GUEST POST! Dr. Brent Nongbri on How We Date Manuscripts

One of the people we are lucky to have as a member of the blog is Dr. Brent Nongbri, who did his Ph.D. at Yale in 2008 and who is now a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at Macquarie University (see here).  Among other things, Brent is one of the most knowledgeable and productive scholars working in the field of paleography – the discipline that deals with the dating of ancient manuscripts. He has been following this discussion of a possible first-century copy of the Gospel of Mark, and to my great appreciation has agreed to do a GUEST POST for us all, on an area many of us are very interested in.  How would we know the first-century manuscript if we saw one???   Here is his succinct and lucid summary of how scholars date ancient manuscripts, from a leading authority, in his own words.   Many thanks, Brent! Brent Nongbri - How We Date Manuscripts Brent Nongbri’s most popular books are Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept and God's Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest [...]