Dating The Manuscript
The date of the fragment is established on paleography alone. When the Egerton fragment was first analyzed, the estimated date was rivaled in age only by the John Rylands Library fragment of the Gospel of John. Later, when an additional piece of the same manuscript was identified in the University of Cologne collection (Papyrus Köln 255) and published in 1987— it fit on the bottom of one of the Egerton pages— a single use of an apostrophe, which was not normally added to Greek punctuation until the 3rd century, sufficed to revise the date of the manuscript. This study placed the manuscript to around the time of Bodmer Papyri P66, c. 200.
Read more about this topic: Egerton Gospel
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