The discovery was made in Egypt, where mummy masks were made out of recycled papyrus. When taken apart via a delamination process, the masks can yield up to 12 different fragments of antiquarian writing.
According to the Blaze, one of the masks yielded a fragment of the gospel of Mark from 80 A.D. – the earliest known fragment of that book of the Bible and putting it quite close to the life of Christ. This also goes a long way to disproving the claim that the gospels were literary inventions that took place centuries after the life of Jesus.
“To have a first-century witness to the text of the New Testament is unprecedented. That a fragment of Mark was found in Egypt is even more astonishing,” wrote Boyce College professor Denny Burk.
“That would seem to require that the original was probably penned decades before.”