Fascinating history, but it tells us next to nothing about Jesus and his krewe. Two hundred years after Jesus' time and already it had gone into myth and controversy...an English translation of a Coptic copy of a Greek original, about what happened in an Aramaic-speaking part of the world. I.e., we really don't know anything about what really happened, or even if anything happened at all. Without looking it up, I couldn't even tell you who was President in 1809.

For that matter, what dowe know about Julius Caesar, or Alexander the Great, or Tutankamun? We have access to translations of translations, written centuries after by guys who might have had their own axe to grind, researching old books by guys who may have had an axe to grind.

And today, the record may be much more detailed, but just as contradictory and confusing. Can you imagine what the historians of the future will make of a dozen random surviving books written on the JFK assassination rescued from the ruins of a bombed-out library? Hell, I watched it on TV and I don't know what really happened.

No, I'm not implying its a waste of time, it looks like a fascinating field of scholarship and I would probably really enjoy working on stuff like that. But to think these dusty old papyri can actually tell us anything about the nature of God is ludicrous.