P52 Update

I had an unpleasant experience with a particular evangelical yesterday. I wrote my response to his ugliness and now it is out of my system. It would be easy for me to say that 'I hate' evangelicals or 'hate Protestants' or some such nonsense. That is what these conservative types want - i.e. to divide us into camps where he hate one another.

I do not hate evangelicals. Let's make this absolutely clear. This sort of thing gets circulated on the internet all the time about me merely because I ask questions.

But what are his motivations for asking these questions? Honestly, it's a kind of disease I think. I used to ask silly questions to myself if I 'got lucky' with a woman I met in a bar.

Why is she doing this? What if I get her pregnant? I guess that explains why I am not a good lover. At least that's my story and I am sticking to it.

In any event I want to make clear that I do not have 'an ax to grind' against any faith. I like thinking. I like letting my mind wander and see where I end up. I was introduced to philosophy at a very young age and it corrupted me.

In any event I want to say that I certainly do not hate evangelicals. One of my aunts (on my father's side) is born again. Another of my aunt's has evangelical leanings (although she is into new age stuff as well). My Armenian orthodox uncle (through marriage) read my book and loved it. My wife is Catholic and her mother who goes to church every Sunday read my book and love it.

The bottom line is that I don't hate Christians. Anyone who has a sincere interest in truth-seeking will at least like my book. I ask a lot of questions and come up with some - but not all - the answers.

In any event I had an evangelical come to my rescue in the Yahoo Textual Forum which I post ideas. The point is that a real truth seeker divorces the person promoting the idea from the idea itself.

I was pleasantly surprised that James Snapp, who I had directed some of my childishness against a few months ago defended my idea that the P52 fragment could possibly be a Diatessaron fragment rather than the earliest example of the gospel of John. Here is what he wrote (ML is the name of another evangelical who rejected my identification in the post which proceeds James's):

Setting aside the "supergospel" stuff and the "Throne of Mark" stuff and the "Agrippa as Messiah" stuff that Stephan currently promotes, if we isolate the question that pertains to textual criticism, it amounts to this: could P52 be a fragment of Tatian's Diatessaron instead of a fragment of the Gospel of John?

And I think the answer is a very qualified yes: if we accept the earliest possible date for Tatian's composition of the Diatessaron, and the latest possible date for the production of P52 (cf. Nongbri's essay, as AnneMarie already advised), then P52 could conceivably be a fragment from the Diatessaron. The chunk of John 18 that appears in the Diatessaron is so big that a small portion of it would be indistinguishable from an identically small portion of the Gospel of John.

You wrote, "The dating of P52, for example, is dated to be approximately 50 years older (from our perspective) than the Diatessaron. If you move the date of P52 to 180, then you move the date of the Diatessaron the same distance (from 160 to 215)."

No no no; if the date of P52 is reassigned to 180, nothing happens to the production-date of Tatian's Diatessaron. We just have a scribe whose script was not up-to-date. The date of the Diatessaron' s production (c. 172) does not move. (Morna Hooker gave the Diatessaron a date of 140, but I think that was either a typographical error or plain carelessness; I don't think she would try to defend that.)

ML: "The date of P52 is pretty secure at AD 125."

No it's not; see my earlier posts (via the Search Posts feature) in which I recommended Nongbri's essay. A scribe's handwriting tends to stay the same throughout his career. How long was the career of a typical scribe? Just 25 years? 30 years? Maybe 50 years if he was healthy. It is convenient to picture scribes with 25-year-long careers, but 50-year-long careers are a real possibility. And that implies that palaeographically determined estimates of production-dates (in cases in which there is nothing else to go on) must be considered capable of varying by as much as /50/ years plus or minus, not just /25/ years plus or minus, even though that is a convenient way of framing the more /probable/ range.

Meanwhile, while the /possibility/ that P52 is a fragment of Tatian's Diatessaron cannot be completely ruled out, it is *extremely* more probable that P52 is a fragment of John than of anything else. Anytime before the production of Tatian's Diatessaron, P52 has to be John. And if we stretch P52's production-date to 180, then we have to ask if it is more likely to be part of a text that had been circulating already for about 80 years, or part of a text that had been circulating for about eight years (and which might have been first made in Syriac)?

For a nice survey of evidence that the Gospel of John was already in existence in the early 100's, see Ezra Abbott's "The Authorship of the Fourth Gospel: External Evidences" which is available at Google Books.

Yours in Christ,

James Snapp, Jr.

The point is that I am not just praising James' objectivity merely because he is putting forward qualified support for my observation (although this is what I would think if I were someone else reading my post). The point is that he is different from other people in the forum who merely attack a new line of inquiry merely because it has damaging repercussion for your world view.

Yes, one can notice that James has to still put forward ways to support the idea that we don't P52 to continue promoting an early date for John. But really that is his right.

I have theories that I have a personal investment in and if I saw someone bringing forward something which contradicted them I too would be quietly searching for ways to 'rescue' my ideas.

That's only human.

But the point of this post is to recognize that this isn't a war between 'man of faith' and 'the godless.' Of course for some people it is. I can't change that. I am guilty of making bombastic and downright silly statements on a regular basis.

I guess, what I am saying is that we have to resist the temptation to 'raise the temperature' to the point that we lose sight of what we all - whether we count ourselves among the pious, the atheist or the agnostic - are supposed to be after.

By this I mean of course, the truth.