Nongbri’s marshalling of data is impressive and his arguments for dating P66 into the fourth century appear convincing at first glance. Yet there are flaws in the comparative data used that undermine Nongbri’s assertions. The weaknesses of Nongbri’s non-paleographical arguments will be addressed first.
The provenance of P66 is certainly an important part of the history of the manuscript and comparing it to the other papyri in the cache could yield valuable insight into the use of P66. Nongbri pointed out that if P66 is assigned a “ca. 200” date, then it “would be the earliest item in the Bodmer hoard that was actually part of the collection proper.” But it is unclear why one must call into question the traditional dating for P66 simply because …show more content…
Hundreds of carbonized bookrolls were discovered in The Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum which was buried under the ash of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. Scholars have placed the building of the Villa some time in “the third quarter of the first century BC.” Yet many of the papyri have been dated to the second and third centuries BCE, as much as 200 years before the original collection of the library would have taken place. Coupled with this, many of these older works likely began their life in Greece or the eastern Mediterranean and not in Italy where they were …show more content…
Bagnall made a similar criticism of the method used by Carsten Thiede to push the dates of several New Testament papyri into the first century. Bagnall wrote that Thiede’s “palaeographic arguments were based almost entirely on similarities of specific letter shapes, rather than the overall character of the handwritings.” Nongbri appears to be guilty of a similar practice in attempting to push the date for the script into the fourth century. Rather than placing P66 within the development of a graphic stream, Nongbri simply looked for similar looking letters and words in P.Cair.Isid 2 and P.Bodmer XX. There was no critical interaction with the recent palaeographic assessment given by Orsini and Clarysse that placed P66 within the development of a graphic stream and confirmed Turner’s dating of the handwriting to 200-250