aa5874

Dating by Paleography or Scientific means will hardly ever give a specific year. All dating are withing a range or time period.

The main advantage of Scientific dating is that it dates the AGE of the medium and cannot be fooled by those who can forge the writing styles of ancient writings.

Radiocarbon dating requires a BLANK piece of papyrus to carry out tests.

If P 46 is subjected to radiocarbon testing it may be revealed that the "paper" is not at all from the 2nd or 3rd century but from some other time.

mountainman

Firstly thanks for the informative response, but secondly, I am certainly not unaware of the papyri databases. I have worked with databases for some time, and obtained a number of papyri databases, the largest containing 6,345 elements (rows) which I have examined in a number of ways. I am well aware of the general state of the nation. There is no need to make such false comments.


These palaeographical dates appear to undermine the thesis, and had they been C14 dates I would not be here arguing the point, I would have left the field of engagement on the thesis, admitted refutation by the evidence, and gone surfing for ever. I trust you understand this Maklelan, and everyone else.



The question becomes this: are you able to therefore unambiguously preclude as being possibly true, a date for these papyri one hundred years after the careful palaeographical upper range of 250 CE?

A further question would be whether you would accept any other mitigating circumstances that may be brought into the debate over the upper bound of the chronology of the papyri according to the palaeographic assessment.

Maklelan

You certainly don't manifest any awareness of the general state of papyrological studies. Having a database is quite different from knowing the scholarship.

I would hope that is true, but the whole Chrestos primacy question has been definitely proven false and you don't seem the least bit concerned.

I personally am totally convinced they do not come from 450 CE. I am not able, however, to speak for anyone else. Given the fact that C14 dating pretty much always just corroborates paleographic dating, what would lead you to believe these dates could be so far off? You have no other evidence that's at all compelling. Why are you so convinced everyone is so right everywhere else, but so wrong only when it comes to NT texts dated to before the time of Constantine?

Now you're appealing to the possibility of mitigating circumstances? Your entire argument has obviously fallen to the ground. If you really would just go surfing from now on if you became convinced this thesis of yours was false, it's time to start waxing your board.

Maklelan

I've seen this notion a few times now. Can you give me a single example of a forger fooling a professional paleographer into wrongly authenticating a modern papyrus text to the first half of the first millennium of the Common Era?

aa5874

What illogical question is that?

My statement CLEARLY refers to Scientific dating. Radiocarbon dating CANNOT be fooled by handwriting or styles of writing. There is ZERO requirement that writing styles be known for radiocarbon dating.

A BLANK SAMPLE is only required for radiocarbon dating.

Maklelan

Your insistence that Radiocarbon dating cannot be fooled by a forger only makes sense if you are implying that paleographers can be fooled by a forger. Specifically, you must be using that comment to cast doubt on the paleographic dating of texts traditionally dated to before Constantine. My contention is that no forger could really fool the papyrological community into accepting as authentic a modern text written on papyrus in a style of the first to fourth centuries. Can you point to an example of this happening, or is your charge really just an assumption you're making?

aa5874

My contention is that Radiocarbon dating cannot be fooled by writing styles since it is NOT required.

Now, we can get an idea that a Paleographer was fooled if we also apply Radiocabon dating to P 46.

When one so-called experience Paleographer dates P 46 to the mid 3rd century and another dates them to the 1st century it is likely somebody is being fooled.

I won't be fooled. Let them apply Radiocarbon dating to the P 46 because I want to know when the "paper" was made.

I hope the "paper" for P 46 was NOT made in the 4th century.

Maklelan

No, no one is being fooled. It's just an indication of the application of different methodologies. As with C14 dating, though, you have to take multiple measurements, since you're looking for a concentration of data, not a single point. When multiple scholars provide paleographic dates we usually find a concentration around a specific time frame that is generally right on the money.

You've obviously been fooling yourself for quite some time. I take your evasion of my question as a tacit admission that you don't know of any forgeries that actually fooled any paleographers.

So do I. Hopefully some day the owners will do it.

It wasn't. Not only does everyone paleographically date it much earlier, but there's not a single indication anywhere that it dates to the fourth century. The only thing that suggests it is this theory you guys have concocted. Rather than look at the tons of scholarship that has gathered all this data and arrived at all these conclusions, you've come up with a conclusion and are now hunting down evidence to support it. Like Sherlock Holmes said in A Scandal in Bohemia, "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."

aa5874

You have totally contradicted yourself.

It was a CAPITAL MISTAKE for you say that "it was wasn't" BEFORE you got the DATA from the radiocarbon tests.

mountainman

How convinced are you that they could not be dated to the post-Nicaean epoch 330-350 CE (100 years after 250 CE)?


Here is a series of other evidence items and other mitigating issues that I would appeal to in order to substantiate the idea of such a late dating in the 4th century:

(1) Only after the sudden prominence and seriousness of the Constantine Bible were the huge majority of the educated (literate) pagan people of the eastern states inspired to try and come to terms with the contents of that codex. That is, the interest in the NT literature exploded at Nicaea and not before (even allowing it be on a slow simmer). People were more inclined to study and openly preserve the NT canonical books only in the rule of Constantine, who decreed these books to be the basis of his imperial state monotheistic religion. Comparitively, people were then very much inspired to learn all about the new greek story, which was to replace Homer and Plato.


(2) Population demographics for the city of Oxyrynchus show a massive explosion in the epoch of the mid 4th century, and it is from this generational epoch that the papyri were largely produced, and then thrown on the rubbish dumps. The massive population explosion at Oxy coincides with the mass movement of the populace to the deserts from the major cities, which were under the control of a new monotheistic state religion backed by the emperor and his army.

(3) Fragments are from codices not rolls. This mitigates towards the 4th century rather than earlier.

(4) Fragments are of canonical and noncanonical texts. This raises some interesting questions such as are we to assume the orthodox and the heretics both used the same rubbish dumps at Oxy, or had their HQ in the same city? How do we explain the mixture of the writings of heretics and orthodox at the city of Oxy? Are we looking at a mid 4th century enclave of not-yet-converted-to-Christian greek literate scribes trying to come to terms with both the canonical and the non canonical books of the NT?

(5) C14 dating results available for gJudas (290 CE) and Nag Hammadi (348 CE) both plus or minus 60 years are conspicuously later than the estimates being provided by the palaeographic assessments. If the C14 results were allowed to represent any authority, then they would support the 4th century manufacture of new testament related codices, rather than the 2nd or 3rd centuries, all other things being equal. All major canonical codices are the product of 4th century manufacture. The explosion came at Nicaea [1].


These are a handful of reasons why I do not see we can automatically reject the possibility that the papyri fragments are derived from the 4th century and not the earlier two centuries as conjectured by the scholarship on palaeographic dating.