Editing Palaeography (section)

=== Document dating ===
Palaeography may be employed to provide information about the date at which a document was written. However, "paleography is a last resort for dating" and, "for book hands, a period of 50 years is the least acceptable spread of time"<ref>{{cite book |last=Turner |first=Eric G. |year=1987 |title=Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient World |edition=2nd |place=London |publisher=Institute of Classical Studies }}</ref><ref name="nongbri24">{{cite journal |url=http://people.uncw.edu/zervosg/papyrology/nongbri%20p52%20misuse.pdf |last=Nongbri |first=Brent |year=2005 |title=The Use and Abuse of P52: Papyrological Pitfalls in the Dating of the Fourth Gospel |journal=Harvard Theological Review |volume=98 |pages=23–48 (24) |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150216200012/http://people.uncw.edu/zervosg/papyrology/nongbri%20p52%20misuse.pdf |archive-date=16 February 2015 |doi=10.1017/S0017816005000842 |s2cid=163128006 |accessdate=21 November 2014 }}</ref> with it being suggested that "the 'rule of thumb' should probably be to avoid dating a hand more precisely than a range of at least seventy or eighty years".<ref name="nongbri24" /> In a 2005 e-mail addendum to his 1996 "The Paleographical Dating of P-46" paper Bruce W. Griffin stated "Until more rigorous methodologies are developed, it is difficult to construct a 95% confidence interval for &#91;[[New Testament]]&#93; manuscripts without allowing a century for an assigned date."<ref>Griffin, Bruce W. (1996), [http://www.biblical-data.org/P-46%20Oct%201997.pdf "The Paleographical Dating of P-46"]</ref> [[William Schniedewind]] went even further in the abstract to his 2005 paper "Problems of Paleographic Dating of Inscriptions" and stated: "The so-called science of paleography often relies on [[circular reasoning]] because there is insufficient data to draw precise conclusion about dating. Scholars also tend to oversimplify diachronic development, assuming models of simplicity rather than complexity".<ref name="Schniedewind, William M. 2005">{{cite book |last=Schniedewind |first=William M. |author-link=William Schniedewind |year=2005 |chapter=Problems of Paleographic Dating of Inscriptions |editor1-first=Thomas |editor1-last=Levy |editor2-first=Thomas |editor2-last=Higham |title=The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating: Archaeology, Text and Science |publisher=Routledge |isbn=1-84553-057-8}}</ref>