Chrstians believe that Chrstianity began with the life and death of Jsus of Nazareth (a city which didn't exist at the time he supposedly lived).
Did it?
Did Chrstianity begin with a real person who lived around 2000 years ago, or was it begun later out of a hodgepodge of pagan religions with striking similarities to today's Chrstianity? (Think of Dion-ysius, Mith-ras and others).
Many Chrstians point to early papyri to "prove" that Jsus was being written about withing 50 years or so from his supposed existence. Do those papyri in fact prove anything? How were they dated? Who wrote them?
The "earliest" papyri is the famous P52. P52 is supposed to be the oldest scrap of the Greek Text and it has been dated to around 125 CE
Supposedly.
How was it dated to 125 CE? A guy named Colin Roberts compared the handwriting on P52 with handwriting of 5 (yep, 5) samples from the early 2nd century of the common era back in 1935 and concluded based on those 5 samples AND NOTHING MORE that P52 was from the early 2nd century.
Problem is that using handwriting (paleography) is not terribly scientific. Using handwriting samples alone P52 could date anywhere from the 2nd century CE to the 4th century CE! From Brent Nongbri's 2005. The Use and Abuse of P52: Papyrological Pitfalls in the Dating of the Fourth Gospel. Harvard Theological Review:
Did it?
Did Chrstianity begin with a real person who lived around 2000 years ago, or was it begun later out of a hodgepodge of pagan religions with striking similarities to today's Chrstianity? (Think of Dion-ysius, Mith-ras and others).
Many Chrstians point to early papyri to "prove" that Jsus was being written about withing 50 years or so from his supposed existence. Do those papyri in fact prove anything? How were they dated? Who wrote them?
The "earliest" papyri is the famous P52. P52 is supposed to be the oldest scrap of the Greek Text and it has been dated to around 125 CE
Supposedly.
How was it dated to 125 CE? A guy named Colin Roberts compared the handwriting on P52 with handwriting of 5 (yep, 5) samples from the early 2nd century of the common era back in 1935 and concluded based on those 5 samples AND NOTHING MORE that P52 was from the early 2nd century.
Problem is that using handwriting (paleography) is not terribly scientific. Using handwriting samples alone P52 could date anywhere from the 2nd century CE to the 4th century CE! From Brent Nongbri's 2005. The Use and Abuse of P52: Papyrological Pitfalls in the Dating of the Fourth Gospel. Harvard Theological Review:
What emerges from this survey is nothing surprising to papyrologists: paleography is not the most effective method for dating texts, particularly those written in a literary hand. Roberts himself noted this point in his edition of P52.
The real problem is the way scholars of the (Greek) Testament have used and abused papyrological evidence. I have not radically revised Roberts's work. I have not provided any third-century documentary papyri that are absolute "dead ringers" for the handwriting of P52, and even had I done so, that would not force us to date P52 at some exact point in the third century.
Paleographic evidence does not work that way.
What I have done is to show that any serious consideration of the window of possible dates for P52 must include dates in the later second and early third centuries.
Thus, P52 cannot be used as evidence to silence other debates about the existence (or non-existence) of the Gospel of John in the first half of the second century. Only a papyrus containing an explicit date or one found in a clear archaeological stratigraphic context could do the work scholars want P52 to do. As it stands now, the papyrological evidence should take a second place to other forms of evidence in addressing debates about the dating of the Fourth Gospel.
