MrMacSon wrote: ↑Mon Jul 16, 2018 12:27 am
Peter Kirby wrote: ↑Sun Jul 15, 2018 4:05 am
It’s a fragment of Against Heresies.
I realise that. I would like to know if it has been specifically dated and, if so, on what basis. I have recently been wondering if paleography of early Christian texts such as P Oxy 405 is a biased methodology b/c it is both self-referencing and based on assumed or likely dates.
While I have never seriously questioned the dates given by Grenfel & Hunt to fragments found at Oxyrhynchus tell in Egypt, I *have* seriously questioned the dates given to the DSS fragments from Qumran. But there is an important difference:
Those damn authors of the DSS never dated anything. There were no marriage contracts, deeds or other dated documents. So the earliest researchers made comparisons to Hebrew in inscriptions and coins, which is not exactly the same as what might have been written on documents, which we unfortunately have almost none dated to the 1st century BCE or earlier. The dates thus proposed were largely wishful thinking (guesses) that magically coincided with the critics opinion about the value of the DSS for interpreting the development of Judaism or influenced early Christianity.
On the other hand, the Oxyrhynchus deposits included many fragments of dated legal or tax documents that range from as much as two or three centuries. So, it becomes possible to match up fragments and identify handwriting style ("hands") of individual scribes. Then they made stabs at further identifing scribal "schools" and how the writing style of that school changed over the years.
This sort of thing is even more precise when it comes to identifying medieval European hands, especially in Latin, because there you have many many thousands of complete manuscripts to compare.
While they didn't have that luxury with the Oxyrhynchus papyri, I feel they could make sound assumptions.
The dates that G & H assigned individual papyri usually have a margin of error of 50 years
either way, unless they say otherwise. However, this is the "otherwise" case. G & H had this to say about P. Oxy 405 in
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri vol 3, page 10:
405-406. Theological Fragments.
Plate I (405 and 406 verso).
We here group together fragments of two different theological works, which we have not been able to identify, both containing quotations from the New Testament.
405 consists of seven fragments written in a small neat uncial hand, which is not later than the first half of the third century, and might be as old as the latter part of the second.
The ordinary contractions qs, cs, his (all with overstroke]; and it is clear that the use of these goes back far into the second century.
Besides its early date (it is probably the oldest Christian fragment yet published), 405 is interesting on account of a quotationrom St. Matthew iii. 16-7 describing the Baptism, which is indicated by wedge-shaped signs in the margin similar to those employed for filling up short hues, e.g. in Fr.(a) ll. 9 and 13
.
Translated:
not later than the first half of the third century, means 201-250 CE. The extreme "most recent" date would be 250 CE.
and might be as old as the latter part of the second means 180-200 CE. "Might" does not mean "probably is", but expresses an extreme limit for the "earliest" possible date.
All that means is, at extremes, it was probably written between 180 and 250 CE. The median date would then be 215 CE. That would allow 35 years for a copy of Irenaeus'
Against Heresies, written ca. 180 CE, to get to Egypt.
Lugdunum in Gaul was a *major* stop in the Roman military supply chain for legions active in the north, and Egypt was at the other side of a *major* civilian wheat supply chain that sent countless ships to Rome. Retainers of the elite classes/military officers and private businesspersons/merchants probably traveled along it all the time, where items could exchange hands. "I'll gladly trade you this spare mss of Irenaeus if you give me your copy of that wild & crazy codex with the epistles of Clement and Barnabas!" The other guy says "Do you have that in Latin?"
By the way, maybe I missed it, but who exactly identified P. Oxy 405 with Irenaeus
AH? AH only survives (mostly) complete in Latin, not Greek. If one of the literary fragments of
AH in Greek came even close to the Oxy fragments I think we can be sure that G & H would have quickly identified this fragment. But they admit the identity of the work escapes them. So, someone has had to do some pretty imaginative back translating from Latin to Greek to say "Ahah! This *must* be from Irenaeus
AH!" FWIW, Matt. 3:16 occurs only in
AH 3.9.3. Yet that passage in Matt. was also of interest to Heterodox Christians and Gnostics. A Google search got a lot of hits where this is assumed, but I'm just not seeing where someone gives a name to the person who connected the dots
DCH