Posted: Apr 25, 2017 9:47 pm
dejuror wrote:
The flaw with your argument is that you must reject all writings dated by Paleography before the 4th century when dating by Paleography is universally accepted.
Leucius Charinus wrote:
But you have just admitted that palaeographical dating estimates are to be universally associated with error bounds, and I have supplied various articles suggesting that it is quite within reason to associate palaeographic dates in the 2nd or 3rd centuries with error bounds that include the 4th century.
Consequently it is not a flawed argument to point out that the Christian writings dated by Paleography before the 4th century may in fact, when a more reasonable error bound is universally applied, be Christian writings from the 4th century.
Your argument is just as flawed as those who put forward the claim that the Jesus story and cult originated in the 1st century before the Fall of the Jewish Temple c 70 CE without the supporting evidence.
Actual ancient manuscripts have been recovered with Jesus stories have been dated by Paleography before the 4th century and none have been dated before c 70 CE.
Again, it must be understood that dating of ancient manuscripts whether by carbon dating or paleography have wide ranges.
See page 845 of dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/radiocarbon/article/viewFile/1537/1541
Leucius Charinus wrote:
Additionally you have not responded to the historical evidence that suggests the rubbish dumps of Oxyrhychus were commissioned in the 4th century when a second city - of "monks" - formed outside the old city walls.
The claim or historical evidence that rubbish dumps of Oxyrhynchus were commissioned in the 4th century does not mean that all the material found were from that time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyrhynchus_Papyri
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a group of manuscripts discovered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by archaeologists including Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt at an ancient rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt (28°32′N 30°40′E, modern el-Bahnasa). The manuscripts date from the 1st to as late as the 7th century AD. They include thousands of Greek and Latin documents, letters and literary works. They also include a few vellum manuscripts, and more recent Arabic manuscripts on paper (for example, the medieval P. Oxy. VI 1006[1]).
It must not be forgotten that virtually all early ancient NT manuscripts were found in Egypt and that Oxyrynchus is also a city of the same place.
At this present time, based on the existing dating of manuscripts and writings attributed to ancient writers, I argue that the Jesus story and cult most likely originated in Egypt and was initiated sometime in the 2nd century or after writings attributed to Philo, Josephus, Pliny the Elder, Tacitus and Suetonius.