Dating a manuscript by its handwriting is far fuzzier than it sounds
Palaeographers can often tell roughly when and where a manuscript was written just from the shapes of its letters. Roughly is the key word. Specialists warn against dating a hand more tightly than seventy or eighty years, and one scholar reckoned New Testament fragments need a full century of margin.
Palaeography is the study of old writing systems as they appear in manuscripts: how letters were formed, how scripts changed, how scribes abbreviated to save time and material, and how books were physically produced in scriptoria. Reading the actual content is a secondary aim. The field is usually said to have been founded by Jean Mabillon, whose De re diplomatica of 1681 was the first textbook on the subject, while Bernard de Montfaucon coined the word itself in his 1708 study of Greek scripts.
Its main practical uses are deciphering, authenticating and dating documents, and sometimes working out which copy a translation was made from. Yet handwriting evidence alone is a blunt tool. Experts describe it as a last resort for dates, treat 50 years as the narrowest acceptable window for book hands, and in 2005 Bruce W. Griffin argued that without better methods a 95 percent confidence range for New Testament papyri should span about a hundred years.
Scripts travel and mutate. Aramaic arose in what is now Syria between 1000 and 600 BC and became the trade language of the ancient Middle East, stretching from the Mediterranean to India's borders. It displaced Babylonian cuneiform even in Mesopotamia, and its right-to-left consonantal alphabet, adapted from Phoenician, fathered Hebrew and Arabic writing and also the Brahmi script behind most writing systems of India, Southeast Asia, Tibet and Mongolia. Large numbers of Aramaic papyri survive from Elephantine in Egypt, where writers already left small gaps between words.
Greek handwriting is harder to trace because the evidence is patchy. Before the fourth or fifth century AD scholars depend almost entirely on Egyptian papyri, the earliest reaching back only to the late fourth century BC. Several hands coexisted at any given time: a formal book-hand for literature and a quicker cursive for documents, each with its own varieties, and not all of them survive in equal numbers.
Source: Palaeography
