Reply #13: Don't ask me, ask a real classicist

[Lydia Leftcoast]

There should be some on DU somewhere. In fact, I know there is, although I can't remember his/her username. Such a person would have the facts about ancient manuscripts. The one classicist I know offline at the moment is out of the country for the next month.

Having dated a classicist in an earlier life, I remember him talking about how some of the poems of Sappho were discovered in Egypt, where they had been used to wrap mummies of animals. This is not surprising, since Egypt had a huge Greek-speaking population at one time.

Whatever the dates of any given Greek or Latin manuscript, philologists (scholars who study the language and provenance of original historical manuscripts) can tell a lot from their style of language. A manuscript may be of relatively recent origin, but still contain very ancient language. The Greek found in Homer or the writings of Plato is more conservative than the Greek of the New Testament era (centuries later) and even less like the Greek of the Byzantine Empire.

It's even been shown that Paul didn't write all the letters attributed to him, because "the" Paul had a very distinctive writing style in Greek, and some of the letters, such as the letters to Timothy, are written in an entirely different style.

By the way, I did some Googling for the earliest dates of various classical authors, and the only citations I could find were from evangelical sites. I tried "oldest Greek manuscript" and got pages and pages of theological sites.