Production-Dates: How Do We Get Them?

           Sometimes when first-time observers read about the production-dates of New Testament manuscripts, one of the first things they notice is that most of the dates are not very precise.  Several factors contribute to establishing the approximate production-date of a manuscript.  Let’s look at some of them today:   colophons, script, content, material, special factors, and radiocarbon dating.

          COLOPHONS.  Notes written by a scribe, or scribes, involved in the production of the manuscript – sometimes state when the manuscript was made.  Such notes, or colophons, immediately simplify the task of assigning a production-date.  Medieval scribes who wrote colophons with dates typically used calendars in which the first year of the earth was 5509.  Sometimes the production-date was given in terms of the reign of a particular Byzantine Emperor.  Robert Waltz has provided a detailed explanation of how production-dates mentioned in colophons should be interpreted.  Rarely, dates are given in terms of the number of years A.D. (Anno Domini, “the year of the Lord”).  

          SCRIPT.  Usually, there is no colophon, so analysts attempting to determine a manuscript’s production-date must resort to a study of the handwriting displayed in the manuscript.  This involves the field of paleography (or “palæography”), the study of ancient writing.   The method of Greek handwriting changed over time – from the majuscule, or uncial, lettering of the early copies (and formal and informal variations), to the minuscule lettering of later copies (with variations such as Perlschrift, Bouletée, and “Ace of Spades” minuscule).

Bernard de Montfaucon
(1655-1741)

The first systematic study of Greek palaeography was made by Bernard de Montfaucon, a Benedictine monk, in 1708.   Almost instantly, paleography grew into a scientific field of study.  In 1912, Edward Maunde Thompson published An Introduction to Greek and Latin Palaeography, a book which remains useful today.  American scholar Bruce Metzger focused on Biblical writings in his 1981 book Manuscripts of the Greek Bible: An Introduction to Palaeography.  Recently, Timothy Janz has written Greek Paleography From Antiquity to the Renaissance, which is available to read at the Vatican Library’s website.   With just a few hours of effort, readers of Janz’s introduction can gain plenty of information about palaeography (and view the specific scripts in manuscripts at the Vatican Library).

      Manuscripts’ production-dates assigned on the basis of paleography tend to have an unavoidable range of about 100 years, because we have no way of knowing whether an anonymous scribe was just beginning his (or her) career – in which, hopefully, he would continue for 50 years – or whether his career was approaching its end.  If a scribe continued using the script he possessed when he first learned to write, then that script could endure throughout his whole career.  (Theoretically a scribe could adjust his own handwriting over time, but there is not much to go on to suggest that such a thing was normal.)        

          CONTENT.  A manuscript cannot, of course, be written before the events that are recorded in the manuscript.  Some New Testament manuscripts – more than you might expect – mention  historical events (especially in lectionary-calendars accompanying the Biblical text) that provide a solid basis for discerning the limits of when a manuscript was made.  For example, if a lectionary calendar mentions the feast-day for Cosmas the Hymnographer, bishop of Maiuma, and Andrew of Crete, it must have been produced after the mid-700s.  If a lectionary-calendar mentions Lazarus the Wonder-worker, its production-date must be later than the period when Lazarus the Wonder-worker was active in the 900s.

          (The Latin term for the earliest possible production-date is the terminus a quo.   The Latin term for the latest possible production-date is the terminus ad quem.)

          MATERIAL.  All New Testament manuscripts are made of papyrus or parchment or paper.  (There is a small class of witnesses, which used to be represented by the letter “T” in a Fraktur-style font, which can include other material such as very small manuscripts, amulets, and inscriptions.)  Characteristics of these materials can influence the dating of a manuscript – especially when the paper features a watermark, which can narrow down not only the production-date of a manuscript but also its provenance (where it comes from).

          SPECIAL FACTORS.  Sometimes the provenance of a manuscript helps define the limits of its production-date.  For example, the manuscript known as GA 0212 (which technically should not be in the list of continuous-text New Testament manuscripts, because it is not a continuous-text New Testament manuscript) was found in the ruins of Dura-Europos, a place which was beseiged and destroyed by a Roman army in 257.  Thus 0212’s terminus ad quem cannot be later than 257.

          Even after taking all of the above into consideration, specialists sometimes get production-dates wrong.  One example is found in the 27^th edition of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece, where the editors assigned GA 2427 a production-date of “XIV?” (p. 711), and ranked it as a “consistently cited witness of the first order” in Mark (See the Nestle-Aland Introduction, p. 47* and p. 58*).  GA 2427 is indeed cited very frequently throughout Mark in NA27’s textual apparatus. 

          But in NA28, GA 2427 is gone.  In 2006, Wieland Willker already described 2427 as a fake, and, as Willker reported, Stephen Carlson demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that 2427 is a forgery, based primarily on Philip Buttmann’s 1860 Greek New Testament (as he explains in an article at the SBL Forum Archive).  Tommy Wasserman gives additional details about the exposure of 2427 in a 2009 post at the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog.  Margaret Mitchell of the University of Chicago (now retired) gave a lecture in 2012 which will leave viewers with no reason to imagine that GA 2427 was made no earlier than 1860.             

          So, experts can be fooled, at least temporarily, by well-made forgeries – even with careful consideration of colophons, script, material, and special factors.  Which brings us to the last resort:
          RADIOCARBON ANALYSIS.   A small amount of parchment that undergoes carbon-14 tests can yield an approximate production-date for the material.  (The date when the material was used may be later.)  This is usually not done (because the carbon-14 tests involve the destruction of the things they test).  But sometimes it is.  For instance the Ethiopian Garima Gospels, initially assigned a production-date in the 1000s, was suspected by Jacques Mercier of being much earlier.  Mercier submitted small sample fragments of the manuscript to radiocarbon tests, which gave one fragment a date of  330-540, and another fragment a date of 430-650 (as reported in 2011 in the journal of Kenyon College).  And just like that, the Garima Gospels went from being a minor witness to the Ethiopic Version to being confirmed as a contender (with the Rabbula Gospels of 586) to be the oldest illustrated manuscript of the Gospels.  Perhaps what is presently a last resort should in the future be the first resort, where parchment is involved, and when the requisite amount of material can be spared, and the cost of radiocarbon analysis is not prohibitive.  Rare is the parchment New Testament manuscript that does not have a blank border that could be removed without appreciable loss.

                                              

Video Lecture 23: Consult the Evidence

Lecture 23 in the series Introduction to NT Textual Criticism is available to view, with captions, on YouTube, about the advantages of consulting the external evidence for the New Testament text.  Special attention is given to 14 manuscripts and one inscription.  Links to some online manuscript-collections are included in the captions at the end of the lecture.

It can also be viewed, without captions, on Bitchute.

Here is an excerpt:

            Fifth, the Book of Kells.  The Book of Kells is so famous, because of its artistry, that it's easy to overlook it as a textual witness might be overlooked.  Widely regarded as the most beautifully written of all Gospels-manuscripts, the text in the Book of Kells might be considered just another copy of the Vulgate.  For the most part, that is what it is – but it also has some readings that echo Old Latin ancestors that pre-dated the Vulgate.

             One of the readings in the Book of Kells, and several other Latin copies, occurs in Matthew 27:49.  After Matthew’s report that some of the bystanders at Jesus’ crucifixion said, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to save Him,” the very next thing that happens, in most copies, is that Jesus cries out with a loud voice, and yields up His spirit.   But in the Book of Kells, before verse 50, there is more.  It says,      

            “And another person took a spear, and pierced His side, and there came out water and blood.”

            This is an approximate parallel to John 19:34.   The significant difference is that in John, when Jesus is pierced, He is already dead; the soldiers pierce His side to remove any doubt that He has died.  The reading in the Book of Kells appears to be an interpolation, inserted by a scribe trying to make a harmonization – but the insertion was made at the wrong place, before Jesus dies.

            But the originator of this reading cannot have been a Latin scribe, because the same reading is also found in Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, the two Greek manuscripts that form the backbone of the base-text of the New Testament in the NIV and ESV. 

             As a side-note, I have noticed that although the NIV and ESV rely very heavily on these two manuscripts, the reading of Vaticanus and Sinaiticus in Matthew 27:49 has not been adopted in their text, and, as far as I can tell,  is not mentioned in the NIV and ESV in a footnote, even though it is supported by some other Alexandrian witnesses such as Codices C and L.

            If we reckon that witnesses that share the same readings tend to have the same origin, then the thing to see is that the witnesses with this relatively rare reading in Matthew 27:49 must be connected in some way, even though some of them represent a stratum of the Latin Text in Ireland, and some of them represent a very early form of the Greek Gospels-text used in Egypt. 

            This connection is also suggested by similarities between some of the artwork in the borders of the Book of Kells, and in the artwork that appears in some Coptic manuscripts.

          Which brings us to our sixth witness:  the Fadden More Psalter.   The discovery, in 2006, of the Fadden More Psalter is another piece of evidence that increases the plausibility of a connection between a Biblical text in Ireland, and a Biblical text in Egypt.  The Fadden More Psalter is is a very heavily damaged Latin copy of the Book of Psalms that was made in about the year 800.

            The parchment pages of the Faddan More Psalter were found along with a leather cover.  It was found in a bog, near the city of Tipperary.  The discoverer, Eddie Fogerty, exercised remarkable skill and competence in preserving the manuscript once it was discovered.  One of the interesting things about the cover is that there is definitely papyrus in the cover’s lining.

             Sometimes, we cannot access the evidence directly because it does not exist anymore.  That is probably the case with our seventh witness:  Codex Gissensis.  For a few decades after its discovery in Egypt in 1907, a small Gothic and Latin fragment, with text from Luke 23 and 34, was kept in Germany.  Unfortunately, it was reportedly destroyed as a result of bombing during World War II.  But black and white photographs of the manuscript have survived.

            Similarly, when Lake Nasser was enlarged on the southern border of Egypt around the year 1970, many artifacts from the ancient site of Faras were heroically rescued by a team of researchers from Poland, and they can still be visited at the National Museum in Warsaw.  Some inscriptions had to be left behind, though, and were subsequently submerged. 

            But photographs of them were taken, including a photograph of our ninth witness:  an inscription that features the beginning and ending of each Gospel.  Even this small witness can help track the geographic spread of variants in these portions of the text.