Yes. I studied paleography under Leonardo Taran at Columbia. And likewise a year of papyrology with Roger Bagnall. Very valuable training.

To your questions:

1) The formal parlance distinguishes “text” from “manuscript.” The latter is an instantiation of a text. The former is the hypothetical sequence of words that presumably was composed at some time and each manuscript preserves a (possibly edited and often erroneous) copy of a copy of a copy of a…of one of the original ones that would have been copied at original publication.

The autograph, first text put to papyrus or parchment, often from a wax tablet draft, would be first, but then immediately dozens of copies would be made by slaves or scribes to disseminate, and those could already have errors in them, and that would be the first generation of the text, after that copies of them, then copies of those copies, etc.

So, when historians date a text, they are trying to estimate when the text was composed; but when they date a manuscript they are dating when that physical copy was made, i.e. when ink was put to it. Which can be decades or centuries after the original text was composed, and rarely to never from the first run. Every ms. we have is many copying steps removed from the originals; indeed, they are at least one whole editing stage removed (see Three Things and Trobisch).

2) Why dates disagree: because no actual date stamp exists on any of it. No NT text says when it was composed. And no ancient manuscript says when ink was put to it (some medieval mss. do but that’s not common). So we have to guess based on a principle of of terminus ante and post quem: the latest it could have happened, and the earliest it could have happened, between which it could have happened any time, but often scholars will pick the midrange as most likely, on the assumption that it’s statistically more likely in the middle than either end, but that’s not very reliable thinking.

This results in several outcomes: first, apologists want to invent and push everything to an over-early date, so you have to weed through bullshit to find a reliable, objective, fact-based, mainstream dating; second, facts change over time (we learn new things, catch things we missed, new techniques and examples come to light), so dates change over time (and apologists often use decades old scholarship and avoid using the most recent and thus most reliable results, and even non-apologists are unaware of updates in the field and thus report old dates mistakenly); third, disagreements still exist over when to park each terminus, and where in between is “most likely” or if even any is; and finally, really, we should be reporting the most evidence-based terminus as “before then” and not speculate beyond that, and this results in the latest dates being reported, but usually with careful qualifiers (like “before 120” rather than “around 120”), so you have to pay close attention to wording, and telephone games often strip that careful wording out resulting in a misreported date.

For texts, the process is complicated and varies with the evidence available.

For manuscripts, almost always it’s done by script style (the handwriting), based on the observation that scribal school trends changed over time, and you can date a manuscript that way. However, it’s just as inaccurate as carbon dating (+/-50 years or +/-25 at best), and has been “gamed” by apologists requiring corrections over time, where apologists will “claim” the handwriting matches a certain period when, objectively, it does not, or there are too few letters on a scrap to even be claiming to know the style of the writing at all. This is well discussed in Nongbri’s God’s Library where he scolds apologists for this and redates a lot of manuscripts with objective methods, and sometimes Wikipedia has caught up, sometimes it hasn’t, so you will see old dates or new dates, or even really old dates, when only the latest most objectively determined dates should be used.

3) AI is garbage and can never reliably do any of this. When run in bots, it just regurgitates the contradictory bullshit online. When run in isolation on some sort of data metric, it hallucinates and errs a lot, and can’t correctly explain its reasoning (it literally invents a chain of thought on request, which is not the actual evidence or reasoning it used), and always has to be vetted and corrected by expert humans anyway. So there is no way for AI to improve on expert humans in this task. Humans have to identify their objective evidence and why the conclusion follows from it. Only humans know how to do that. AI faking it doesn’t cut it.

4) No extant ms. for the NT is old enough to even be close to date of composition, so dating mss. is never helpful for dating the texts they contain. It’s useful in some extra-biblical cases only.

I’ll add that AI is helping to read ambiguous text on the Herculaneum papyri, but that would be of no use for dating. All it is doing is trying to come up with the most plausible words to fit a string of damaged marks on a burnt papyrus. And even then experts have to “check its work” and fix its mistakes. So all it really does is speed up the guessing game, so experts can skip a certain percentage of false starts and thus do the work faster. But AI could never do the work by itself.

it’s most likely Eusebius and Origen both had what we have in TA

So, you’ve lost me. TA? Do you mean TF?

If so, that was not in Origen. It shows up in the JA sometime after Origen but in the same library, so likely inserted by Pamphilus (his successor) or Eusebius himself (his successor). Besides my peer reviewed studies, see now my remarks here and here.

As far as your theory, it’s too confusing as described. I might need a diagram showing the development sequence you have in mind.

Seperate topic.

Id also like to know if you have textual criticism experience and can explain why manuscript dates differ from proposed dates of (original) composition? And how that difference is calculated and why different people calculate both dates differently? Would AI not be more accurate in comparing texts to others to ascertain a date? And is this comparison to other dated similar manuscripts the only means of producing an “earliest/latest possible date of composition”?

No I’m agreeing they most likely have it as we have it. And I was just going into why I think that may be. I was just asking since it’s most likely Eusebius and Origen both had what we have in TA and is it possible read it as a Naming convention for Christ. Hence Arriving at the conclusion that Josephus didn’t believe Jesus was the Christ. Despite both of them reading TA saying “He was the Christ”. If Origen and everyone around him had TA as we have but took “He was the Christ” as literally just a name distinguishing one Jesus “The Christ” from other Jesuses “not the Christ”

Then it explains the presence of TA even while author not believing he actually was what his popular name said he was. That name being “Jesus, the Christ”. hence the original having “He was the Christ” solely intended as a name….* and not as a statement of Faith/a Testimony. I hope I’m making sense here. Which would explain why 1) the majority of evidence points to an original which had the TA. While 2) at the same Time Origen ignoring it and Stating Josephus didn’t believe Jesus was the Christ.

I don’t understand your qualification.

The question is what they did have.

Which we can tell from extant evidence was not that. Because for there to have been that, it should show up in Eusebius’s other two books (among other indications).

To Clarify. my different interpretation theory posits if they DID have TA as we have it. they likely interpreted “He was the Christ” and “who was called Christ” in similar fashion i.e. solely to distinguish him from the other Jesuses.

HI. I actually realized after rereading your article, the other two books (D.E and Th) would logically have to be policed similarly to CH making my scenario much (much) more unlikely and difficult. I’ll gladly abandon it. However I had said this because exactly zero writers before Eusebius are known to have quoted T.F. from Antiquities. Which will remain incredibly fishy to me even with the unlikelihood of my scenario of why that is. another explanation as to why we don’t have any known Christian apologist who used T.F. in any other work is then needed to explain this apparent lack of evidence before Eusebius. Is it at all possible the readers of JA before Eusebius all read the same thing as Eusebius but interpreted it differently than him (I.E. interpreting “He was the Christ” as a Naming convention. Similar to CH20’s “James, the brother of Jesus *who was called Christ*”) to distinguish him from the other Jesuses (many) he discusses…

Origen’s quotation of JA. CH20.. while not quoting CH18 and even expressly saying Josephus did not believe Jesus was the Christ.

I find these three most likely concerning Origen.

1) Either he read the current JA we have and interpreted it differently.. or he read something without a T.A. at all (he goes out of his way, as a Christian wrier in 250s to mention, in relation to Jesus… a passage on JAMES his brother! omitting completely any other apparently existing passage in JA on Jesus during his time) or with a T.A. section much different to anything we can now guess.

That’s ruled out by the same words being in all three separate books of Eusebius. So your scenario requires someone to have hunted down all the manuscripts of each of the other two books and changed them all to agree with the change made to one manuscript of CH (and then of course they had to police every existing manuscript of CH as well to ensure only the one with their reading survived there as well). That’s simply too improbable to be anywhere near as, much less more than, probable as the far simpler scenarios discussed.

…that a scribe of Eusebius’ CH altered his manuscript of Church Histories from an original reading of JA… to “he was the Christ” and this single manuscript, similar to your theory of the Syriac, was copied by multiple scribes, but diverging from your theory, eventually (intentionally) gained more popularity that the (now impossible to determine) originals surrounding it. (Jerome’s Latin and Michael’s Syriac being *attempts* to produce something akin to or claiming to be the original.

I say this because even the writing of CH at the time it was written, by a Religious, and Political leader of the time. His office now (newly) endorsed by the Emperor. writing as soon as the religion had just been endorsed and promoted by Constantine… I would say written in response to this. for the reasons below:

1)the timing of his writing coinciding exactly with Constantine’s conversion.

2)the first appearance of a “Church Histories” (regardless of it’s author) as a direct parallel (even in the author’s eyes) to the many Official “Histories” written by High ranking political, civil and military officials during earlier pagan times…

3) all to varying degrees, these “Histories, were purposely written during the reigns of moderate emperors to ensure survival of any controversial contents.

I think evidence points to a Eusebius who anticipated the triumph of Constantine’s religion over the state… and specifically aspired to have his work remembered, then, as the first of many, state sanctioned histories of the Church.

with this in mind any of his scribes (or anyone else, a higher authority or in an extreme scenario even Eusebius himself) in pandering to the Authorities has more than enough incentive specifically from the 380 Edict, to embellish an original JA with Christian censorship for Eusebius’ CH. after all the work itself is called “Christian Histories” .

I believe you could add one additional detail. There is also an Armenian translation of Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History made in the early fifth century by Mesrop Mashtots (died in 441) from the Syriac translation, which therefore must have been available already at that time. The Armenian version reads: ”∙Քրիստոս իսկ է նա.” I don’t know Armenian but Քրիստոս means Christ; իսկ means and, but, moreover, as in this case indeed, truly; է is a verb, then the third person singular present tense of եմ, i.e. is; նա means he, she or it. Accordingly it says: “Christ indeed is he”, or rather: ”he is indeed/truly Christ/Messiah.” This translation is confirmed in personal letters by Robert Bedrosian who writes: “The literal sense of the sentence is this: ‘Indeed, He is the one who is the Christ.’”; and by Bert Vaux who writes: “I would translate it literally as ‘he is indeed Christ’.”