to count as a copy. No ancient writer names or quotes it, so it is known only from its own leaves, conventionally called the Unknown Gospel.

The Gospel of Jesus's Wife Fragment is a small Coptic papyrus scrap presented in 2012 containing a broken line translated as naming Jesus's wife. Investigation later traced the fragment to an owner with a documented history of Egyptology training and fabrication, and demonstrated on grammatical grounds that the text was very likely composed from an online edition of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, a conclusion its own presenter eventually accepted as pointing toward forgery.

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Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Sources
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source
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