Quote:
Originally Posted by Bagor
Is carbon dating used here as an initial step when considering authenticity?
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Sometimes, yes. But there are two problems here:
First, most of the manuscript fragments in my research are either simply too small to carbon date, or their owners are far too reticent to allow it to happen. There is presently an ambitious research project in the Netherlands to have 100-or-so of the actual Dead Sea Scrolls re-tested using C-14, but the Israel Antiquities Authority who owns most of the DSS has fought this at every turn for precisely this reason: carbon dating is destructive, and the scrolls are already deteriorating quite rapidly. The common procedure is to date uninscribed sections of the material, but with very small fragments it is nearly impossibly to find suitable points for testing.
Second, C-14 dating is of limited use, because it can tell us only about the age of the media—NOT the date of inscription. For example, two recently revealed controversial manuscripts have both been carbon dated. The so-called "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" fragment is a forgery, and when it was C-14 tested came through with an expected date. The carbon-dating was trumpeted by some scholars and in the media as proof that the fragment was ancient. Similarly so for the "Jerusalem papyrus." It was carbon dated and yielded a date in the mid–late first millennium B.C.E. But again, this fragment is also probably a forgery that we can demonstrate on the basis of palaeographical anomalies and syntactical anachronisms. This last one is an important fragment since if authentic would contain the earliest mention of Jerusalem and a Hebraic Jewish kingdom written in Hebrew. It was recently marshalled by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu in a fiery speech laced with Zionistic rhetoric against the UNESCO resolution of 26 October 2016 which identified Israel as an "occupying power" in the West Bank.
The fact of the matter is that forgers have long realized the need to produce objects in close correspondence to their claimed ancient milieu. I suspect that if all of the MOTB fragments were C-14 dated they would yield dates in the late first B.C.E. and early first C.E. centuries. I would not find these tests convincing, since I suspect that the forgers used ancient materials in the first place.