Rylands Library Papyrus P52

Nongbri himself appears to admit their shortcomings when he writes, “Turner (Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient World, 19-20) notes that the ideal situation would be to compare literary hands to other dated literary hands. Documentary texts, that is, manuscripts with documentary information, provide dates, often explicitly so. Or, at a minimum, they have something written within that document that can lead to a dating period. These documentary texts are therefore not as valuable as the literary documents when the comparison is with another literary document, which Nongbri seems to admit on the one hand and then complain about comparing literary with literary.

thoughts on “Papyrus 52 (P : The “Ambiguity and Uncertainty” of Modern-Day Evangelical Bible Scholars Redating Early Papyri”

In other words, before an English New Testament arrives at your door, the Greek New Testament is translated, but before the Greek New Testament can be created, someone must read the manuscripts, but before someone reads the manuscripts, they must be trained to read the handwriting. Therefore, behind the pages of an English Bible, lies the entire history of Greek handwriting. Tischendorf himself and the British scholars Westcott and Hort produced two rival editions of the Greek text. They believed that their text reflected the original as well as possible, even if it was based on manuscripts dating from at least three centuries after the New Testament was written. Gradually the new critical texts replaced Erasmus’ text, which has not received much attention from serious scholars anymore. Thousands more ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament have become known in the past 100 years.

The fragment of papyrus was among a group acquired on the Egyptian market in 1920 by Bernard Grenfell, who chose several fragments for the Rylands Library and began work on preparing them for publication before becoming too ill to complete the task. Colin H. Roberts later continued this work and published the first transcription and translation of the fragment in 1935. Nongbri says, “the overall appearance is not terribly close to that of P52, but the letters that Roberts identifies are similar.” Again, we are not looking for an absolute perfect match.

Unfortunately he used only manuscripts of inferior quality for his edition of 1516. A few verses from the Apocalypse were lacking in the manuscripts at his disposal. He simply re-translated them from the current Latin version!

Nongbri goes on to point out differences once again “Some letters, however, are very different, such as the sigma, which curves sharply downward in P.Oslo. 2.22.” Yes, well, this is expected because the scribe of P52 is not a professional scribe; he is a practiced scribe, a reformed documentary hand, which is a literate writer with experience in making copies of literature. There are times when the forms of the letters in P52 does not even match the forms of the letters in P52.

Albright wrote, ‘We can already say emphatically that there is no long any basis for dating any book of the New Testament after about AD 80, two full generations before the date between 130 and 150 given by the more radical New Testament critics of today .’ . Elsewhere Albright said, ‘In my opinion, every book of the New Testament was written by a baptised Jew between the forties and eighties of the first century (very probably sometime . . . This chapter examines the important—but complicated—role played by gospel traditions in early Christian literature down to the beginning of the third century. Section A offers a survey of the historical processes by which gospel traditions were transmitted in the early church, and thereby delineates the forms in which “the gospel” was known to early Christian writers. Section B then explores some of the ways in which early Christian authors used the gospel materials available to them, and offers a case study in the Apostolic Fathers.

The Use and Abuse of P52: Papyrological Pitfalls in the Dating of the Fourth Gospel

Everyone knows that paleographic dating is conditional and difficult. No one has argued that it is the “most effective method.” Every book on textual criticism and paleography makes this patently clear. Not one papyrologist isn’t aware of the immense difficulty in finding suitable comparative manuscripts. Of course, there will be a measure of subjectivity when one is evaluating the similarities.

The Dating of New Testament Papyri

Egerton 2, then dated paleographically to 100 CE and 150 CE respectively; and proposed that the most probable date for 𝔓52 would lie in between these two. Nongbri rejects paleographically dated comparators on Feabie.com dating principle, and consequently proposes the closest dated parallels to 𝔓52 as being P. 2.78 of 184 CE; each, he suggests, as close to 𝔓52 as the others, and all three closer than any other dated comparator.

Ancient Technology

Fayum 110 and Abb 34 (though not P.Lond. 1.130) as dated comparators to 𝔓52, identifying P. Fayum 110 as the “most important parallel” he could find among dated documents, and noting in particular that both of these showed the same two forms of alpha in simultaneous use. Nongbri notes other instances where the letter forms in P.

On the other hand, the generous scale and format of the codex pages of 𝔓52 are such that it is highly unlikely that it could originally have comprised the four canonical gospels; Roberts calculated that such a codex might have required 576 pages. The idea that “paleography is not the most effective method” or ‘using a undated manuscript to date an undated manuscript is circularity of argument’ “for dating texts” seems to suggest that a better method is available to us for P52 or all other undated literary manuscripts. As I mentioned before, he uses paleography in an effort to undermine P52. Paleographers could be viewed as manuscript detectives; through their knowledge of the writing of ancient texts, the forms, and styles, we get a reasonably close idea of when a manuscript was copied. As an example, when looking at our modern languages today, we can see that within every generation or two there are subtle changes.