Older Than Its Fame, and Still Being Reassessed

When Bell and Skeat first dated the Egerton Papyrus 2 fragments, they reasoned much as C. H. Roberts would when he dated Rylands P52 a few years later: comparing the handwriting to other Egyptian papyri whose dates were independently established. Their original estimate placed the writing in the first half of the second century, which would make Egerton Papyrus 2 a close contemporary of Rylands P52 and one of the very earliest physical witnesses to any gospel tradition, canonical or not, surviving from antiquity.

Later paleographic work has generally pulled that date later, closer to the end of the second century, part of a broader pattern in which early twentieth century papyrologists, working with a smaller comparison set of securely dated documents than scholars have today, tended to date distinctive-looking early Christian hands earlier than more recent analysis supports. The fragments remain genuinely old by any reasonable standard, among the oldest physical evidence for written gospel material anywhere, but the exact decades involved have moved as the comparative evidence base has grown, the same pattern of revision that reshaped confidence in Rylands P52's own famous early date.