Rylands Library Papyrus P52 - Date

Date

The significance of 52 rests both upon its proposed early dating and upon its geographic dispersal from the presumed site of authorship; traditionally thought to have been Ephesus. As the fragment is removed from the autograph by at least one step of transmission, the date of authorship for the Gospel of John must be at least a few years prior to the dating of 52. The location of the fragment in Egypt extends that time even further, allowing for the dispersal of the documents from the point of authorship and transmission to the point of discovery. The Gospel of John is perhaps quoted by Justin Martyr, and hence is highly likely to have been written before c. 160 CE; but many New Testament scholars have argued from the proposed dating of 52 prior to this, that the latest possible date for the composition of the Gospel should be pushed back into the early decades of the second century – indeed not much later than the traditionally accepted date of c. 90 CE, or even before that.

Scepticism about the use of 52 to date the Gospel of John (not about the fragment's authenticity) is based on two issues. First, the papyrus has been dated based on the handwriting alone, without the support of textual evidence. Secondly, like all other surviving early Gospel manuscripts, this fragment is not from a scroll but from a codex; a sewn and folded book not a roll. If it dates from the first half of the second century, this fragment would be amongst the earlier surviving examples of a literary codex. (Around 90 CE, Martial circulated his poems in codex form, presenting this as a novelty.) The year before Roberts published 52, the British Museum library had acquired papyrus fragments of the Egerton Gospel which are also from a codex, and these were published in 1935. Since the text of 52 is that of the canonical Gospel of John, whereas the Egerton Gospel is not, there was considerable interest amongst biblical scholars as to whether 52 could be dated as the earlier of the two papyri.

52 is a literary text and, in common with almost all such papyri, has no explicit indicator of date. Proposing a date for it required comparison with dated texts, which tend to be documentary (contracts, petitions, letters) and, unlike 52, are often the work of professional scribes. Roberts proposed four dated papyri as close comparators: Abb 34 (ca. 110-117 CE), P. Fayum 110 (94 CE), P. London 2078 (81-96 CE), and P. Oslo 22 (127 CE). Of these, P. Fayum 110 is the only one that shares the characteristic dual form of alpha found in 52; while P. Oslo 22 is most similar in some of the more distinctive letter forms, e.g. eta, mu and iota. Roberts also suggested two literary texts as comparators: P. Berol. 6845 (a fragment of the Iliad estimated to date around 100 CE) which he suggested (other than in the form of the letter alpha) is "the closest parallel to our text that I have been able to find"; and the Egerton Gospel itself, which was then estimated to date around 150 CE. He stated that it had "most of the characteristics of our hand ... though in a less accentuated form". Roberts circulated his assessment to three fellow paleographers: Frederic G. Kenyon, W. Schubart and H. I. Bell; all concurred with his dating of 52 in the first half of the 2nd century. Kenyon suggested another dated comparator in P. Flor I (153 CE); but Roberts did not consider the similarity to be very close, other than for particular letters, as the overall style of that hand was cursive. In the same year 1935, Roberts's assessment of date was supported by the independent studies of A. Deissmann, who, while producing no actual evidence, suggested a date in the reigns of Trajan (98-117) or Hadrian (117-138). In 1936 the dating was supported by Ulrich Wilcken on the basis of a comparison between the hand of P52 and those of papyri in the extensive Apollonius archive which are dated 113-120.

Subsequently, a number of other comparator papyri have been suggested, notably P.Oxy. 2533, where a literary text dated to the early second century in a hand very close to 52 has been written on the back of a re-used document in a late first century business hand. In addition, the discovery of several other papyrus codices of the early second century suggested that this form of book was more common for literary texts at this date than had previously been assumed. Consequently, until the 1990s, the tendency was to suggest a date for 52 towards the earlier half of the range suggested by Roberts and his correspondents. However, a cautionary note was raised by the discovery that a papyrus fragment in Cologne constitutes part of the Egerton Gospel. In this fragment the letters gamma and kappa are separated by an apostrophe, a feature very rare in dated second century papyri; which accordingly implies a date for the Egerton Gospel closer to 200 CE - and indicates the perils of ascribing a date for a papyrus text of which only a small part of two pages survives.

The early date for 52 favoured by many New Testament scholars has been challenged by Andreas Schmidt, who favours a date around 170 AD, plus or minus twenty-five years; on the basis of a comparison with Chester Beatty Papyrus X and with the redated Egerton Gospel. Brent Nongbri has criticized all attempts to establish a paleographic date for papyri like 52 within such narrow ranges. Nongbri collected and published a wide range of dated comparator manuscripts; demonstrating that, although there are plentiful examples of hands similar to that of 52 in the early second century, two later dated papyri also had similar hands (P. Mich. inv. 5336, dated to 152 CE; and P.Amh. 2.78, an example first suggested by E. G. Turner, that dates to 184 CE). Nongbri suggests that this implied that older styles of handwriting might persist much longer than some scholars had assumed, and that a prudent margin of error must allow a still wider range of possible dates for the papyrus:

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 52. The real problem is the way scholars of the New 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 52, 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.

Nevertheless, most scholars continue to favour the earlier dating, though the possibility of a later date cannot be entirely discounted. The John Rylands Library continues to maintain Roberts's assessment of the date of 52, that it "may with some confidence be dated in the first half of the second century A.D.", and the date is given as c. 125 in standard reference works.