Carsten Peter Thiede

Carsten Peter Thiede OCF KStJ (8 August 1952 – 14 December 2004) was a German archaeologist and New Testament scholar. He was also a member of PEN and appointed a Knight of Justice of the Order of St John. He taught as Professor of New Testament Times and History at the Staatsunabhängige Theologische Hochschule (STH) in Basel and at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, Israel. He often advanced theories that conflicted with the consensus of academic and theological scholarship. Born in West Berlin, Thiede studied Comparative Literature and History there before procuring a German National Scholarship Foundation Research Fellow position at Queen's College at Oxford University in 1976, where he attained a Blue for volleyball, which he had played in the German Volleyball Premier League. In 1978, he became a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Geneva, where he drew inspiration from his fellow "comparativist", George Steiner. Drawn to the subject of early Christianity because of his background as a linguist and his expertise in medieval Latin philology, the study of the origins of Christianity came to form his life's work. For a number of years into the early '90s Thiede worked with various broadcasting companies, including BBC Radio and ERF, and as an editor at the Brockhaus publishing company. Thiede was best known for his interpretation of some of the Greek Dead Sea Scrolls fragments, including the identification of the small 7Q5 papyrus fragment (illustration) as a fragment of the Gospel of Mark. He supported O’Callaghan’s controversial claims that several papyrus fragments from Qumran Cave 7 are actually Christian New Testament texts from pre AD 70. In December 1994, Thiede redated the Magdalen papyrus together with former deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph and current editor of The Spectator, Matthew d'Ancona, which bears a fragment in Greek of the Gospel of Matthew, to the latter part of the 1st century on palaeographical grounds; this t