page_title: Egerton Gospel
section_title: Dating the manuscript
hierarchical_section_title: Egerton Gospel / Dating the manuscript
caption_attribution_description: English: A fragment of the Egerton Gospel. Papyrus collection of the University of Cologne, Papyrus Köln 255 (P. Köln 255 or P. Köln VI 255).
context_page_description: The Egerton Gospel refers to a collection of three papyrus fragments of a codex of a previously unknown gospel, found in Egypt and sold to the British Museum in 1934; the physical fragments are now dated to the very end of the 2nd century CE. Together they comprise one of the oldest surviving witnesses to any gospel, or any codex. The British Museum lost no time in publishing the text: acquired in the summer of 1934, it was in print in 1935. It is also called the Unknown Gospel, as no ancient source makes reference to it, in addition to being entirely unknown before its publication.
context_section_description: The date of the manuscript is established through paleography alone. When the Egerton fragments were first published its date was estimated at around 150 CE; implying that, of early Christian papyri it would be rivalled in age only by ⁵², the John Rylands Library fragment of the Gospel of John.  Later, when an additional papyrus fragment of the Egerton Gospel text was identified in the University of Cologne collection (Papyrus Köln 255) and published in 1987, it was found to fit on the bottom of one of the British Library papyrus pages.  In this additional fragment a single use of a hooked apostrophe in between two consonants was observed, a practice that became standard in Greek punctuation at the beginning of the 3rd century; and this sufficed to revise the date of the Egerton manuscript. This study placed the manuscript to around the time of Bodmer Papyri ⁶⁶, c. 200; noting that Eric Turner had confirmed the paleographic dating of ⁶⁶ as around 200 CE, citing use of the hooked apostrophe in that papyrus in support of this date.
  The revised dating for the Egerton Papyrus continues to carry wide support.  However, Stanley Porter has reviewed the dating of the Egerton Papryus alongside that of ⁵²; noting that the scholarly consensus dating the former to the turn of the third century and the latter to the first half of the second century was contra-indicated by close paleographic similarities of the two manuscripts. The 1987 redating of the Egerton Papyrus had rested on a comment made by Eric Turner in 1971 "in the first decade of III AD this practice (of using an apostrophe between two consonants, such as double mutes or double liquids) suddenly becomes extremely common, and then persists.".  Porter notes that Turner had then nevertheless advanced several earlier dated examples of the practice from the later second century, and one (BGU III 715.5) dated to 101 CE.  Porter proposes that, notwithstanding the discovery of the hooked apostrophe in P. Köln 255, the original editors' proposal of a mid second century date for the Egerton Papyrus accords better with the paleographic evidence of dated comparator documentary and literary hands for both ⁵² and this papyrus "the middle of the second century, perhaps tending towards the early part of it".
caption: Papyrus Köln 255, University of Cologne.
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