Carsten Peter Thiede

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.

[1] 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 later 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 too provoked much debate and was highly publicised, most notably with a front-page headline in The Times.

Carsten Thiede initially wrote an article in the academically peer-reviewed Zeitschrift für Papyrologie in regards to his dating of the papyrus to the last third of the first century.

For the last seven years of his life, Thiede also worked for the Israel Antiquities Authority repairing damage to the Dead Sea Scrolls and excavating the biblical location of Emmaus.