How Do We know When Manuscripts Were Written? Guest Post by Brent Nongbri

Here is the second post by Brent Nongbri on his recent book God’s Library.    I mentioned in the first of his posts that the book is “ground-breaking.”  In part that’s because he challenges the widely accepted dates of a number of our earliest surviving manuscripts of the New Testament.   Here he talks about his further explorations of this problem.   The basic question: When scholars say “This manuscript dates from the fourth century” (or the second, etc.): how do they *know* that?  Or do th...