Dating Early Christian Papyri: Old and New Methods

Introduction

Roberta Mazza, University of Manchester

In 2016, as a member of the steering committee of the Society of Biblical Literature

group ‘Archaeology of Religion in the Roman World’, I proposed to put together a

panel on early Christian papyri and the problem of dating them. My aim was to

discuss the state of the art of palaeographical and other methodologies used for

assigning a date to papyrus manuscripts that do not contain any indication of their

time of composition other than their material aspect.

My personal interest in the topic came from two direct experiences. First, since 2009 I

have contributed to the curatorship and study of the papyrus collection at the

University of Manchester, which allegedly holds the most ancient fragment of the

New Testament ever found (P.Ryl. 3 457 = P 52), besides a surprising number of

other early Christian writings, such as the first copy of the Sub Tuum Praesidium

(P.Ryl. III 470), which I will return to later, one of the earliest copies of the St. Mark

Liturgy (P.Ryl. III 465), and the earliest evidence of anti-Manichaean polemics in

Egypt (P.Ryl. III 469). I found myself questioning the dates of some of these papyri,

or at least the methodology used and reasons given for such date attributions,

following a new wave of studies in papyrology that have rightly criticised a certain

way of practicing palaeography by past generations. Brent Nongbri, one of our

contributors, has led the way in reconsidering the methodology followed by Roberts

in dating our P 52, showing how his opinion has often been misused for various

reasons in the years following publication. 1 It took me many years to convince the 1 I consider Nongbri 2005 the watershed study in this area; see also Bagnall 2009, Clarysse, Orsini 2012, Nongbri in this issue and now the overall extended discussion provided by Ningbri 2018. I am questioning the methods employed by Roberts for assigning a date to P.Ryl. III 469 in Mazza forthcoming, in which I propose a later date (the first half of the fourth century) combining a new palaeographical analysis

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Rylands Library to change the labels of the papyrus and provide a more critical

approach to its dating. It is worth mentioning that the fragment in question is the only

item in the Rylands extensive collection to be on permanent display due to the high

cultural and religious meanings attached to it. This shows the complex and

problematic relationship Europeans have with ancient manuscripts, Christian ones in

particular.

The second reason which pushed me to organise the session was that I have been

directly involved in recent attempts to use technology and scientific methods when

deciphering and studying papyrus manuscripts; this led me to question the blind faith

which academics and the wider public seem to have in research outcomes that result

from scientific investigations that are useful but far from conclusive. I had the

opportunity to employ radiocarbon analysis and multispectral imaging while editing

P.Ryl.Greek Add. 1166, a Christian amulet with passages from the Bible and the

liturgy, later re-used for a tax receipt.2 I realised on that occasion how misleading the

way in which analysis results are communicated in publications can be, and how

troublesome a cultural environment is in which science and technology seem to hold

an unquestionable status in some fields and in the mind of the general public. The

example of carbon dating is particularly interesting: too few people, including

academics, are aware that this technology provides dates only for the papyrus and not

for the ink used on it, and that the results are always given with an approximation of

ca. a century. To give an example, the analysis performed on P.Ryl.Greek Add. 1166

showed that the piece of papyrus on which the text was written was produced between

574 and 660 with a margin of certainty of 95.4%, and between 608 and 650 with a

margin of 68.2%. This has implications on the interpretation of the object and should

with historical considerations. 2 Mazza 2016.

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be clearly explained in the edition of the manuscript; palaeographical analysis

confirmed a date in that 95.4% range of time.

Besides using carbon dating, I also took part in a pilot project for developing new

non-invasive technologies for reading papyri encapsulated in mummy masks and

other cartonnage objects.3 The pilot project came as an answer to a rather serious

practical preoccupation: in the last decade, especially in some American Evangelical

Christian quarters, the search for manuscripts bearing the first traces of the Scriptures

led to the destruction of ancient mummy masks, book bindings and other ancient

objects without any concern for the many issues involved with such practices, let

alone the serious unanswered questions about the provenance of the artefacts.4 To

some academics and their audience the destruction of ancient artefacts seem to be a

legitimate and unproblematic process, motivated by a cultural value system in which

the search for the most ancient testimonies of Christian writings justifies even

unorthodox and unscientific behaviours. In this case too, although I found the

collaboration with scientists and imaging experts enriching and fruitful, I had to face

problems of communication with specialists in other fields and experienced the limits

of scientific disciplines, which tend to be wrongly thought of as more efficient than

the humanities in discovering dates and other features of archaeological remains.

These two professional circumstances, working on the Rylands collection and

multidisciplinary research, together with the direct experience of the power early

Christian manuscripts still hold over their audience, convinced me that it was time to

address the problem of dating early Christian manuscripts, from Egypt and potentially

elsewhere, in a more sophisticated way than has been practiced so far. The panel and

the articles, which resulted from it and are published in the following pages, constitute 3 Funded by Arcadia Foundation, the project results have been published in Gibson et al. 2018.4 Mazza 2014; Gibson et al. 2018, 1–2.

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a first attempt at solving a number of methodological contradictions and obstacles and

answering some crucial questions: What are the limits of palaeography and how can

we overcome them? Similarly, what are the limits of scientific methods such as

radiocarbon analysis and Raman spectroscopy when applied not only to early

Christian, but also to any other type of ancient manuscript? Finally, how can we

communicate the complex and always partial results of multidisciplinary research on

such manuscripts not only inside academia but also, and perhaps more importantly, to

the wider public?

In his contribution, Malcolm Choat traces the roots of papyrology against those of

palaeography, and shows how different preoccupations and research questions led to

different approaches to the study of Greek handwriting within papyrology. He rightly

recalls that ‘the subjectivity that lies at the heart of the system’ is often underplayed

and students tend to have great confidence in the ability of papyrologists to attribute

dates. This brings me back to one of the abovementioned Christian Rylands papyri,

P.Ryl. III 470, which is a good example of how uncritical reliance on past attempts at

dating a papyrus can cause imprecision and misconceptions that still remain in current

research.

The manuscript in question was purchased in Egypt by J. Rendell Harris in 1917 and

published by C. Roberts in 1938.5 It is a small fragment that presents many aspects of

interest for its material shape and the text it carries. In his edition Roberts proposed a

date of the fourth century with a question mark due to the many doubts the papyrus

raised. Roberts’ discussion in the introduction addressed both the handwriting and the

material features of the object, as well as the textual content. Written along the fibre

of a leaflet, the back of which is blank, was clearly a hymn or prayer to the Mother of

5 An image is available through the John Rylands Library website: http://enriqueta.man.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/1dg7qa.

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God, as indicated by the vocative θεοτόκε at line 4. The shape of the capital letters –

tall and compressed, adorned by decorative serifs – was briefly discussed, and

compared to the chancellery style of that used in a letter of the prefect Subatianus

Aquilas, securely dated to 209 CE (SB I 4639). On the basis of this means of

comparison E. Lobel, with whom Roberts consulted, deemed that the papyrus could

not be later than the third century. However, Roberts rightly warned the readers not to

jump to conclusions: the papyrus mentioned Mary as mother of God, a title that

appeared only later on, and there were many difficulties in dating this type of highly

stylized handwriting. The first edition of this manuscript highlights some of the

themes addressed by Choat and Nongbri in the following pages: palaeography

developed hand in hand with the publication of papyri, and the use of palaeography as

the only means for dating texts has always represented a challenge. Papyrologists

answered as best as they could, by providing some analysis and discussion against

securely dated items and consulting their peers as part of the amicitia papyrologorum,

a phrase that started to be used in the 1930s and has since become the motto of the

International Association of Papyrologists. Papyrologists rely on each other’s

opinions and direct experience with large amounts of texts in order to give the best

possible, but nonetheless partial and subject to change, answer to the question of

attributing a date to a papyrus that does not bear one.

Right after its publication, the hymn was recognised as an early version of the first

prayer to Mary as the Mother of God, the Sub tuum praesidium.6 Debates on the date

of the papyrus have not stopped since its publication and recognition of the Greek

version of that famous prayer. P.Ryl. III 470 has been assigned to different centuries

spanning from the third to the ninth.7 Nonetheless, exactly as for P 52, early 6 Mercenier 1939. 7 See e.g. Stegmüller 1952 (fourth century); Giamberdini 1969 (third or fourth century); Förster 1995 (sixth or seventh century); Förster 2005 (seventh to ninth

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Christianity students have tended to choose information from editions in a rather

selective and unsystematic way, and usually end up selecting the earliest date. For

instance, in a recent monograph on the development of Marian devotion, S.J.

Shoemaker dedicates a section to our P.Ryl. III 470, which opens with the following

sentence:8

In 1917 the John Rylands Library in Manchester, which houses one of the

world’s most important collections of ancient papyri, added to its inventory a

small fragment containing a prayer in Greek to the Virgin Mary that seems to

date from the end of the third century.

As I have reported above and is clearly explained in the introduction to the edition,

Roberts has never attributed that date to the papyrus. He gave an account of Lobel’s

opinion and provided a very cautious estimate to the fourth century, stressing his

many doubts including the comparative handwriting of the edict suggested by his

colleague. Shoemaker, however, interprets our Rylands papyrus as proof that ‘at least

some Christians in Egypt had begun to pray to the Virgin Mary and ask for her

intercessions already by the end of the third century.’9 The author admits that there are

debates surrounding the date of the fragment, but in light of considerations relating to

the cult of Mary as attested in some passages of Origen, he concludes the following:10

‘In light of this evidence, and the initial suggestion that the palaeography

reflects handwriting from the third century, the end of the third century seems

to be a likely date for the production of this document, although one certainly

should not rule out the possibility that it might be even slightly earlier.’

century), with extensive discussion of previous bibliography and palaeographical analysis. Contra Förster, without extensive discussion: Römer 1998 and more recently Luijendijk 2014, 30 with footnote 87. See also the catalogue entries: Van Haelst 1976 n. 983 and De Bruyn and Dijkstra 2011 n. 276. 8 Shoemaker 2016, 69.9 Ibid.10 Shoemaker 2016, 72.

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The point in question here is not the correctness of the papyrus’ date but rather the

methodology employed in fixing one. While there is no real attempt to provide a

comparison with dated manuscripts, there is a plain acceptance of a shaky provisional

date attributed to P.Ryl. III 470 almost a century ago. It is also worth noticing that the

debate surrounding the date is very briefly mentioned in the section and considered

only in a footnote in some depth.11 Students of early Christianity seem to have too

much confidence in the ability of renowned papyrologists to assign dates to undated

manuscripts, including when the papyrologists themselves explain that their guess is

far from firm, as in the case of Roberts’ first edition of the Rylands papyrus.

As Nongbri explains, the use of palaeography for dating Christian manuscripts is even

more complex and problematic than this example shows. In order to fix a date for

undated papyri, papyrologists try to find a securely dated document that presents a

similar handwriting; they are largely working on the assumption that graphic

similarity entails that the two documents are contemporary, as we have just seen in

the comparison between P.Ryl. III 470 and the letter of Subatianus Aquilas. But this

equation is far from certain: the activity of a scribe can span many decades; scribes

could write in different styles in different occasions and even use, for instance,

archaizing letters on purpose. Moreover, what does graphic similarity precisely mean,

and how is the comparison carried out? The questions raised by Nongbri problematize

the scientific methodology at the core of our practice; there are still many editions

which provide too few explanations regarding an assigned date. Expertise based on

academic prestige and competence – recalled by Choat with reference also to recent

cases, namely the so-called first-century Mark fragment, which now has become

P.Oxy. LXXXIII 5345 dated to the second or third century –, is only partially

11 Shoemaker 2016, 71 with footnote 18.

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justified; there must always be a place where the reasons for a date are provided: that

is peer-reviewed publications.

The development of palaeography applied to papyri went hand in hand with the

development of imaging technologies and the accumulation of published texts, which

constitute the basis for the study of handwriting through comparisons. Yet, despite the

establishment of palaeography as a field, the study of Greek hands remained firmly

anchored to a humanistic way of considering the history of writing as a process with a

beginning, a development and a slow decay. The use of the word ‘canon’ and the

categorisation of styles of writing are rightly recalled by Nongbri as part of a

problematic approach to palaeography, which needs to be better clarified for the

audience and practiced with a greater awareness of the mechanics of scribal education

and habits.12

A question that was addressed in the course of the SBL panel concerns the

classification and treatment of Christian papyri as a corpus separate from the rest of

the papyrus evidence. Choat rightly criticised the approach taken by the title of the

panel pointing out that the separation of this specific material from the rest of the

papyri produced in the same period and by the same scribes (or at least scribes trained

in a similar environment) is in fact the main cause of distortions produced in early

Christian scholarship on early Christian manuscripts. Nongbri’s article, however,

shows that there is indeed something peculiar about Christian manuscripts, which is

the extensive, almost exclusive, use of the codex format for their scriptures. As a

consequence none of the samples in question present the phenomenon of the re-use of 12 In this respect, many steps forwards have been made in recent years on scribes and scribal training and practices in Egypt from the Hellenistic to the Islamic period, see e.g. Eines–Eitzen 2000; Bucking 2007; Cromwell 2017. The presence of literature and administrative documents in the same papyrus rolls or fragments illustrate well how a class of local administrators were occupied in both types of scribal activities, as recalled most recently by Del Corso 2018; for an example relating to second century BCE see Del Corso 2014.

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one side of the roll, which instead occurs for non-Christian literature and provides

some anchors for dating literary manuscripts. The exclusive use of literary papyrus

handwriting on scrolls, which are in great part dated before the third century, without

bearing in mind the fact that handwriting styles could have lasted longer than the use

of scrolls, risk to create a tendency to the date Christian codices towards the earlier

spectrum. To Choat’s warning not to isolate Christian material from the rest, should

be added the caution not to separate literary from documentary papyri in

palaeographical analysis. As shown by recent and less recent scholarship, it is not

infrequent to find papyrus documents written in literary hands and literature copied in

documentary hands.

So far the pitfalls and perils of a methodology, palaeography within papyrology, seem

to belong to the humanities. Are science and technology any better? Can they help us

overcome the problems outlined so far? In his paper, Nongbri shows some confidence

in, but also preoccupation with, carbon dating; I have discussed in the opening the

limits of this procedure and the need to improve the way results are communicated to

the audience. Carbon dating is also a destructive analysis since a fragment from the

manuscript under study needs to be sampled and processed; in Manchester, for

instance, I suspect the technique will be never allowed on P 52 and other important

papyri. The following contribution of Goler et al. deals with a potentially

revolutionary and non-destructive technology that has started to be tested on papyrus

and other manuscripts only recently: Raman spectroscopy. In simple terms, this is a

non-invasive imaging technology, which focuses on the ink rather than the ‘paper’.

This technique is based on the assumption that ancient inks are made from different

elements the molecules of which vibrate in various ways; through advanced imaging

techniques, scientists are able to measure those vibrations and decompose the ink.

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Technically speaking this procedure enables the analysis of the components of inks

rather than their dating. However, the assumption of the article and similar

experiments in Raman spectroscopy is that components and their mixing must have

changed over time, and by sampling a consistent number of them, it will be possible

in the future to attribute a date to manuscript inks on the basis of pattern recognition.

To some extent, Raman spectroscopy is what palaeography was for Mabillon in the

early modern period: a tool for detecting forgeries, rather than assigning dates.13 In

fact the Columbia–NYU–ISAW project team that present some of their results here

was brought together for analyses carried out while researching a papyrus that we

now know is a modern forgery, the so-called Jesus’ Wife fragment. This Coptic

papyrus has been under the spotlight since September 2012, when Karen King

presented it at the International Congress of Coptic Studies in Rome. A scholarly

debate about whether the fragment was genuine or not has kept papyrologists,

coptologists, historians of early Christianity, as well as scientists and imaging

technicians, busy for almost four years. The nature of the text transmitted also

attracted wide and sustained media attention, as has always happened with Christian

texts.

The Jesus’ Wife fragment went through carbon dating analysis, and the result was a

calibrated age between 648 and 800 CE (95.4 %);14 ink analysis provided a result in

line with carbon black pigments (lamp black) found in a ‘wide variety of manuscripts

including many dating from the early centuries of the Christian era’.15 These results

might seem puzzling, since if taken without caution they might prompt the false idea

that the manuscript was indeed genuine. However, upon closer inspection both

analyses were, and still are, completely inconclusive if isolated from other 13 See Choat on this issue.14 Hodgins 2014; Tuross 2014.15 Yardley and Hagadorn 2014, 164.

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considerations pertaining to the humanities: palaeography, textual philology and

collection history, the last of which was indeed the conclusive piece of evidence for

establishing without any doubt that the papyrus was in fact a forgery.16

Carbon dating analysis proved that the forger of the Jesus’ Wife fragment used a

genuine piece of papyrus to write the text; anyone working in papyrus collection is

aware that blank papyri and papyri with wide sections of unwritten texts have been

found (and might still be found) in Egypt. The use of genuine ancient papyrus to

fabricate forgeries is a well-known phenomenon.17 As for the ink, as mentioned above

the brief report appended to the publication of the Jesus’ Wife papyrus confirmed that

it was mainly based on carbon black pigments, and the spectra obtained did not

present anomalies compared to the compositions of similar samples from other

manuscripts at the centre of previous investigations. Nonetheless, it is widely known

that forgers are aware of ancient ink composition and are able to produce it; the

problem with Raman spectroscopy is that too few papyri have been sampled and there

is no reliable set of data so far. Although a statistical model can offer some solution to

this problematic status of the question, as Goler et al. are proposing here, the way

forward is indeed the collection of a consistent pool of data.

16 Journalist Ariel Sabar’s investigation into the owner of the papyrus and the rest of his small collection left for study at Harvard University proved this beyond doubt, as King has also admitted (Sabar 2016a and 2016b). However, many scholars had already expressed the firm opinion that the fragment was a forgery on the basis of palaeographical and philological arguments, see e.g. Suciu and Lundhaug 2012; Watson 2012; Askeland 2014 and 2015; Depuydt 2014; Bernhard 2015. For a recent review of the case and its implications for the field, see Schroeder 2017.17 For instance, a most famous nineteenth-century forger of Christian papyri, Constantine Simonides, used ancient blank or washed out fragments; he also wrote on the blank side of fragmentary rolls that he ingeniously pasted onto cardboard so that the original ancient writing on that side remained hidden upon inspection (Capponi 2008). In the John Rylands Library there is a small collection of forgeries, all fabricated in the late Victorian era most probably in Egypt, made through recycling ancient blank or washed out material.

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The solution of the Jesus’ Wife papyrus’ case is a wonderful and successful example

of multidisciplinary research (planned and unplanned), in which the combination of

various methods led to a final verdict of forgery. This kind of multidisciplinary

approach and collaboration has been rightly deemed as the way forward in a recent

study on the authenticity of fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls recently emerged from the

antiquities market:18

This study seeks to implement a multidisciplinary approach of investigation

using empirical methods alongside historical interpretative methodologies,

intuitions and aesthetic evaluation, which may allow for credible multi-

contextual reasoning.

The SBL panel and the articles published here were gathered together with the same

awareness that multidisciplinary research is the only possible path toward solving the

many and complex questions connected to the study of ancient papyrus manuscripts,

never forgetting that our conclusions are always partial and transitory because of the

true nature of academic research.

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