How Old Are the Oldest Christian Manuscripts?

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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.

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Footnotes

1. See “Mixing the Gospels,” BAR, March/April 2017.

2. See David A. Warburton, Biblical Archaeology 101: “Dating in the Archaeological World,” BAR, September/October 2018.

3. See “Earliest New Testament Fragment,” BAR, March/April 2015.

Endnotes

1.
Portions of this essay are adapted from Brent Nongbri, God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2018). Reproduced by permission.

2.
These curves also have “wiggles” at some points, meaning that sometimes a particular number of “radiocarbon years before present” will correspond to more than one set of calendar years. Thus, the calibrated results of radiocarbon analysis will provide a range (or ranges) of possible dates with degrees of probability that the actual date falls somewhere within the ranges.