How Old Are the Oldest Christian Manuscripts?

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It is common to hear scholars claim that this or that copy of, say, the Gospel of John dates to “circa A.D. 200.” But how can the experts be so certain? The surprising answer is that they usually can’t !¹

Some pieces of ancient writing do carry exact dates. What specialists call “documents,” that is, receipts, deeds, tax returns, official government proclamations—in short, non-literary texts—often preserve the dates on which they were copied, just as such documents do today. So, we can often know the dates of documents down to the very day that they were copied. But when it comes to manuscripts that contain early Christian literature, like the writings of the New Testament, we are not so lucky.

Some copies of later medieval Greek biblical manuscripts do give us dates in the form of colophons, short notes to the reader from the scribe who copied the manuscript. But colophons with dates like this only become common in Greek biblical manuscripts in the ninth century. How do we determine the dates 040of literary papyrus and parchment books from earlier periods?

Sometimes we have clues that help establish the earliest or latest possible date that a manuscript was copied. For example, in some cases, we have manuscripts that have emerged from a secure archaeological context. The Syrian city of Dura-Europos was sacked in A.D. 256 and abandoned after that. In the rubble near the western wall of the city, excavators found a copy of a Greek Gospel harmony (a manuscript that combines the text of the four Gospels).^a Because of its archaeological context, it has a secure terminus ante quem, or latest possible date, of A.D. 256. It was copied some time before the year 256. How much earlier, is a matter of debate.

On other occasions, the contents of a manuscript help us in assigning a date. A papyrus from the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, P.Oxy. 3529, is a copy of the martyrdom of Dioscorus, who was killed in the 23rd year of Diocletian (A.D. 306/307). So, this manuscript has a terminus post quem, an earliest possible date, of 041A.D. 306, the year of Dioscorus’s death. How much later it was copied, we don’t know.

Sometimes reused writing material is helpful for dating. Texts copied on rolls (rather than in codex form) could be easily reused. So, a roll with a literary text might be flipped over and used for a dated document or vice versa. For books in the codex format, sometimes dated documents, usually older waste pieces, were reused in the manufacture of the leather covers. In the case of Nag Hammadi Codex VII, a document with the date of A.D. 348 gives us the earliest possible date that the cover (and probably the codex) was made.

So manuscripts like these are relatively datable. They have a fixed point, either a terminus ante quem or a terminus post quem. But these are rare exceptions.

In the vast majority of cases, scholars attempting to assign a date to literary papyri of the Roman era rely on palaeography, the comparative analysis of handwriting. Palaeography, broadly speaking, is the study of ancient forms of writing. While the academic field of palaeography concerns all aspects of writing and its production, the chief interest of Greek palaeography for most biblical scholars is its role in the process of trying to establish dates for otherwise undated examples of Jewish and Christian writing.

The usefulness of palaeography for assigning dates to undated samples rests upon an important assumption: Graphic similarity generally equates to chronological similarity. Thus, the procedure of palaeographic dating is deceptively simple: A manuscript of unknown date is first usually assigned to one of several generally accepted styles of writing. The earliest and latest securely datable samples of each style will then provide the range within which the sample of unknown date can be placed.

Although all palaeographers agree on this general approach, they disagree about how precise this method can be. According to one influential group of scholars, it is possible to precisely trace the rise, perfection, and decline of particular styles of writing. These palaeographers believe that they can assign an undated manuscript not only to a general stylistic group but also to a particular chronological point, sometimes as narrow as 25 years or even a decade, in the evolution of that style of writing.

Other palaeographers, however, are suspicious of such developmental constructs and such tightly restricted date ranges. They point out that the frameworks of the alleged rise, perfection, and decline of styles of writing are based on very few securely dated anchor points. They also stress that slight differences in the formation of letters, rather than showing chronological development or decline, may instead be the result of geographic difference or of the competence, age, or personal inclinations of individual copyists and, thus, are not indicative of the date of the writing.

This second group of palaeographers would emphasize the relatively long working life of copyists (30 years is not uncommon; more than 45 years is not unheard of). They would also note the 042persistence of writing styles between teachers and students across generations and the well documented ability of copyists to write in styles generally associated with different time periods. The last point especially gives pause, because it challenges the key assumption that graphic similarity necessarily equates to chronological similarity.

This key assumption is also called into question by the phenomenon misleadingly termed “archaism.” A fair description of the phenomenon would be to say that sometimes we have securely datable samples of writing that appear quite similar—but that were actually produced centuries apart.

In fact, the editor of P.Oxy. 3529 (the copy of the Martyrdom of Dioscorus already introduced) noted that the writing of this manuscript resembled that of another Oxyrhynchus papyrus, P.Oxy. 246, which is a registration of livestock with an explicit date of the 12th year of Nero, that is, A.D. 66. The editor further noted that the script of P.Oxy. 3529 would “suggest [a date in] the early Roman period.” But we know that it was copied after the year 306, which shows that this type of writing was in use for two to three centuries.

Palaeographers attuned to these types of complexities hesitate to give precise dates for undated manuscripts and therefore provide a 043broader range of possible dates. For palaeography, the bottom line is this: It can usually get us within a century or two of the likely date that a manuscript was copied with a reasonable degree of confidence. But date ranges of 50 years or less based only on palaeography are dubious, and date ranges of 25 years or less are simply examples of wishful thinking.

What about radiocarbon analysis?^b Few early Christian manuscripts are tested this way, because the analysis requires the destruction of a very small piece of the manuscript. And even radiocarbon dating is not as precise as we might like. Living things absorb the radioactive isotope carbon-14 from the atmosphere: plants by photosynthesis and animals by consuming plants. When living things die, they stop absorbing new carbon-14, and the carbon-14 present in the dead organism begins to decay at a regular rate. Because we know this rate, we can calculate the number of years ago that this organism died. The calculation presumes that the level of carbon-14 in the atmosphere is constant, but we know this is not the case.

Fortunately, we can determine the carbon-14 content of the atmosphere in a given year by testing material of known ages, primarily tree rings. These can be traced back thousands of years and used to create a calibration curve to convert the results of our calculations, from “radiocarbon years before present,” into a range of calendar dates. However, if you look at one of these calibration curves, you’ll notice that it is not a fine line but rather a wide swath, which reflects the uncertainty of radiocarbon age determinations.²

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The most compelling results of radiocarbon analysis emerge when an object’s date is disputed by several centuries or more. The Shroud of Turin provides an ideal example. The question was whether the cloth dates to the time of Jesus or the medieval period. Multiple samples tested in different labs in the late 1980s yielded results that date the linen to a period between A.D. 1260 and 1390, exactly the time when the shroud first turns up in the historical record. The radiocarbon analysis of the shroud has thus proven to the satisfaction of sober observers that it is a product of the 13th or 14th century—and not the first century.

It is more difficult to determine smaller intervals of time, which is usually what we are trying to do with early Christian manuscripts. And the process is not foolproof. For instance, when National Geographic published a translation of the Gospel of Judas (Tchacos codex) with much fanfare during the Easter season of 2006, the magazine noted that the codex had been subjected to radiocarbon analysis. The resulting date was usually reported in the media as “circa 280 C.E. plus or minus 60 years.” But National Geographic did not publish the actual data from the testing.

The little information we do have concerning the testing is that “the mean calendar age” reported by National Geographic was determined by averaging together the results from the samples taken from the codex pages and samples taken from the papyri used as stuffing for the codex’s leather cover. Since papyrus from the covers of books is usually waste, its creation would predate its use as stuffing for the leather cover. And indeed this material from the cover yielded the earliest radiocarbon dates of the lot. The inclusion of these pieces in the production 045of the statistical mean skewed the reported date of the construction of the codex too early.

An analysis that omits the material taken from the cover would produce a range of dates from the late third century to the very end of the fourth century. This corrected radiocarbon range has more overlap with palaeographic analysis of the Tchacos codex, which tends to assign the writing to the fourth or fifth century. The date of “280 CE ± 60 years” for the Tchacos codex that one frequently sees reported is therefore probably wrong.

I want to be clear that radiocarbon analysis is a very useful tool that has revolutionized archaeology. There are early Christian manuscripts that have been assigned palaeographic dates varying by as much as three or four centuries, and radiocarbon analysis would be especially helpful in these cases. However, when it comes to ancient manuscripts, even radiocarbon analysis is not necessarily the panacea it is sometimes thought to be. When carried out properly and reported accurately, this kind of analysis adds important data to be considered with available archaeological and palaeographic evidence when trying to establish dates for early Christian manuscripts. The more data we have to go on, the better.

So how old are the earliest Christian manuscripts?

The evidence we have and a proper understanding of the multiple dating techniques at our disposal reveal that there is a significant discrepancy between what we actually know and what many have claimed to be true about the earliest Christian manuscripts. The Dura-Europos Gospel harmony, copied some time before A.D. 256, is actually the earliest relatively securely datable Christian manuscript.

The famous Rylands Library Gospel of John,^c a small papyrus fragment sometimes touted as the earliest Christian manuscript with a date of “about A.D. 125,” is actually dated only by its handwriting, which cannot be assigned to such a narrow range. The style of writing used in the Rylands papyrus in fact persisted into the third century. So, while the Rylands papyrus (and a few other fragmentary Christian papyri) might be older than the Dura parchment, we can’t know for sure without some further testing.

The moral of the story is that we need to be aware of the contingency of our knowledge and the limits of our methodologies—to be honest about what we don’t know—before we can move on to establish more reliable knowledge about the ages of our earliest Christian manuscripts and to even form conclusions about the creation and transmission of the New Testament.

The earliest Christian manuscripts are almost never dated explicitly, and scholars must rely on technical analyses and circumstantial evidence to establish probable dates. Learn about the uses and abuses of the dating techniques.