Well people will disagree about how the one bit of evidence is to be interpreted, how it is to be dated, etc. And how it fits into the overall pattern of evidence for the epoch.
I look at a very broad spectrum of all sorts of different evidence from the 4th century and the earlier centuries. All of the texts in the NHL and the NT Apocrypha for example. The political histories, the philosophical literature, the coins, scientific and medical literature, geography, everything I can find. The nomina sacra fit into this bigger picture somehow like a piece of the jigsaw puzzle fits into the overall 4D picture. They are supposed to be a distinctive - almost trade mark - feature of Christian literature.The completeness of superlinears seems to be a solid indication of their maturity / development - and that is my motivation of what I see in this evidence. What's yours?
I would assume that the scriptoria and the people involved in the production of the imperially sponsored NT Bible Codex were not the same scriptoria and the people involved in the production of the NHL. The former were the orthodoxy. The latter were the heretics. That's how I look at the evidence at the moment.
I have attempted to draw a map of this evidence here:
Evidence Map: Chronology of the components of Christian Literature
https://www.academia.edu/78665273/Evide ... Literature
I came across it on VridarCan you provide Magne's elaboration here? As it is unclear to me what he means with this opinion
https://vridar.org/2018/10/01/enticed-b ... mythicist/
Apart from archeological evidence, the only facts we can attain are the texts. We must therefore reason about the texts that relate facts, not about the facts related by the texts.
(Magne, p. 23)
My search for the author of that epigraph eventually led me to the following explanation.
- Dom Maerten’s criticism highlighted the difference which exists between the historical method based on authentic, dated documents and the critical method which, like an archeologist when he excavates, has to distinguish between the various redactional layers in biblical or liturgical documents. Errors of syntax are one of the means of reconstructing the prehistory of a text in order to attain History. The historian’s shortcoming lies in his frequent inability to distinguish between two literary genres : works that have an author and works of living literature where each generation has added its contribution.