Haran

As an aside, I'd like to know from others why p52 couldn't represent the Gospel of John.

Let me present the case as I see it:

• The text seems to be from the middle of a passion narrative about Jesus.
• If it is from the middle, it must have had something surrounding it for it to make sense.
• It is significantly the same as what we know of the passion narrative in GJohn, so it was probably at least the same passion narrative in whole.
• Therefore, it was at least a passion narrative of Jesus.
• Since it is significantly the same as GJohn's passion narrative as we know it, it makes sense to me that it probably was GJohn.

History deals in probabilities and I think the probability that p52 was the actual GJohn is very high.

Haran

CX

Who said that? I think it certainly could be an attestation to GJn. In fact I think it probably is, but it's too small to be useful.

Haran

CX, I'm just curious why Spin said this in one post above:

"Incidentally, whatever p52 was, it cannot have been part of a gospel."

Thanks,
Haran

CX

Aaah. I missed that. He said it probably because he thinks that is correct. Suffice it to say it is not. There is nothing to definitively demonstrate that it is not part of a gospel manuscript. In this case the most parsimonious conclusion, tentative though it is, is that it was originally part of a gospel manuscript.

CX

Suggesting that it was a leaf from a codex.

Really? P52 is 18 lines per page. This is well within the reasonable size limits for early papyri. P30 is 10-19 lines per page. P32 is 13-14 lines per page. P47 is 23-30 lines per page. P66 is 15-25 lines per page. P72 is 16-20 lines per page. There are plenty of exemplars of codices with lineation similar to P52. Furthermore it is fairly well established that codices began to be used in the 2nd century C.E. I'd suggest formulating a stronger argument or letting it go.


How so?

Of course an exact dating is impossible, but paleographers, as I'm sure you know, generally date +/- 25 years or so. P52 could be in the range from 100-150 making it one of the earliest MSS we have (along with P90). The latest scholarship I've seen suggests that the upper bound is actually around 125, but I don't know what the rationale is for that so I'll withhold my assent to that.

spin

spin:
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and what is written in Jn 18:31-33 and 37-38. This would imply an extremely tiny page size (given that such close texts are back to back), that we can discount that possibility.
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cx:
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Really? P52 is 18 lines per page.
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When you put it that way, it does sound more reasonable, I guess.

spin

spin:
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Also, p52 does not accord with the current versions of the text.
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cx:
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How so?
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Now, cx, you've got the apparatus, but for example what is in 18:37 that is not usually found between ego gegennhmai, or what is the TO in the first line on the recto? What is found elsewhere between legei and autw 5r? There are other differences.

spin:
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Yet further, palaeographers almost never give such tight date ranges for palaeographical datings: now given such a small sample of text as found on p52, how can one give such an exact dating?
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cx:
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Of course an exact dating is impossible, but paleographers, as I'm sure you know, generally date +/- 25 years or so. P52 could be in the range from 100-150 making it one of the earliest MSS we have (along with P90). The latest scholarship I've seen suggests that the upper bound is actually around 125, but I don't know what the rationale is for that so I'll withhold my assent to that.
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I fundamentally don't trust palaeography as the only source for dating a single item. It is too subjective and open to being consciously or not consciously manipulated.

As I have pointed out, there is a very small sample of exemplars for each letter -- in fact some letters, given a cursory glance, are not represented at all: BZXYFC.

Now, I don't know anything about the specific fonts involved, but of the palaeographic evidence I've had to deal with in Hebrew, one usually needs a good representation of the letters to make a solid judgement. The context of other finds helps to clarify the dating as well.

With little evidence other than the meagre selection of letters on p52, I can't see how anyone can be neutrally sure about such a restricted date range -- though 50 years is better than some of the ranges already touted.

What are the texts that it has been compared with?

spin

I've been naughty and started at the bottom of the page and worked up, so sorry about saying things already said.

spin:
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As Driver once said, palaeography is the handmaiden of history, not history of palaeography. The dating of p52 is simply overhopeful.
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Haran:
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Overhopeful? Remember that you are talking about many honest and excellent scholars with much more knowledge than us, Spin. I can see something of a trend, myself, so I would imagine that they are not being overhopeful but reasonable in putting a window around the date.
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Sorry, but there are a lot of normally good scholars who are working on the Dead Sea Scrolls and take the palaeographic sequences provided by F.M.Cross as gospel. We are not participating in a popularity contest, but attempting to get solid foundations for saying what is held as factual.

The selection of letters we are dealing with on p52 is not as simple as you would like to make it.
Here's a quick frequency list:

AAAAAAAAA 9
GG 2
DD 2
EEEEEEEE 8
HHHH 4
QQ 2
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII 17
LL 2
MMMMM 5
NNNNNNNNNN 10
OOOOOOOOOO 10
PPP 3
RR 2
SSSSSS 6
TTTTTT 6
UUUUUU 6
WWW 3

And obviously by far the most frequent are the vowels (half the text) and the most frequent of consonants is nu, which I wouldn't consider too open to great variations. Usually the more distinctive letters are the ones which provide the best indicators.

That said I must say, as I already have, that Greek palaeography is not something I know anything directly about at all. I am merely projecting what I know in another field of palaeography onto this one.

I'm really looking for something that would make this dating more understandable: what dated texts has it been compared with? Which are the principal letters which are indicative of the dating? Are there enough exemplars of these letters? I unlike you, Haran, find that the low frequency of many of the letters make dating rather hard.

Haran:
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However, Spin, by "atheological axe grinding", I mean that you overreact in the opposite direction - to the point of error and false information, IMO, and I (and probably others) get just as tired of that.
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I think, Haran, that it is very hard to overcome the unconscious christianizing activities that a christian performs. Being brought up holding a particular belief makes it hard to see when what you are saying is learnt belief or chosen opinion.

What I thought you were first referring to is my comment on Alexis Comnenus's glowing misrepresentation of the support for the textual tradition of the nt texts in comparison to others. We have to be thankful to the unstoppable reclamation by the desert of the territory occupied by the towns which were eventually claimed back to the desert for having these texts. Many of them didn't survive so well because there was little interest shown in them by those who maintained the culture in the darker ages. In fact we have to thank the Arabs for preserving many texts.

It is not strange that christian texts are better represented, but thanks to chance we have a wealth of non-christian sources as well.

Haran

I think you pulled these from <a href="http://www.skypoint.com/~waltzmn/ManuscriptsPapyri.html#P52" target="_blank">Waltz' Encyclopedia of NT Textual Criticism</a>.

These are not variations with the modern critical text, these are comparisons with other MSS. If you compare p52 with the modern critical text, I believe there are one, possibly two, minor variations. Even the comparisons shown on this webpage are relatively insignificant wording changes, such as your last example (legei autw - says he to him - as compared to legei ouv autw - says he therefore to him). These kinds of things are the kind of simple variations that anyone might slip into a text one is copying, even today - I'm sure I've even been guilty.

Aside from that, you asked about the dated MSS which p52 was compared to... Look back a few posts and I put up a quote from Comfort and Barrett's book which lists some of the MSS it was compared with to arrive at the c. 125A.D. dating. If you're lucky (I haven't checked yet) you might find some of them on the <a href="http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/POxy/frame1.htm" target="_blank">Oxyrhynchus Website</a> since I gave the numbers (if they happen to have these particular ones posted).

Finally, letter shapes are not all there is to determining the date of a MS (e.g. serifs, etc.) if you read Waltz' entry on palaeography. Even so, do your own comparison say between p52 - c. 125 and p66 - c. 200 (which you can find on <a href="http://www-user.uni-bremen.de/~wie/bibel.html#pap" target="_blank">Wieland Willker's website</a>) and you'll see variation between several of the letters (note serifs on p66 letters also).

Haran

spin

Haran,

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.

When one takes p52 with the next earliest fragment I've found, ie p90 which has an overlap with p52, what we have are two attestations of the one passage in John. What a wonderful coincidence: out of the several thousand verses from the nt we find the earliest two brief fragments overlapping. The odds make this coincidence highly improbable. What it seems that we are dealing with -- on first glance -- are two witnesses to the same passage and nothing more of the gospel text can be claimed, unless your thought is driven by infinite improbability (-- for Douglas Adams fans).

Having a better look at p52, there would be a number of letters that I would eliminate as unuseful for letter shapes (those only partially preserved, either being cut by lacunae or surface wear).

I still think that the strict dating of such a poorly preserved manuscript is overhopeful. You might find serifs on p66, but how long did the two forms with and without serif exist together?

One needs more than just a few hands to compare. I've looked at p90, p66, p52, p39 (a very nice hand), and a few others. None of these are dated. At the same time were there specifically christian scribal schools? The purpose for the writing may also influence the letter forms, along with fonts which represent different scribal schools. I see no problem in an expert scribe from a school using an old font or a new font for some specific purpose.

What I would dearly like to know though is the relationship in which a text was found with respect to others.

If I didn't have other things to deal with, I could get more interested in the palaeography issue, but I'm trying at the moment to understand why Hebrew names with the theophoric element -mwt (the god of death) almost only occur in Chr and Ezra.