Steven Avery
Administrator
Hixson Gurry
Comparison of P.Ryl. 16 and scribe A of Codex Sinaiticus
P.Ryl. 16. Used by permission of The University of Manchester Library 5.3. Comparison of P.Ryl. 16 and scribe A of Codex Sinaiticus. P. Rly. 16 used by permission of The University of Manchester Library.
A comparison of P.Ryl. 16 and scribe A of Codex Sinaiticus illustrates the problem that resulted in Turner’s hesitancy to assign any date ranges shorter than fifty years on the basis of paleography alone.23 These two manuscripts are written in the same general style, called “biblical majuscule,” but they were written forty to two hundred years apart from each other. The comparison aims to show why one should not be too eager to accept the earliest possible or even the latest possible dates. P.Ryl. 16 is a fragment of a comedy that was reused as a letter. The letter on the back can be dated to AD 256, giving this papyrus its terminus ante quem, but we do not know how long before AD 256 it was written. In 1967, Guglielmo Cavallo paleographically dated the manuscript to the narrow window of circa 220–225 (!).24 The manuscript is part of an archive, however, which can shed some additional light on its date. In a study of reused papyri with dates on both sides, Turner suggested that P.Ryl. 16 might be as early as AD 150 because other reused papyri in the archive were about one hundred years old before reuse.25
Figure 5.2. P.Ryl. 16 is a fragment of a comedy with a dated letter on the backside
Foster, “Bold Claims, Wishful Thinking,” 199; Turner, Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient World, 20. Thanks are due to Brent Nongbri, who inspired me to compare P.Ryl. 16 with Codex Sinaiticus. 24 Cavallo, Ricerche sulla maiuscola biblica, 45-46. 25 Turner, “Recto and Verso,” 106. However, there is no guarantee that P.Ryl. 16 was written as early as AD 150. At least one papyrus in this archive was reused after only nine months, and several others after fifteen to thirty years. 23
The other hand of our comparison is scribe A of Codex Sinaiticus, which has a terminus post quem because it was produced with the Eusebian apparatus in the Gospels. It obviously could not have been made before Eusebius had developed this cross-reference system, which probably happened during the window of AD 290–340. Codex Sinaiticus could be later but not earlier. On the basis of the handwriting, Cavallo dated Codex Sinaiticus to circa 360 “or a few years later” (!).26 Cavallo described the hand he calls “biblical majuscule” as emerging from a “sober and undecorated script.” “True biblical majuscule” has a “visible contrast between thin horizontal strokes and fatter vertical ones (particularly gamma, pi, tau), while oblique [i.e., diagonal] strokes appear in between (alpha, delta, lambda).” Cavallo continued, “Among late examples . . . the script shows a stronger contrast between fat and thin strokes and decorative buttons at the extremities of the latter, in particular on the horizontal strokes of gamma, delta, epsilon, pi and tau.”27 In other words, the hand that we are comparing should have thick vertical strokes and thin horizontal strokes. The later the hand is, the more the contrast there will be. Later examples of the hands tend to have decorative serifs on horizontal strokes, but earlier examples tend not to have them. In the above comparison, we see handwriting from two manuscripts that Cavallo dated 135 to 140 years apart, and to be fair, P.Ryl. 16 is earlier than Codex Sinaiticus. There are differences between the two hands, admittedly. The epsilon (ε) and sigma (ϲ) are not the same—they are slightly more decorative in Codex Sinaiticus. The phi (φ) in Codex Sinaiticus is more angled than round. Codex Sinaiticus has generally more difference between the thick vertical strokes of nu (Ν) and the thinner diagonal stroke (but not always; see the ν in μενειν [menein]).28 Still, the two hands bear a remarkable similarity. Additionally, tau (Τ) in P.Ryl. 16 has more prominent serifs, or “hooks,” on the ends of the horizontal stroke than tau in Codex Sinaiticus—a feature Cavallo considered to be more characteristic of later examples of “biblical majuscule.” Cavallo himself dated the manuscripts 135 years apart, but this comparison is even more problematic if P.Ryl. 16 is a few decades earlier, as Turner argued. 26
Cavallo, Ricerche sulla maiuscola biblica, 58. Guglielmo Cavallo, “Greek and Latin Writing in the Papyri,” in The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology, ed. Roger S. Bagnall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 128-29. 28 It is also problematic to look merely at “test letters,” so I have reproduced the samples in groups of the same words. 27
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Dating Myths, Part One
P.Ryl. 16 (AD 220–225, according to Cavallo)
Codex Sinaiticus, Scribe A (ca. AD 360, according to Cavallo)
Figure 5.3. A comparison of P.Ryl. 16 (left) and scribe A of Codex Sinaiticus (right), showing their similar hands
The point of the comparison is to illustrate how difficult it can be to assign a date paleographically. Yes, something is different between the two hands, but can we accurately measure it to be 135 years’ worth of development? Furthermore, “development” assumes that the styles changed in linear fashion, as Turner noted. But, he said, “If [a particular style] was written in several centres it is likely that cross-influences will have affected this style, as they did other styles.”29 To state it alternatively, do we really see 135 years’ worth of linear development between the hands of P.Ryl. 16 and scribe A of Codex Sinaiticus, or are the two similar because the scribes had similar influences? If the latter, we cannot really be confident enough to assign such narrow dates as Cavallo does. Additionally, it is possible for scribes contemporary with each other to have conflicting features with regard to date. P. J. Parsons mentioned features of Codices Sinaiticus, Vaticanus (03), and Alexandrinus (02), in which a scribe or scribes exhibit later features of handwriting than other scribes working at the same time on the same manuscript.30 Even a near-perfect 29
Turner, Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient World, 22. P. J. Parsons, “Review of Ricerche sulla maiuscola biblica by Guglielmo Cavallo,” Gn 42, no. 4 (1970): 380.
match with a securely dated manuscript is not enough to assign a secure date paleographically.31 Other methods. Other aspects might occasionally provide more information on the date of a manuscript. For example, Turner suggests that the format and dimensions of a codex might shed light on its date.32 Illuminated manuscripts have an additional layer of available information in their art. If a manuscript has been found with an intact cover, the cover might provide a terminus post quem. A deed dated October 7, AD 348, for example, was reused in the cover of Nag Hammadi Codex VII, indicating that the codex had to have been made after that date and suggesting a similar date range for the other Nag Hammadi codices.33 Scientific testing could be of some use as well. The York Gospels (York, Minster Library, Add Manuscript 1) have a terminus ante quem of around AD 1020 because the manuscript came to York through Wulfstan, the archbishop of York, who died in AD 1023, but it was unclear how long before AD 1020 it was written. DNA analysis revealed that an unusually high percentage of the parchment sampled came from female calves. One would expect male calves to be used for parchment because males are less valuable for maintaining and growing a herd. Cattle numbers in the British Isles suffered in the late tenth century because of a cattle plague that swept through between AD 986 and 988, and female cattle would have been especially valuable to repopulate herds after the plague. The best explanation for the unusually high presence of parchment made from female calves in the York Gospels is that its pages were made from the skins of female calves that died in that plague, which, if correct, suggests a strong possibility for a composition date of the York Gospels around the year AD 990.34 31
Brent Nongbri writes of P52, “I have not provided any third-century documentary papyri that are absolute ‘dead ringers’ for the handwriting of P52, and even if I had 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” (“Use and Abuse of P52,” 46). 32 E. G. Turner, The Typology of the Early Codex (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), 7. 33 J. W. B. Barns, G. M. Browne, and J. C. Shelton, eds., Nag Hammadi Codices: Greek and Coptic Papyri from the Cartonnage of the Covers, NHS 16 (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 57. Stephen Emmel rightly questions how much later they were made, however, in “The Coptic Gnostic Texts as Witnesses to the Production and Transmission of Gnostic (and Other) Traditions,” in Das Thomasevangelium: Entstehung-Rezeption-Theologie, ed. Jörg Frey, Enno Edzard Popkes, and Jens Schröter, BZNW 157 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), 38. 34 Matthew D. Teasdale et al., “The York Gospels: A 1000-Year Biological Palimpsest,” Royal Society Open Science 4, no. 10 (2017): 7.
match with a securely dated manuscript is not enough to assign a secure date paleographically.31 Other methods. Other aspects might occasionally provide more information on the date of a manuscript. For example, Turner suggests that the format and dimensions of a codex might shed light on its date.32 Illuminated manuscripts have an additional layer of available information in their art. If a manuscript has been found with an intact cover, the cover might provide a terminus post quem. A deed dated October 7, AD 348, for example, was reused in the cover of Nag Hammadi Codex VII, indicating that the codex had to have been made after that date and suggesting a similar date range for the other Nag Hammadi codices.33 Scientific testing could be of some use as well. The York Gospels (York, Minster Library, Add Manuscript 1) have a terminus ante quem of around AD 1020 because the manuscript came to York through Wulfstan, the archbishop of York, who died in AD 1023, but it was unclear how long before AD 1020 it was written. DNA analysis revealed that an unusually high percentage of the parchment sampled came from female calves. One would expect male calves to be used for parchment because males are less valuable for maintaining and growing a herd. Cattle numbers in the British Isles suffered in the late tenth century because of a cattle plague that swept through between AD 986 and 988, and female cattle would have been especially valuable to repopulate herds after the plague. The best explanation for the unusually high presence of parchment made from female calves in the York Gospels is that its pages were made from the skins of female calves that died in that plague, which, if correct, suggests a strong possibility for a composition date of the York Gospels around the year AD 990.34 31
Brent Nongbri writes of P52, “I have not provided any third-century documentary papyri that are absolute ‘dead ringers’ for the handwriting of P52, and even if I had 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” (“Use and Abuse of P52,” 46). 32 E. G. Turner, The Typology of the Early Codex (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), 7. 33 J. W. B. Barns, G. M. Browne, and J. C. Shelton, eds., Nag Hammadi Codices: Greek and Coptic Papyri from the Cartonnage of the Covers, NHS 16 (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 57. Stephen Emmel rightly questions how much later they were made, however, in “The Coptic Gnostic Texts as Witnesses to the Production and Transmission of Gnostic (and Other) Traditions,” in Das Thomasevangelium: Entstehung-Rezeption-Theologie, ed. Jörg Frey, Enno Edzard Popkes, and Jens Schröter, BZNW 157 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), 38. 34 Matthew D. Teasdale et al., “The York Gospels: A 1000-Year Biological Palimpsest,” Royal Society Open Science 4, no. 10 (2017): 7.
DAT ING MY THS , PART T WO HOW LATER MA NUSCRIPTS CAN BE BET TER MA NUSCRIPTS
Gregory R. Lanier
Comparison of P.Ryl. 16 and scribe A of Codex Sinaiticus
P.Ryl. 16. Used by permission of The University of Manchester Library 5.3. Comparison of P.Ryl. 16 and scribe A of Codex Sinaiticus. P. Rly. 16 used by permission of The University of Manchester Library.
A comparison of P.Ryl. 16 and scribe A of Codex Sinaiticus illustrates the problem that resulted in Turner’s hesitancy to assign any date ranges shorter than fifty years on the basis of paleography alone.23 These two manuscripts are written in the same general style, called “biblical majuscule,” but they were written forty to two hundred years apart from each other. The comparison aims to show why one should not be too eager to accept the earliest possible or even the latest possible dates. P.Ryl. 16 is a fragment of a comedy that was reused as a letter. The letter on the back can be dated to AD 256, giving this papyrus its terminus ante quem, but we do not know how long before AD 256 it was written. In 1967, Guglielmo Cavallo paleographically dated the manuscript to the narrow window of circa 220–225 (!).24 The manuscript is part of an archive, however, which can shed some additional light on its date. In a study of reused papyri with dates on both sides, Turner suggested that P.Ryl. 16 might be as early as AD 150 because other reused papyri in the archive were about one hundred years old before reuse.25
Figure 5.2. P.Ryl. 16 is a fragment of a comedy with a dated letter on the backside
Foster, “Bold Claims, Wishful Thinking,” 199; Turner, Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient World, 20. Thanks are due to Brent Nongbri, who inspired me to compare P.Ryl. 16 with Codex Sinaiticus. 24 Cavallo, Ricerche sulla maiuscola biblica, 45-46. 25 Turner, “Recto and Verso,” 106. However, there is no guarantee that P.Ryl. 16 was written as early as AD 150. At least one papyrus in this archive was reused after only nine months, and several others after fifteen to thirty years. 23
The other hand of our comparison is scribe A of Codex Sinaiticus, which has a terminus post quem because it was produced with the Eusebian apparatus in the Gospels. It obviously could not have been made before Eusebius had developed this cross-reference system, which probably happened during the window of AD 290–340. Codex Sinaiticus could be later but not earlier. On the basis of the handwriting, Cavallo dated Codex Sinaiticus to circa 360 “or a few years later” (!).26 Cavallo described the hand he calls “biblical majuscule” as emerging from a “sober and undecorated script.” “True biblical majuscule” has a “visible contrast between thin horizontal strokes and fatter vertical ones (particularly gamma, pi, tau), while oblique [i.e., diagonal] strokes appear in between (alpha, delta, lambda).” Cavallo continued, “Among late examples . . . the script shows a stronger contrast between fat and thin strokes and decorative buttons at the extremities of the latter, in particular on the horizontal strokes of gamma, delta, epsilon, pi and tau.”27 In other words, the hand that we are comparing should have thick vertical strokes and thin horizontal strokes. The later the hand is, the more the contrast there will be. Later examples of the hands tend to have decorative serifs on horizontal strokes, but earlier examples tend not to have them. In the above comparison, we see handwriting from two manuscripts that Cavallo dated 135 to 140 years apart, and to be fair, P.Ryl. 16 is earlier than Codex Sinaiticus. There are differences between the two hands, admittedly. The epsilon (ε) and sigma (ϲ) are not the same—they are slightly more decorative in Codex Sinaiticus. The phi (φ) in Codex Sinaiticus is more angled than round. Codex Sinaiticus has generally more difference between the thick vertical strokes of nu (Ν) and the thinner diagonal stroke (but not always; see the ν in μενειν [menein]).28 Still, the two hands bear a remarkable similarity. Additionally, tau (Τ) in P.Ryl. 16 has more prominent serifs, or “hooks,” on the ends of the horizontal stroke than tau in Codex Sinaiticus—a feature Cavallo considered to be more characteristic of later examples of “biblical majuscule.” Cavallo himself dated the manuscripts 135 years apart, but this comparison is even more problematic if P.Ryl. 16 is a few decades earlier, as Turner argued. 26
Cavallo, Ricerche sulla maiuscola biblica, 58. Guglielmo Cavallo, “Greek and Latin Writing in the Papyri,” in The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology, ed. Roger S. Bagnall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 128-29. 28 It is also problematic to look merely at “test letters,” so I have reproduced the samples in groups of the same words. 27
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Dating Myths, Part One
P.Ryl. 16 (AD 220–225, according to Cavallo)
Codex Sinaiticus, Scribe A (ca. AD 360, according to Cavallo)
Figure 5.3. A comparison of P.Ryl. 16 (left) and scribe A of Codex Sinaiticus (right), showing their similar hands
The point of the comparison is to illustrate how difficult it can be to assign a date paleographically. Yes, something is different between the two hands, but can we accurately measure it to be 135 years’ worth of development? Furthermore, “development” assumes that the styles changed in linear fashion, as Turner noted. But, he said, “If [a particular style] was written in several centres it is likely that cross-influences will have affected this style, as they did other styles.”29 To state it alternatively, do we really see 135 years’ worth of linear development between the hands of P.Ryl. 16 and scribe A of Codex Sinaiticus, or are the two similar because the scribes had similar influences? If the latter, we cannot really be confident enough to assign such narrow dates as Cavallo does. Additionally, it is possible for scribes contemporary with each other to have conflicting features with regard to date. P. J. Parsons mentioned features of Codices Sinaiticus, Vaticanus (03), and Alexandrinus (02), in which a scribe or scribes exhibit later features of handwriting than other scribes working at the same time on the same manuscript.30 Even a near-perfect 29
Turner, Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient World, 22. P. J. Parsons, “Review of Ricerche sulla maiuscola biblica by Guglielmo Cavallo,” Gn 42, no. 4 (1970): 380.
match with a securely dated manuscript is not enough to assign a secure date paleographically.31 Other methods. Other aspects might occasionally provide more information on the date of a manuscript. For example, Turner suggests that the format and dimensions of a codex might shed light on its date.32 Illuminated manuscripts have an additional layer of available information in their art. If a manuscript has been found with an intact cover, the cover might provide a terminus post quem. A deed dated October 7, AD 348, for example, was reused in the cover of Nag Hammadi Codex VII, indicating that the codex had to have been made after that date and suggesting a similar date range for the other Nag Hammadi codices.33 Scientific testing could be of some use as well. The York Gospels (York, Minster Library, Add Manuscript 1) have a terminus ante quem of around AD 1020 because the manuscript came to York through Wulfstan, the archbishop of York, who died in AD 1023, but it was unclear how long before AD 1020 it was written. DNA analysis revealed that an unusually high percentage of the parchment sampled came from female calves. One would expect male calves to be used for parchment because males are less valuable for maintaining and growing a herd. Cattle numbers in the British Isles suffered in the late tenth century because of a cattle plague that swept through between AD 986 and 988, and female cattle would have been especially valuable to repopulate herds after the plague. The best explanation for the unusually high presence of parchment made from female calves in the York Gospels is that its pages were made from the skins of female calves that died in that plague, which, if correct, suggests a strong possibility for a composition date of the York Gospels around the year AD 990.34 31
Brent Nongbri writes of P52, “I have not provided any third-century documentary papyri that are absolute ‘dead ringers’ for the handwriting of P52, and even if I had 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” (“Use and Abuse of P52,” 46). 32 E. G. Turner, The Typology of the Early Codex (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), 7. 33 J. W. B. Barns, G. M. Browne, and J. C. Shelton, eds., Nag Hammadi Codices: Greek and Coptic Papyri from the Cartonnage of the Covers, NHS 16 (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 57. Stephen Emmel rightly questions how much later they were made, however, in “The Coptic Gnostic Texts as Witnesses to the Production and Transmission of Gnostic (and Other) Traditions,” in Das Thomasevangelium: Entstehung-Rezeption-Theologie, ed. Jörg Frey, Enno Edzard Popkes, and Jens Schröter, BZNW 157 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), 38. 34 Matthew D. Teasdale et al., “The York Gospels: A 1000-Year Biological Palimpsest,” Royal Society Open Science 4, no. 10 (2017): 7.
match with a securely dated manuscript is not enough to assign a secure date paleographically.31 Other methods. Other aspects might occasionally provide more information on the date of a manuscript. For example, Turner suggests that the format and dimensions of a codex might shed light on its date.32 Illuminated manuscripts have an additional layer of available information in their art. If a manuscript has been found with an intact cover, the cover might provide a terminus post quem. A deed dated October 7, AD 348, for example, was reused in the cover of Nag Hammadi Codex VII, indicating that the codex had to have been made after that date and suggesting a similar date range for the other Nag Hammadi codices.33 Scientific testing could be of some use as well. The York Gospels (York, Minster Library, Add Manuscript 1) have a terminus ante quem of around AD 1020 because the manuscript came to York through Wulfstan, the archbishop of York, who died in AD 1023, but it was unclear how long before AD 1020 it was written. DNA analysis revealed that an unusually high percentage of the parchment sampled came from female calves. One would expect male calves to be used for parchment because males are less valuable for maintaining and growing a herd. Cattle numbers in the British Isles suffered in the late tenth century because of a cattle plague that swept through between AD 986 and 988, and female cattle would have been especially valuable to repopulate herds after the plague. The best explanation for the unusually high presence of parchment made from female calves in the York Gospels is that its pages were made from the skins of female calves that died in that plague, which, if correct, suggests a strong possibility for a composition date of the York Gospels around the year AD 990.34 31
Brent Nongbri writes of P52, “I have not provided any third-century documentary papyri that are absolute ‘dead ringers’ for the handwriting of P52, and even if I had 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” (“Use and Abuse of P52,” 46). 32 E. G. Turner, The Typology of the Early Codex (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), 7. 33 J. W. B. Barns, G. M. Browne, and J. C. Shelton, eds., Nag Hammadi Codices: Greek and Coptic Papyri from the Cartonnage of the Covers, NHS 16 (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 57. Stephen Emmel rightly questions how much later they were made, however, in “The Coptic Gnostic Texts as Witnesses to the Production and Transmission of Gnostic (and Other) Traditions,” in Das Thomasevangelium: Entstehung-Rezeption-Theologie, ed. Jörg Frey, Enno Edzard Popkes, and Jens Schröter, BZNW 157 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), 38. 34 Matthew D. Teasdale et al., “The York Gospels: A 1000-Year Biological Palimpsest,” Royal Society Open Science 4, no. 10 (2017): 7.
DAT ING MY THS , PART T WO HOW LATER MA NUSCRIPTS CAN BE BET TER MA NUSCRIPTS
Gregory R. Lanier