Meatros

I was thinking about it recently and I'm under the assumption that scholar's use carbon 14 dating in order to date the various manuscripts of the bible. If not that specific dating method, then one similar to it. I also know that there are a variety of other ways to date items of antiquity, such as language analysis and if they reference events and what not; however I'm curious, the other dating methods *point* to a when, but isn't it the Carbon 14 (or a similar method) that conclusively shows how old a script is?

If not, then what is the best/most reliable way to date antiquity items (such as the early letters of the bible)?

Roger Pearse

Carbon-14 dating is almost never used to date a manuscript. I'm not sure why this is, but it is a destructive method, and it does not give very precise results, so that may be it.

Manuscripts are nearly always dated from the type of script. This all goes back to the Benedictine father, Jean de Mabillon in the 17th century, who had to demonstrate whether or not a Dark Ages charter conveying property on his order was, or was not, authentic (disputes under the Ancien Regime could get pretty bitter). What he did was to get hold of copies of the script in dated manuscripts -- ones with a date written at the end -- and compile tables of all the sorts of scripts he could find, by date and location. Location turned out not to be as critical, but he didn't know that when he started. What popped out of this exercise was clear evidence of the way the book-hands in these manuscripts changed over the years, and a method to assign the writing of a manuscript to a period of time. The bookhands change over time, as do the abbreviations used, and locality also comes into it. So you can quite often, in the middle ages, get a date to within 20 years this way alone. I myself did this on a fragment of parchment at a library I happened to visit, and, from the abbreviations and letter forms used, determined that it was written around 1310 AD, probably in England.

The same approach has been more widely used, and no doubt Greek paleography works in the same way: start with dated and dateable material, and work from there. The date ranges obtained are likely to be better than Carbon-14.

The texts contained in those manuscripts may be of any date. The first manuscript known to survive of many ancient texts is often 15th century. It is a common mistake among the unwary to presume the text should be dated just before the first witness. But this is not true. Nor is it so for first citation, since 99% of ancient literature is lost. Both of these provide a terminus ante quem (endpoint before which) for the text; but a first century manuscript could contain a text composed hundreds of years earlier. Of course a chronicle tends to be dateable to just before the last events mentioned in it; but again this is not definitive.

Dating a text therefore involves a range of factors, no one of which tends to be decisive. It can be done alright: but there is no quick fix.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Vorkosigan

Slug, I split off your comments here

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=112728

Vivisector

Radiocarbon dating has been applied to the Dead Sea Scrolls. A relatively nontechnical description is here and a more technical description here. The comparison of radiocarbon age estimates to paleographic estimates is interesting, but so are the two-standard-deviation limits on the radiocarbon estimates (nearly 300 years in one case I noted).

I think Roger's exactly right - the limits of precision probably don't enable one to meaningfully test many interesting null hypotheses.

V.

andrewcriddle

FWIW the Radiocarbon dating of the dead sea scrolls does decisively refute the claim of the late Professor Zeitlin that they were actually medieval.

Andrew Criddle

Lucretius

The problem is that even if Carbon dating could be made more accurate ,what could you test ?
With the possible exception of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we just don't have anything approaching an original copy of any Biblical text.

Roger Pearse

Thank you for these links -- this is interesting.

I was afraid of something like that.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

As far as I know, we don't have the autograph of any literary text before about the 13th century. Indeed in antiquity, in some cases, there may never have been a single autograph of a text. We who live in the era of print can often unconsciously presume that book-production in the manuscript era was like that in our own. In some ways this is so; but emphatically not in others.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

gregor

FYI - You can read Robert Eisenman's rebuttal to the accuracy of the DSS dating in his James the Brother of Jesus. And no, I don't want to engage in a long fight about Eisenman's work, I'm just making the note.

Vivisector

Good point, and a good example of how the results can be used to reject a null hypothesis of medieval authorship.

If one were to hypothesize that a Christian community produced the DSS, then I suppose that one could use the radiocarbon results to reject the hypothesis in the case of 4Q208 but not in the case of 4Q521.

Interesting stuff - thanks for the OP for bringing it up.

V.