hatsoff

Apparently the Egerton fragments are dated only by paleography. The few scholarly remarks I can find indicate that they are probably as old as the first half of century II. However, wikipedia has this to say:

When the Egerton fragment was first analyzed, the estimated date was rivaled in age only by the John Rylands Library fragment of the Gospel of John. Later, when an additional piece of the same manuscript was identified in Cologne and published in 1987— it fit on the bottom of one of the Egerton pages— a single use of an apostrophe, which was not normally added to Greek punctuation until the 3rd century, sufficed to revise the date of the manuscript. This study placed the manuscript to around the time of Bodmer Papyri P66, c. 200.

The source for this claim is in another language (you can read a choppy computer translation here), and I have not been able to verify it. Does the apostrophe really throw off our Egerton dating so far?

squiz

The original is here:
http://www.user.uni-bremen.de/~wie/E...Gronewald.html

hatsoff

Right. What I'm asking is, if we can be certain that the apostrophe is authentic to Egerton, is it evidence enough to push its date to the late second or early third century? Why or why not?

mountainman

From here:

3. The Hand and the punctuation:

The hand is that of an experienced writer and is fairly regular.
On the Köln fragment the scribe uses the apostrophe (high comma) once:

line 45: kai aneneg'kon ...

This apostrophe is frequently used in the 3rd century, but not in the 2nd (Turner). This was the reason for redating Egerton from 150 to 200 CE.
No other accents and breathings have been used.

Punctuation: The scribe sometimes uses a highpoint and sometimes a small space at the end of a sentence. The following first letter is sometimes enlarged.