Peter Kirby

Are any NT MSS copies accepted to be first century?? I mean, excepting Thiede and Kim...

(Maybe I'm reading this wrong and you meant: "Of NT MSS, which are from the second century onward, the majority...")

best,
Peter Kirby

Vorkosigan

Well, I dug it out of Schnelle, History and Theology, p477. Obviously, it can't be too fringe if a moderate conservative like Schnelle has picked it up and distributed it in an intro work.

spin

Great, thanks. That resolves a quibble of mine.

I'd be interested to know about the Oxyrhynchus paps of the 1st century, to see if they reflect the trend.


spin

Vorkosigan

This edition of the JBL has a review of the Oxy papyri about 50 pages long, spin. In a text+footnote on page 12, the author writes:

"As a whole, NT papyri date from the second century to ca. 600, but we should include also eleven additional majuscules found at Oxyrhynchus, for they all date within the same range—from the third/fourth through the fifth/sixth centuries.24"

24 The twelve Oxyrhynchus majuscules, by century, are third/fourth: 0162 (P.Oxy. 847); fourth: 0169 (P.Oxy. 1080), 0206 (P.Oxy. 1353), 0308 (P.Oxy. 4500); fifth: 069 (P.Oxy. 3), 0163 (P.Oxy. 848), 0172 (PSI 1.4), 0173 (PSI 1.5), 0174 (PSI II.118), 0176 (PSI 3.251); fifth/sixth: 071 (P.Oxy. 401), 0170 (P.Oxy. 1169). On the possibility that P52 (P.Ryl. 457, 2nd c.) came from Oxyrhynchus, see C. H. Roberts, ed., Catalogue of the Greek and Latin Papyri in the John Rylands Library, Manchester, III: Theological and Literary Texts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1938), 2. Roberts is more cautious in An Unpublished Fragment of the Fourth Gospel in the John Rylands Library (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1935), 24–25.

In another footnote he includes p52 among those dated to the 2C:

New Testament papyri dated to the second century are P52 (ca. 125), P90 (P.Oxy. 3523), P98, P104 (P.Oxy. 4404; ca. 200), P32, P46, P64 + 67 + 4[?], P66; second/third c.: P77 (P.Oxy. 2683), P103 (P.Oxy. 4403).

Yuri Kuchinsky pointed out here that both p52 and the other second century fragment of John (offhand, can't remember the number) both come from the same part of the gospel, and the latter is dated in the second half of the century.


Vorkosigan

spin

Thanks for the post Vork. Good info, but not what I was looking for at the moment. Oxyrhynchus has numerous papyri from the 1st century, obviously non-biblical. It's they that interest me to see if the codex was employed regularly in that context. The xians might have been avantguarde with their use of codices in Greek.


spin

Vorkosigan

Sorry! I got lost in the conversational drift.

Vorkosigan

andrewcriddle

P90 (contains John 18:36-19:7)

Andrew Criddle

PhilosopherJay

Hi Peter,


This is a good point. People are often misusing the paleography in this case. At best we can say that a date of 125-150 is likely for the circulation in Egypt of some work that contains a Jesus interogation scene similar to or identical with the scene found in the Gospel of John. Knowing that statements of Jesus circulated in different forms, we cannot discount that stories about Jesus circulated in different forms as well. It is just as likely that the writers of John and/or the Nicodemus used this bit of text as that the bit of text belongs to either John or Nicodemus.

That said, the more interesting discussion for me is why people generally believe John to be the fourth gospel. It is the first gospel that we know to have had a commentary written about it and the first gospel of which we have physical evidence.

Mark has to backtrack on a failed postwar prophesy of Jesus' return, saying that nobody can know the time of his return. The postwar return phophesy must itself have been postwar. This suggests to me that Mark is 40 or 50 years past the Roman-Judean War, John has no such reference and seems to reflect a prewar world. Take for example this line:

19:15 But they shouted, Take him away! Take him away! Crucify him! Shall I crucify your king? Pilate asked. We have no king but Caesar, the chief priests answered.

Such a line could make no sense in the post-war world, where everybody knew that the Jewish Priests had led a bloody rebellion against Caesar costing millions of lives. Why emphasize Jewish loyalty to Rome?

For this as well as other reasons, I would date John to circa 60 C.E.. Mark circa 120 or later. I would like to know the significant objections to this dating.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

CX

Sorry. Poor phrasing on my part. Your version is much clearer. As far as I know there are no MSS fragments from the 1st century and perhaps as few as 3 from the 2nd century.

CX

Well, the common medium for everyday writing at the time in Oxyrhynchus was the potsherd. Codices were very expensive and continued to be well past the period in question. Even amongst non-Xians codices were used mostly for classical literature and were owned primarily by the wealthy elite. The Xian use of the Codex form is a testament to the wealth of the proto-Orthodox Xian movement even as early as the second century.