Haran

Spin, I have addressed this issue several times now on different threads. I dearly hope that the biased atheist website that started this false rumor would correct their information. p52 has at least one and possibly two complete sets of consecutive words. Did you actually read the MS fragment?? I'll point them out, if necessary, as I have pictures of them on my website with boxes around the consecutive words. Please stop spreading this misinformation... You seem to know Greek so I would expect better from you.

Nothing more than a conspiracy theory... Coincidences happen, unless of course you'd like to attribute it to a miracle of God that two of the earliest papyri preserve the passion narrative of Jesus the Messiah from the "late", "high-theology" Gospel of John, no less.

Were you able to find any of the dated Oxyrhynchus papyri that I mentioned earlier? That is what p52 was compared with for dating. I merely offered the NT papyri to show the change in handwriting over a relatively short period of time. There were also different scribal schools in different areas which have their own unique styles.

Isn't there something about the name changing issue in Wurthwein's introduction to OT Textual Criticism that refers to something like this? Oh yeah, here's the quote:

While the examples given for this are mainly for Baal, I assume that it would probably extend to the use of Mot. However, I have not looked into the issue as of yet.

Haran

[ April 19, 2002: Message edited by: Haran ]</p>

CX

Hmmmm...I'm not sure what you're driving at. At the top of the verso of P52 we read ...UTO GEGENNHMAI. The critical text reads EGW EIS TOUTO GEGENNHMAI it seems reasonable that the TO on the fragment was originally the end of TOUTO. What am I missing here?

According to NA27 P66 inserts the word OUN, but the critical text does not include this reading. One witness is hardly evidence for the correct reading. Even so the presence or absence of a particular word or the transposition of words has little bearing on the issue in question. These are pretty trivial variants we are dealing with. What other differences do you note?

Paleography is a bit outside my area of expertise. I think scholars date P52 based on it's use of an uncial script, it's being a leaf of a codex written on papyrus and comparison to other texts from the period (I know not which, but I think P90 might be one such). Ultimately I don't have a dog in this fight. P52 is a curiousity and not useful for text criticism so while it makes a nifty museum piece I don't think it matters a whole lot to scholarship except possibly to demonstrate that the codex form was in use by the early 2nd century. Whether it's third century or second century isn't especially important except for possibly some apologetic use on the reliablilty of canonical texts which is ill advised even if the dating is correct.

Haran

No. Ok, I feel like people are not completely reading my posts...

In order to date a MS, Palaeographers compare them with dated MSS (i.e. ones that have an actual date in history on them...in a colophon written by the scribe, for instance).

Once again, here are the dated MSS that p52 was compared against for its dating according to Comfort and Barrett:

• P. Fayum 110 (A.D. 94)
• Egerton Gospel (A.D. 130-150)
• P. Oslo 22 (A.D. 127)
• P. London 2078 (reign of Domitian, A.D. 81-96)
• P. Berolinenses 6845 (ca. A.D. 100)
• P. Oxy. 2533 (see <a href="http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/POxy/frame1.htm" target="_blank">Oxyrhynchus website</a>, if they have it posted there)

Most of these you would have to look up in a good library somewhere. P. Oxy 2533 is the only one that I know of that might be online.

P52 is used, if I remember right, in the Nestle-Aland critical apparatus, so it has some significance - especially for dating the Gospels. It simply bothers me to see such a discovery dismissed so easily by some here who don't seem to know that much about it or the study of it...

Haran

CX

Thanks for that good information and many of my comments were written before reading your posts. My apologies. As I said paleography is not something I am too familiar with. I was basically guessing at how it was dated though I did mention P90 which, I believe is thought to be a fragment of the Egerton Gospel. Nor am I dismissing P52 I think it is a fascinating and valuable find, it's just not useful for text criticism owing to it's small size and extremely fragmentary nature.

Incidentally P52 is not used in the the critical apparatus for NA27. We should not expect it to be since it provides nothing in the way of attestation to interesting variants and there are much better sources for the canonical text. It is however listed in the appendix as a "first order" witness simply because of it's age (recall that NA27 doesn't give specific dates by and large and lists P52 only as coming from the 2nd century).

As far as I know P52 is not used to date the gospels or even GJn except as a basis for the terminus ad quem by Schnelle and others (cf. HTNTW p.477) along with P90 and P66 Schnelle goes on in the footnotes to discuss the relative uncertainty of dating P52 and offers a date as late as 170 C.E. (+/- 25 years) from another scholar and concluding that a date around 150 is not unreasonable.

CX

A minor niggle but the site referenced above is inspired by The Encyclopedia of New Testament Textual Criticism and was conceived and undertaken by Rich Elliot at Simon Greenleaf University. Credit where credit is due. It is a fantastic site and Elliot freely acknowledges that he is not a recognized textual critic. Personally I think he does a great job.

spin

spin:
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Given the fact that there is so little of p52 on the fragment -- there doesn't appear to be two complete consecutive words on any line -- the number of variants which appear is more than interesting.
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haran:
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Spin, I have addressed this issue several times now on different threads. I dearly hope that the biased atheist website that started this false rumor would correct their information. p52 has at least one and possibly two complete sets of consecutive words. Did you actually read the MS fragment?? I'll point them out, if necessary, as I have pictures of them on my website with boxes around the consecutive words. Please stop spreading this misinformation... You seem to know Greek so I would expect better from you.
------------

Get off it Haran. There is no misinformation at all. Of 14 lines of characters, only two have two complete words on them, 2r (oudena ina) & 4v (legei autw). I don't really know what you are talking about, but don't be utterly boring.

I think you are prepared to treat this small fragment as having a significance that cannot be eked out of it. So you have apparently overreacted.

Of these 14 lines two contain only two characters, so we can only talk reasonably of 12 lines and of those 12 lines we find at least four variations -- and that's with only two or less full words on each line, not nice complete lines. There is just so little of the fragment, yet four or five variants can be noted. You can live with that as being reasonable. I can't. I stick to the position that what we have in p52 is quite a wide variation from the statistical norm in such a small fragment. And I find your overreaction unreasonable.

I don't think we can get much further with the dating of p52, as the datings provided can only be average date and in no way reflective of a real date, ie working from the relative change of fonts, the one we see in p52 fits basically earlier in the 2nd century than later. This doesn't say when it was written at all. It is just the palaeographer's intuition for the font type.

There doesn't seem to be any trace of the find description for p52, which is a strong aid in dating from the context. We are left to guess from its similarities with other undated texts and the Oxyrhynchus texts which I haven't seen mentioned at all in any sites which deal with these fragments.

CX

I don't want to quibble, but you are the one that said there were no two consecutive words. Haran has addressed that issue several times. One can understand his frustration, although I fail to see why it matters whether there are two consecutive words or not. The point is it's a tiny tiny fragment and we can't really use it for anything besides being impressed by the fact that even though we cannot date it prescisely it appears to be one of the oldest if not THE oldest NT fragment we have.

spin

cx:
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I don't want to quibble, but you are the one that said there were no two consecutive words. Haran has addressed that issue several times.
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I take Haran's reaction(s) in this matter to have been pedantic to the extreme, which is strange for he is usually not so from what I have seen.

When one says a person cannot string two words together, it may be a slight exaggeration, just as the text doesn't contain two complete consecutive words. In fact, as I did say in the previous message there are a whole two lines with two consecutive words, the previous statement was a slight exaggeration. But the significance is there this fragment has very little on it.

cx:
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One can understand his frustration, although I fail to see why it matters whether there are two consecutive words or not.
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Because of the number of variants it evinces, when there is almost no text to expect variants in at all.

cx:
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The point is it's a tiny tiny fragment and we can't really use it for anything besides being impressed by the fact that even though we cannot date it prescisely it appears to be one of the oldest if not THE oldest NT fragment we have.
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I guess you're right.

Haran

You're right, sorry... I just didn't want to take the time to write out an even longer website name...

Haran

Haran

It is mentioned as supporting the NA27 text in part of the critical apparatus for verse 33.

Correct, but the Alands' Intro to the Text of the NT gives c. 125 A.D.

Haran