Roger Pearse

It's usually fairly vague, because usually the finder steals the books and sells them on the black market. On the one hand this is good -- the peasants would certainly burn them for fuel if they had to hand them in; but on the other hand it means the dealers deliberately confuse the trail.

J.M.Robinson did some digging into the origins of the Nag Hammadi find, so muddy were the waters about this. The articles unfortunately are buried in magazines with copyright on them, but I abstracted the data here. I don't have any data on the Bodmer finds. Anyone know if there are articles on how these were found?

Manuscripts are always dated by paleography.

Paleography was invented by a Benedictine monk, Jean de Mabillon, in the 17th century. The Benedictines had reorganised in France after the Reformation as the Congregation of St. Maur, with their headquarters at St. Germains-des- Pres in Paris, and achieved a very high level of learning indeed. The issue was brought up by a Jesuit who alleged that various charters granting lands to the Benedictine order had been forged (all part of the infighting under the ancien regime). The task of working out the facts was assigned to Dom Mabillon.

What Mabillon did was to draw up a list, with examples, of manuscripts that had dates on them, so that it was known at what date they were written. He organised the list by country as well as period (although country turned out less important). With this mass of data, he was able to see the evolution of medieval 'book hand's, and those which did not belong stood out like a sore thumb.

Mabillon published his collection of data as De re diplomatica, and it was immediately hailed as a triumph. Even the Jesuits admitted that it was conclusive (although with the new data platform, it became clear that the 'charter of Dagobert' that had started it all was indeed not an original of the Merovingian period!).

Mabillon's work related to Latin hands. His colleage, Dom Bernard Montfaucon, undertook a similar task for Greek. In general this process is undertaken afresh for each new language group, and collections of 'dated and dateable manuscripts' published as a basis.

How accurate is it? Well, not too bad. I myself got a resuly within 30 years on a Latin manuscript fragment I came across, because it used abbreviations which had only a brief currency and then were dropped. Unless Carbon-dating has improved a lot lately, that's better than you get from this. But of course there is room for argument, as old scribes tend to carry on using older hands.

There are books on these things, if you are interested? I'm no good on Greek paleography -- Latin mss are my thing --, so perhaps some of those who are thus interested will comment.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Ben C Smith

Are you perchance running Windows without a comprehensive Unicode font? The symbol (which you cannot see on your system without a proper font) I use for the papyrus marker is really Unicode number 503, an uppercase letter wynn. Most printed texts use a fractal Gothic letter that Unicode has hidden down in some subcategory of its master list; most systems, let alone fonts, will not display it yet. So I improvised.

Try downloading and installing a free Unicode font like Titus Cyberbit Basic or Cardo. I have a page about fonts and such on my site.

Ben.

Steven Avery

Exactly. That is also a nice way of saying that many of the papyri are abysmally corrupt.

http://www.pathlights.com/onlinebook...0Centuries.htm
A hurried count shows P45 with 20, P75 with 57, and P66 with 216 purely careless readings."—W. Pickering, The Identity of the New Testament Text, p. 123.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

Julian

How do you judge that it is a wild text? All we have are papyri from the the first few centuries. The parchment codices do not appear until later. Why is a papyrus a private copy? How do you judge this? What we call mainstream today has slowly manifested itself as the copies became more and more harmonized over the ages.

The autographs themselves were probably what you call wild texts, judging by our best evidence, the papyri.

Now, something like D^ea (05) is generally a wild text but it is a parchment codex from a much later time but probably preserving some early readings. Textual critics generally regard papyri as the best evidence we have so I am curious as to your evidential rejection of this based on their non-conformity to some mainstream text for which we have no early exemplars.

Julian

Roger Pearse

The suggestion that authors produce a range of wildly differing texts which then grow towards harmony is an interesting one, but doesn't seem to require any comment from me.

What is the source for your information on this? As far as I know the unreliability of papyrus texts is a commonplace. But I'm certainly interested to hear different, if anyone knows.

My own statements were based mostly on various papers by T.C.Skeat, F.G.Kenyon, and the like.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

S.C.Carlson

Depends on the papyrus. Aland classifies the NT papyri as either "strict" or "wild". The strict are generally Alexandrian, but the wild are less easily classified with later text-types (they are Western, if anything).

Roger Pearse

Thank you for this. Since papyrus was the standard writing material, there must be or have been good quality texts written on it at some point. I suppose most of what is discussed for most texts comes from Oxyrhynchus.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Yuri Kuchinsky

As far as the old papyri go, they are generally given plenty of reverential lip service, but only when they support Nestle/Aland text. In those places where they differ from Nestle/Aland, their worth instantly drops to zero.

All the best,

Yuri.

Steven Avery

Wouldn't this be because Aland is considering the couple of alexandrian manuscripts as "neutral" and the hundreds of Byzantine manuscripts as corrupt ?

Does Aland ever discuss the number and extent of differences even between a supposed alexandrian papyrus and Aleph or B ? Textual, as well as spelling and simple blunders ?

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

S.C.Carlson

Actually, neither the strict nor the wild papyri are Byzantine in their text. The best Sturz could do was occasionally find a Byzantine reading here and there in a wild papyrus, but none of them had a consistently Byzantine text.

Aland used P75's closeness to B as an argument against W-H's case for the originality of the Western non-interpolations, so, if anything, the papyri's effect on modern textual criticism is now a critical text that is even more Alexandrian than what Westcott and Hort had allowed for.

(In my view, since W-H's theory of the text basically predicted a document like P75, it cannot be used to falsify aspects of their theory as Aland did with the Western non-interpolations.)

Stephen