Roger Pearse

People often get confused by the word 'manuscript'. Today a 'manuscript' of a book means the copy that the author sends to a publisher. But in this context a 'manuscript' means a hand-written copy of a text. Prior to the invention of printing all books were manuscripts, and these could be of various ages. Of course books wore out and were recopied, so most manuscripts are late copies. In the west that means 15th century, since printing took over after 1450, and reduced book prices by 80%; in the Syriac world that means 19-20th century.

These copies can be of many different dates. However the writing changes somewhat down the years. Note that books are not written in handwriting, but nearly always in a more blocky script known as 'book hand', since they are usually intended to be read by others.

Some manuscripts have a 'colophon' or notice at the end with the name of the scribe and the date (in the Syriac world this will be in Anno Graeci, the Seleucid era). But this is relatively few, and anyway colophons may be copied also by the next copyist.

The man who invented a way to date manuscripts was the Maurist Jean de Mabillon in the early 18th century. (After the Reformation the Benedictines had regrouped as the congregation of St. Maur). Under the ancien regime state favour was an essential and the religious orders had to fight for their position. An accusation was made by a Jesuit that a charter of Dagobert (ca. 690 AD), giving land to the Benedictine order, was a fake, together with a range of others, including some to the Dominicans. Dom Mabillon was assigned the task of finding out.

What he did was to compile a handbook of dated and dateable manuscripts. This consisted of samples of the bookhand of a range of manuscripts (mainly charters, for obvious reasons) which either had a date in them (e.g. "given at our court in the 1200th year of our reign..." or something like that) or else were in some way strongly associated with a date. He arranged these by supposed date and also country (although this last turned out not to matter).

With this data base, the change of book hand down the years became obvious, and the fakes in the collection stood out conspicuously. It was now possible, by comparison, to assign manuscripts to the type of book hand. This was the foundation of what is today called paleography, and placed the dating of manuscripts on a sound basis. The book was published as De re diplomatica. (The charter of Dagobert, however, was indeed proven to be a forgery).

The term paleography was coined by one of Mabillon's colleagues, Dom Bernard de Montfaucon, when he carried out a similar task shortly afterwards for Greek manuscripts. Books of 'dated and dateable manuscripts' tend to exist today for all ancient languages which have substantial numbers of manuscripts extant. (The Maurists were all wiped out at the French Revolution, unfortunately).

This process has been refined over the last two centuries. When parchment was expensive, it was useful to abbreviate. The abbreviations also vary down the years in the same way. I myself, using a dictionary of these things, was able to date a fragment of a small leaf in a wretched gothic bookhand (which had been reused in a 15th century binding) to 1390-1405 and England because it used an abbreviation not listed elsewhere.

Biblical manuscripts are not dated differently from other manuscripts. The papyrus fragment you have in mind is P52, a fragment of John, which was published in 1936 and dated by its finders to 100-150 AD, most likely ca. 125, and probably earlier than later. This early date has been inconvenient to various scholars (not least because it destroyed the scholarly consensus to date John very late, ca. 170) and I keep seeing attempts by occasional scholars to date it later, but I tend to treat these with circumspection.

One other mistake that laymen tend to make; the date of the first surviving manuscript copy is not normally related at all to the date of composition. When you consider that most of our copies of classical texts are 15th century you will see why. I always quote Velleius Paterculus, which was extant in 1520 in a 9th century manuscript, printed then, and the sole ms. was then lost. But Velleius Paterculus wrote ca. 28 AD, not ca. 1520! Texts are normally composed well before extant manuscript copies; often decades or centuries before. P52 is thus evidence of a 1st century date for the text it contains, since it can hardly be sensibly possible to suppose it to be part of the autograph or a close copy.

In all things manuscript related, I would suggest that we ought to find out what the situation is for texts which do not have large numbers of people really desperate to redate late, base line on that basis, and work from that.

I hope this helps.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

T. C. Skeat did one of his excellent articles on it and came to that conclusion. The very early date was championed by the paleographer Carsten Thiede (who was subjected to appalling abuse by certain theologians for his pains) which made headlines but has not found general acceptance.

I'm not sure why it is 'important to remember' this?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Doug Shaver

Why do you keep referring to what "theists" think? A theist is just someone who believes that at least one god exists. The word has nothing to do with what anyone thinks about the Bible.

People who assert those early dates for New Testament writings are, in most cases, fundamentalist Christians. They comprise a very small subset of all theists.

markfiend

May I ask why not?

Roger Pearse

For the same reason that it is unlikely that you and I will meet accidentally in the street tomorrow morning. It's possible. There is no a priori reason why not. But you and I both know that it won't happen. Likewise the chances of any find of a literary papyrus being part of the autograph or an immediate copy of it must be tiny, compared with the chances that it is just another copy, one of thousands. Most extant manuscripts are centuries after composition; decades at least. Another early fragment is a portion of Irenaeus Adversus Haereses, (written ca. 180) which dates to around 200 AD. But all papyri come from Egypt, while Irenaeus lived in Gaul and John in Ephesus.

Of course one can 'force' the data. But people who want to date texts especially early, or especially late, are writing polemic, not history. I've grown weary of listening to the sort of NT scholars who keep trying to date gnostic texts early and NT texts late. Let texts find their natural date.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

markfiend

Thank you. I had a suspicion it might be a stupid question...

gregor

"sensibly possible" is not really a probability argument.

Moreover, given that we don't have a great grasp of the number of circulating mss in 150 CE, it's rather difficult to make a probability argument with any degree of confidence.

There is really a single data point - a scrap of paper with 20 words that appear to be from John that is dated around 125 -150 CE. Compare this to the conjecture of the gospels' particular creation date, the bases for which are sometimes mere appeals to credulity or incredulity.

Coleslaw

Which 20 words?

Amaleq13

http://www.abu.nb.ca/Courses/NTIntro...RylandsPap.htm

Coleslaw

Thanks. I guess that answers my other stupid question.