Early New Testament Manuscripts and Their Dates A Critique of Theological Palaeography

Abstract

PAPYRILiterary papyri are notoriously difficult to date because they bear no accurate date 2 , and only few of them can be dated thanks to circumstantial evidence (archaeological or historical context) 3 or because they belong to a dated archive 4 .In a few instances it is possible to give a terminus post, when they are written on the back of a documentary text 5 , or ante quem, when a dated document is written on their verso 6 .As a result dates given by editors or other scholars are as a rule based on palaeographical criteria, i.e. a comparison with the handwriting of datable texts written in a similar P. ORSINI -W.CLARYSSE script.This may result in a relative chronology, whereby texts written in a similar hand are put in a putative order and then inserted in an absolute chronology by means of a few rare stepping stones. II. NEW TESTAMENT TEXTS AND THEIR DATESNew Testament texts are even more problematic than other literary texts, since they are nearly always written in the form of a codex, so that the script is the same on the two sides and neither the back nor front can be used to provide a terminus ante or post quem.Gradually, however, an uneasy consensus has been reached among papyrologists, and the result of this is found in the dates put forward by Nestle-Aland 7 .No New Testament manuscripts are dated to the first and only very few to the second century.Recently even these early dates have been called into question by R.S. Bagnall 8 ; as a result the dates in the tables below (pp.469-472) now appear to be slightly more conservative than those in the LDAB, which were used by Bagnall.The suggestion that Grenfell and Hunt often dated codices too late was refuted by B. Nongbri 9 .Recently this consensus has been put to the test by some New Testament scholars, who argue for an earlier date for most of our oldest New Testament papyri and propose a first century date for several of these.The first to do so was C.P. Thiede in a series of articles and books dealing with Ñ 64+67+4 , of which fragments are kept in Magdalene College Oxford, Paris and Montserrat 10 .J. O'Callaghan and Thiede even found Gospel fragments among the Greek papyri from Qumran (LDAB 6820 and 7341), which were certainly written before the suppression of the Jewish revolt in AD 69 11 .Papyrologists have generally reacted negatively to these identifications and these scraps are not taken into account of here 12 .7. See NESTLE-ALAND, 1994, regularly updated in: http://intf.uni-muenster.de/vmr/NTVMR/ListeHandschriften.php.8. R.S. BAGNALL, Early Christian Books in Egypt, Princeton, NJ -Oxford, 2009, pp.11-18.9. B. NONGBRI, Grenfell and Hunt on the Dates of Early Christian Codices: Setting the Record Straight, in Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 48 (2011) 149-162.10.See, for instance, C.P. THIEDE, Papyrus Magdalen Greek 17 (Gregory

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