Date of P52

On Xtalk today Ken Olson draws attention to an interesting article in Harvard Theological Review by Brent Nongbri of Yale University:

Brent Nongbri, "The Use and Abuse of P⁵²: Papyrological Pitfalls in the Dating of the Fourth Gospel," HTR 98.1 (2005): 23-48

Ken quotes Nongbri's conclusion:

What emerges from this survey is nothing surprising to papyrologists: paleography is not the most effective method for dating texts, particularly those written in a literary hand. Roberts himself noted this point in his edition of P⁵². The real problem is the way scholars of the New Testament have used and abused papyrological evidence. I have not radically revised Roberts's work. I have not provided any third-century documentary papyri that are absolute "dead ringers" for the handwriting of P⁵², and even had I done so, that would not force us to date P⁵² at some exact point in the third century. Paleographic evidence does not work that way. What I have done is to show that any serious consideration of the window of possible dates for P⁵² must include dates in the later second and early third centuries. Thus, P⁵² cannot be used as evidence to silence other debates about the existence (or non-existence) of the Gospel of John in the first half of the second century. Only a papyrus containing an explicit date or one found in a clear archaeological stratigraphic context could do the work scholars want P⁵² to do. As it stands now, the papyrological evidence should take a second place to other forms of evidence in addressing debates about the dating of the Fourth Gospel.

It looks like an important article -- it's a staple of introductory courses on the New Testament that P⁵² provides us with a nice fix-able date in the very early second century that acts as an anchor for a lot of other datings. It looks like people will need to revise those sorts of over-simplistic appeal to over precise attempts to date this fragment.

Update (Thursday, 14.28): Sean the Baptist comments.

Update (Sunday, 1.04): Stephen Carlson has some useful comments on Hypotyposeis.