Follow-Up on Study of the Gospel of John – Introduction

I’ll include the YouTube for my first study session on the Gospel of John below. During my discussion I promised to provide a link for the article I referenced suggesting that the Rylands Papyrus, P52, may be dated a bit too early. The article I referenced is available on Academia.edu, and is titled The Use and Abuse of P52: Papyrological Pitfalls in theDating of the Fourth Gospel. I believe registration is required, but it’s not behind a pay wall.

In addition, you might want to review Larry Hurtado’s comments on an article dealing more generally with early dating of NT manuscripts. The article itself is behind a pay wall, and I haven’t read it.

I find that these notes generally reaffirm my belief that most paleographical dating of New Testament manuscripts provide too narrow a window, one that is not justified by the level of the evidence. If one truly considered the window, the old date for P52 is about at the lower edge of the new window. Our tendency is to read probabilities as certainties, and thus if we have a date of 125 +/- 25 years, we will often cite it as 125. But that window is important. I’m not a paleographer, so I couldn’t comment on the particulars.

This coming Thursday, again at 7:00 pm central, 8:00 pm eastern time I will be discussing John 1:1-18. I will post a link to the event, a video trailer for that lesson, and some questions/points to think about prior to the study here tomorrow.

Also, we will be having a 1/2 hour author interview in the series of Energion Publications Tuesday night hangouts on air with author David Cartwright regarding Cartwright’s recently released book Wounded by Truth – Healed by Love. Elgin Hushbeck, Jr. will conduct the interview. For the second half hour, Elgin will be discussing historicity and the gospels with me, particularly with reference to the Gospel of John. Click here for full information on the Tuesday night hangout.

And finally, here’s the YouTube for last Thursday’s introduction to my study on the Gospel of John. We’re using Meditations on According to John by Dr. Herold Weiss as the text.