Tuesday, May 10, 2022

Jonathan Bernier on the Dating of P52, P66, and P75

While a proponent of an early date for the Gospel of John (he places it to 68-70), Jonathan Bernier wrote the following about the attestation of the Gospel of John in texts such as P52, and, unlike some pop-level Protestantapologists, opts for a later date of such texts:

 

External Attestation

 

When it comes to external attestation, for the better part of a century it was supposed that P52, a fragment of John’s gospel originally dated to the early to mid-second century, established that the Gospel cannot date much later than 125. More recent estimates have suggested that P52 could date to the late second century or even into the third. Similar tales could be told about other early witnesses to the text of John’s Gospel, such as P60 and P75. Although dates as early as the second century have been proposed for both, more recent work has tended toward the third or even fourth century. Given the vagaries of the data, P52, P66, and P75 cannot be used to establish that John’s Gospel existed in the first half of the second century. Indeed, on the strength of the manuscript data alone, one could not, for instance, rule out J. V. M Sturdy’s argument that John’s Gospel was completed ca. 160. (Jonathan Bernier, Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament: The Evidence for Early Composition [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2022], 88)

 

Further Reading:


Modern (Evangelical Protestant) New Testament Scholarship vs. Christina Darlington

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