ficino wrote:Stuff from Patterson fascinating - thank you, Andrew. Do you have a view on the GJW fragment?
It seems to me that you may be overstating when you say that the C-14 dating is "worthless as evidence for the date of the text itself." Surely the C-14 date is one of the pebbles on the scale that prompts an expert to judge plausibility one way or the other? But what you paste above seems to me too to show that analysis of the writing and its interaction with the writing surface trumps the dating of the writing material.
I think GJW is a forgery, I don't think it has been proved a forgery. (At least not yet.)
I wasn't making a general point about the value of C-14 data. I was arguing that the association of GJW with another fragment that is almost certainly a modern text written on old material, means that proof that the material on which GJW is written is ancient, is not good evidence that the text of GJW is also ancient.
Understood, and agreed. My nitpicking was merely prompted by the thought that the C-14 dating at least establishes that the writing material is not modern. Not that that is such a weighty conclusion; I don't know whether any forger has concocted modern papyrus. Cheers, F
Ancient-looking papyrus doesn't have to be concocted. It can be purchased by anyone close to the antiquities market in Egypt... or on eBay, in cases. (And by ancient-looking, I mean simply ancient.)
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
