Archaeologists have found the oldest fragment of the new testament used to create the facial mask of an Egyptian mummy. While people generally imagine the resplendent death rituals of the pharohs, many poorer Egyptians were also mummified, and used scraps of reused papyrus to do so. This method is not without some controversey, as the death mask is destroyed in order to recover the documents. 

Craig Evans, a professor of New Testament studies at Acadia Divinity College in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, and one of the scientists and scholars working on the project, told Live Science that gospel text isn't the only writing they're finding:

"We're recovering ancient documents from the first, second and third centuries. Not just Christian documents, not just biblical documents, but classical Greek texts, business papers, various mundane papers, personal letters," Evans told Live Science. The documents include philosophical texts and copies of stories by the Greek poet Homer.

However, the contents of the papyrsus won't be released for at least two years, leading many to wonder if the destruction of a somewhat common Egyptian antiquity for the sake of a rarer Christian one is justified. 

CNN reports, "The destruction of mummy masks, though legal, falls into an ethically gray area right now because of the difficult choices scientists have to make in the lab when working with them," said Douglas Boin, a professor of history at St. Louis University.

"We have to ask ourselves, do we value the cultural heritage of Egypt as something worth preserving in itself, or do we see it simply as vehicle for harvesting Christian texts?"

Mazza also reminded us that "you do not need to completely destroy masks for getting out texts if you use methods developed and improved by papyrologists since 1980."

As one digs deeper in to the story some of the details begin to get fishy. For one its planned date of publication has been consistently pushed back, from an original plan of 2013 to 2015 and now, just this week, all the way to 2017.

Roberta Mazza, an ancient historian and papyrologist from the University of Manchester in England, said, the academic community has not "been given access to firm information and images on the basis of which could eventually say something."

So only a few people have actually seen it. It is allegedly from the book of Mark, but there is no mention as to what part of Mark. Also Carbon 14 dating has about a hundred year margin of error, and handwriting can't be so precisely defined as to give an exact decade. More disconcerting is that no one in the academic community has seen these test results. 

According to international law, if the mask was taken out of Egypt after 1970, it is officially "unprovenanced," and is effectively prohibited from being sold or published. Evans told CNN "I do not know the specifics" about the provenance of this mask.

Moreover, Evans is not a trained papyrologist, but a scholar of the New Testament. None of the papyrologists, text critics or other highly specialized experts, who must have worked on this text before these claims could be made about it, have been identified or spoken publicly about it.

Evans told Live Science, "We're not talking about the destruction of any museum-quality piece."

The technique is bringing many new texts to light, Evans noted. "From a single mask, it's not strange to recover a couple dozen or even more" new texts, he told Live Science. "We're going to end up with many hundreds of papyri when the work is done, if not thousands."