This cite puts the earliest surviving Christian text at 410 AD. And not a particularly useful document either.
Can Dopers better this?
Maybe Rylands Library Papyrus P52–
Some scraps from John, sometime second century.
More doubtful, Q75, a shred from the Dead Sea Scrolls.
A good list of the early ones: List of New Testament papyri - Wikipedia
What I find interesting is the factoid that the specifically Christian Mss are almost always in codex form rather than rotuli, which is more typical for everything else. Why the Christians were so keen on the codex is a neat question.
(also, complete copies of Timothy 1 and 2 and John 2 (and a bulk of the rest of the thing) by 350 or so in the Codex Sinaticus)
Note that a lot of early Christian writing is non-Biblical in nature, and some of this predates the earliest canonical-Bible MSS. For example, the Muratorian fragment, a remnant of someone’s writing, enumerates the accepted books of the New Testament at the time, and is customarily dated to ca. 170 CE (range 155-200, though some revisionist scholars claim it to be of 7th century provenance).
I think the key word in the link is “oldest dated Christian text.”
A further link in the article to which this post refers is Found At Last: the World's Oldest Missing Page which contains the comment “In a margin he dated the list November 411.” There are certainly many other older Christian texts, as other posters have pointed out, but it’s not that common for early texts to include the date on which they were written.
If the page that lists the martyrs was penned and added to the book on martyrs at the last minute, wouldn’t that make the rest of the book (which has been at the British Library since 1840) older than this one page?
So how is this new discovery suddenly the oldest dated Christian document if we already have the majority of the older book from which it came?
ETA: I skimmed Grimpen’s post too quickly the first time. I think the answer to my second question lies within his(?) post.
Which is puzzling, as Roman documents (for instance) often refer to years by way of naming the consuls, and we have dates for things like Cicero’s letters to his friend Atticus.
Your post makes sense to me on the surface (I acknowledged it in my previous post), but I took the word “dated” in your post to mean the author put a date on the manuscript:
But the common dating system we now use that’s based on the birth of Christ (Anno Domini) wasn’t develop until 525 AD. What am I missing here? How could he have dated a document to November 411? Was there a different dating system at that time and “November 411” is just a translation? Because if that’s so, Quartz has a valid point about Roman dating.
milquetoast,
The dating system is certainly a pertinent question, but the article to which the link leads doesn’t give me enough information to sort it out. I’d be inclined to assume the modern editor translated whatever dating system the document uses into modern “November 411”. But without more informaton, I can’t be sure.
Quartz raises another interesting question: why don’t more early Christian documents include a date? You’re quite right that official documents, and letters, often do. On the other hand, literary texts often do not include a date. So it might be a result of what kinds of writing have survived from the early Christian community. You’d be more inclined to include a date if the material were time-sensitive; but for something like a Gospel, or some later writing intended to be permanent, I’m not sure a date would be thought helpful. On the other hand, some of the absence of dating may be the result of copying. Most of the early Christian letters which we have, both in the New Testament and later, survive only because they’ve been repeatedly copied and sometimes re-edited. I’m not sure that a date would survive that process.
Yes, let me explicitly refine my OP: I’m after the earliest, original surviving dated Christian text.
Right. Formal legal documents went through the consular formula for dating. But do you normally date your grocery list? Mother’s recipe for pound cake? The lumber list so you can build a doghouse with your son for his new pet? That monograph about the ancestry of the yak? If you had to write out, “on the XVIII day before Christmas in the eighth year of the presidency of George W. Bush, Harper being prime minister of Canada and Schwarzenegger governor of California” instead of “12/07/08” how many documents would you date?
Most documents are dateable by textual analysis; most manuscripts can be dated by either paleographic techniques or radiography. However, it’s relatively rare, before adoption by consensus of a common simple dating tchnique, to find documens inscriped with a date.
Cicero managed it. In Rome they also used AUC dating - Ab Urbe Condita, from the founding of the city - and could date things using a very small script.
According to the BL catalogue, the document is dated ‘in the year of the Greeks 723’, which the BL converts as AD 412, a discrepancy doubtless explained by the two different types of Seleucid-era dates.
What this does not explain is the dating to November.
http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/manuscripts/HITS0001.ASP?VPath=html/10281.htm&Search=12150&Highlight=F