P52, a tiny scrap of papyrus that has been dated only on paleographic grounds and could date anywhere in the second or third century. Naturally, conservative scholars take the earliest possible dating as if it were set in stone.
Brent Nongbri has an article here on why it should not be relied on for dating the New Testament:
https://www.academia.edu/436092/The_Use_and_Abuse_of_P52_Papyrological_Pitfalls_in_the_Dating_of_the_Fourth_Gospel
He makes similar arguments here, noting the affinity between P52 and documents dated even to the early third century:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/new-testament-studies/article/abs/palaeography-precision-and-publicity-further-thoughts-on-pryliii457-p52/1D4E56BF0E9D4DDDA313D0C2754E2F28
Why You Can’t Use P52 For Dating
First, paleographic dating of papyri is never a simple matter. Paleography is a last resort for dating (See, e.g., Eric G. Turner, Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient World (2d rev. ed.; London: Institute of Classical Studies, 1987) 19–23). We would also do well to remember the standard rule of thumb for precision in paleographic dating. Turner writes, “For book hands, a period of 50 years is the least acceptable spread of time” (ibid., 20). Because of the constant accumulation of new evidence, the dating of manuscripts—even more so than other aspects of our discipline—is an ongoing process. The low of new evidence is constant (see Ann Ellis Hanson, “Papyrology: A Discipline in Flux,” in Disciplining Classics—Altertumswissenschaft als Beruf (ed. G. W. Most; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002) 191–206). Second, as Smith’s observation suggests, in early Christian writings there are few early quotations of and allusions to John, and even those few are highly questionable. Scholars were debating the nature of these alleged references to John in early Christian authors until the publication of ∏52 in 1935, when such debates, so scholars thought, had now become moot.
First, as Georg Strecker noted almost ifteen years ago, “there is an urgent need for a new analysis of ∏52 that would objectively set out the pros and cons of a possible dating” (The Johannine Letters: A Commentary on 1, 2, and 3 John (trans. L. M. Maloney; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996) xli n. 78). Second (but outside the purview of this study), we should reopen some of the debates of the early twentieth century that tapered off with the publication of ∏52, namely, debates about the presence (or absence) of references to John in the writings of early Christian authors, both “orthodox” and “non-orthodox”. Titus Nagel has recently reopened some of these questions with his study, Die Rezeption des Johannesevangeliums im 2. Jahrhundert: Studien zur vorirenäischen Aneignung und Auslegung des vierten Evangeliums in christlicher und christlich-gnostischer Literatur (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2000), which examines the possible use of John’s gospel in all manner of Christian literature assigned to the second century. Another noteworthy contribution to this debate came into my hands just as this article went to press, Charles E. Hill’s The Johannine Corpus in the Early Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
The Original Publication of ∏52
In 1920, Bernard P. Grenfell acquired in Egypt, for the John Rylands Library, the lot of papyrus fragments that included P52. The duty of sorting and publishing the papyri accumulated for the Rylands collection fell to the other giant of the early study of papyri, Arthur S. Hunt. Hunt published two volumes of the Catalogue of Greek Papyri in the John Rylands Library in 1911 and 1915. After only a small amount of preliminary work with the remainder of the early material and the newer acquisitions, which included P.Ryl. 3.457, Hunt died in 1934, and Colin H. Roberts took up the task. It was Roberts who identified the fragment containing John 18:31–33 on the recto and 18:37–38 on the verso. An image of P52 is reproduced in Figure 1, along with an adapted version of Roberts’s transcription.
Most recent German scholarship has questioned the date of P52, creating an atmosphere quite distinct from that of Anglo-American scholarship:
Andreas Schmidt has proposed that the similarities between ∏52 and P. Chester Beatty X and III might suggest a considerably later date of around 170 C.E. for ∏52. See his “Zwei Anmerkungen zu P. Ryl. III 457,” APF 35 (1989) 11–12 (for criticism of Schmidt’s work, see nn. 49 and 51, below). Walter Schmithals has commented that ∏52 was probably not written before the end of the second century and “es ist also für die Datierung des JohEv praktisch ohne Wert” (Johannesevangelium und Johannesbriefe. Forschungsgeschichte und Analyse [Berlin: de Gruyter, 1992] 9). Nagel even prefaces his study of the second-century reception of John’s gospel with the following remark: “Wenn der ∏52 seine Funktion als sicherer terminus non post quem in der Diskussion verliert . . . ” (23). The work of R. Alan Culpepper is an exception within recent English-language scholarship in entertaining (albeit briely) the idea of a later date for P52. See his John, the Son of Zebedee: The Life of a Legend (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994) 108. For similar caution about an early date for P52, see Stuart R. Pickering, “Short Notes,” New Testament Textual Research Update 2 (1994) 5–6; Bart D. Ehrman, “The Text as Window: New Testament Manuscripts and the Social History of Early Christianity,” in The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis (ed. Bart D. Ehrman and Michael William Holmes; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995) 371–72 and n. 49; and Larry W. Hurtado, “P52 (P. Rylands Gk. 457) and the Nomina Sacra: Method and Probability,” TynBul 54 (2003) 7 n. 20.
Two reasons suggest the undertaking is necessary:
First, a sizeable amount of evidence has been published since 1935 that no one has brought to bear on the question of dating P52. Second, the publication of P52 occurred very early in Roberts’s life; its publication predated his work on the remainder of the Rylands collection and the rest of his impressive career, although before P52 he had published individual papyri in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology and Aegyptus. On the early career of the precocious Roberts, see the memorial in Proceedings of the British Academy 84 (1994) 479–80. Roberts maintained the second-century date for P52 in his later work, although he did not put forward new evidence. See his The Birth of the Codex, coauthored by T. C. Skeat (London: Oxford University Press, 1987) 40.
Robers points out basically, P52 and its’ features line up with documents occuring even in the late second and third centuries.
