Loading...Here is the second post by Brent Nongbri on his recent book God’s Library. I mentioned in the first of his posts that the book is “ground-breaking.” In part that’s because he challenges the widely accepted dates of a number of our earliest surviving manuscripts of the New Testament. Here he talks about his further explorations of this problem. The basic question: When scholars say “This manuscript dates from the fourth century” (or the second, etc.): how do they *know* that? Or do they?? A lot of scholars will not be happy with Brent’s conclusions! But no one can simply write him off — he gives some very convincing analyses….
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Brent Nongbri’s most popular books are Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept and God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts.
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In my last post (HERE), I talked a little bit about some of the interesting stories of discoveries of ancient Christian manuscripts I uncovered while researching my recent book, God’s Library. What I would like to do now is discuss some work I’m currently doing that builds on the sections of God’s Library that deal with problems in assigning dates to early Christian books.
How do we know how old an ancient piece of writing is? It depends on the kind of writing. The “everyday” writing of antiquity (receipts, tax records, letters, wills, marriage licenses, etc.), which scholars simply call “documents,” often contain dates, usually in the form of “Year X of the emperor so-and-so.” But copies of ancient literature didn’t carry those kind of explicit dates. Starting in the ninth century AD, we do find biblical manuscripts with dated colophons, or notes from the monks who copied the manuscript, but older manuscripts lack these kinds of dates. So how do we know the age of these older manuscripts? Sometimes we get lucky. For instance, a fragment of a copy of a gospel harmony (a combination of the four canonical gospels) was found in the ruins of Dura Europos, a city in Syria that was sacked, destroyed, and abandoned in 256 AD. So this harmony must have been copied before that time. Sometimes when literature was copied on a papyrus roll instead of a codex, the blank back of the roll might be reused for a document with a date, so again, we would know that the piece of literature on the front of the roll was copied before the date of the document on the back. These are objective ways of knowing at least roughly when a manuscript was copied.
You might think that early Christian manuscripts would be analyzed using radiocarbon dating, but …
To read the rest of this post, and it’s rather shattering conclusions, you will need to belong to the blog. Joining is easy and cheap — so why not?
The side by side comparison of P. Bodmer 20 and 2 are remarkable. As someone with sloppy handwriting, even when printing, how does that factor into comparisons? My untrained eye might conclude that those two samples were written by the same person due to letter spacing but if I understand you correctly you are saying that the similar style is due to the period more than the person. True?
Yes, trying to account for the variations you can find in just one single person’s own handwriting (Are they writing fast or slow? Are they trying to be neat or are they allowing themselves to be messy?) should make us humble about trying to compare samples of handwriting from thousands of years ago. As for P.Bodmer 2 and P.Bodmer 20, the scripts are quite similar, but there are also a few little differences. Have a look at the alpha (as in the first letter of the bottom word), kind of sharp and angular in P.Bodmer 20 as opposed to more looped and rounded in P.Bodmer 2. I wouldn’t say these samples were written by the same person, but they seem to me to reflect similar kinds of habits and training.
This is probably going to sound stupid but is personal writing style a factor? As in two people could have completely different hand writing styles even if they were trained by the same person. They may have started out very similar but couldn’t one’s alpha become more angular over time? I know this is guesswork and no access to the copiers other works can be acquired.
Yes, we actually have samples of writing from antiquity in which a single copyist writes in different types of handwriting that we generally associate with different time periods. I discuss this phenomenon here: https://brentnongbri.com/2018/05/23/p-oxy-31-2604-writing-exercises-and-palaeography/
My question relates to spelling in antiquity. I have often read scholars like Bart and other textual critics mention that most of the discrepancies in the extant manuscripts are errors in spelling; Bart famously states that ancient scribes could not spell much better than his current students. However, I struggle to understand how the spelling of words became standardized in antiquity without dictionaries, or lexical forms. I read a fair amount of 19th Century autobiography and the spelling in those documents is usually phonetic, and often incorrect (against standard reference works, though the word in question is easily enough discerned). How did spelling in antiquity become standardized?
Well, some ancient people who were highly educated did really care about spelling. Grammarians like Dionysius Thrax (who lived in the second century BCE) wrote about it, and there were in fact ancient dictionaries of different kinds. Usually, these were dictionaries of particular works, like the Iliad. We have many surviving spelling exercises from antiquity. Here is a famous one written by someone named Petaus practicing writing the same line over and over (with difficulty). Ironically, what he is writing says “I, Petaus, the village scribe, have handed in…” and after writing four lines, he misspells the verb and keeps on doing so for the rest of the exercise! https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Petaus-practicing-the-phrase-I-Petaus-village-scribe-have-handed-in-aoAEFo_fig1_265964789
Wow! How interesting and clear. Thanks especially for the information about one versus two columns.
Dear Dr Nongbri
I have been fascinated by your recent contributions to Bart’s blog and have greatly enjoyed following up various links given there. These in turn have led me to other sources and I have marvelled at the ‘detective work’ which you indulge in.
One particular piece I found on your ‘Variant Readings’ blog was entitled:
E.C.Colwell on P52 (July 27, 2018)
In this post you had a short debate with Geoff Hudson who included a comment thus:
“Brent, don’t you think it strange that the earliest date of all fragments of NT manuscripts, including Paul’s letters, is CE2-3? Why should this be so? Doesn’t this fact point to these manuscripts being fabricated?”
Please are you able to explain what he refers to here with regard to a date ‘CE2-3’?
Thanks for the kind words! By ‘CE 2-3,’ Mr. Hudson means ‘second or third century AD.’
Thank you for your response. Forgive me for being obtuse but how then would he refer to the 2nd and 3rd year of the Common Era? Would that be 2-3 CE rather than CE 2-3?
Yes, the usual way of referring to the years would be 2-3 CE. The usual way of referring to centuries would be 2nd-3rd century CE. Mr. Hudson’s use of ‘CE 2-3’ to refer to centuries is a little odd.
Dr Nongbri,
To what extent does geography play a role in determining a chronology of writing styles? Surely these changes in writing styles did not occur everywhere at the same pace. Establishing one universal chronology for ancient writing styles seems a bit rough, when local variations could so easily distort the picture.
That’s a great observation and question! In fact, if you look at some of the classic works on Greek palaeography, you find that the same kinds of visual differences in scripts are sometimes treated as a sign of different chronology and sometimes as a sign of different geography. It really is a case of a house built on foundations of sand. We can use handwriting to make very general kinds of statements about dating, but I don’t think it’s possible to get things down to a 50-year window (which is a range you commonly see, both in scholarship and in museum labels, etc.).