Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: paleography

  • 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.

  • Dating of P52

    This article is fascinating, both because of subject and because of how it demonstrates how paleography functions (HT: Dave Black Online).

    I’m posting it here both for the interest and because I have cited P52 in discussing the dating of the Gospel of John with various classes. Just a few points:

    1) In my own defense (and that of others who use it), I have always pointed out the potential error in paleographic dating, and used the +/-50 years figure as an approximation. Thus I would have always pointed out that P52 could be as late as 175 CE. It appears possible it could be even later. On the other hand it could be somewhat earlier, even with the evidence cited in this article. Think of a 100 year window moving forward or backward. One might say 2nd century. In fact, I suppose one has!

    2) One should also consider that the likelihood that one has laid hands on the earliest copy of a work ever produced is unlikely. So while the gospel cannot have been written after it was produced, it also was not likely written at the same time. A date of 150 or 175 CE would imply some distribution of the gospel at that point. Unfortunately, this amount of time is inherently unknowable. Still, I think it suggests that trying to date the book at or about the time a copy was produced is also questionable.

    3) The article also illustrates the considerable problem with dating a small fragment, which simply compounds all of the difficulties involved in paleographic dating. With only a small amount of text to work with, one has difficulty finding sufficient data points to narrow down the result.

    Still, the article is totally fascinating!