How do they scientifically date the manuscripts?
That is a very interesting question. They have tried carbon-14 dating, for instance, but carbon-14 dating is not accurate enough, in the plus or minus range of possibility, to compete with the method of dating them according to the style of the handwriting.
Now, if you are not an expert in these matters, judging dating by handwriting might seem a very hazardous process but, of course, we have large collections of manuscripts from the ancient world in different languages. We have some in Greek going back to times BC, biblical manuscripts indeed, in Greek, and with them we can compare writing in ordinary secular writing. We can then compare it with writing on monuments. That does, of course, tend to be much more formal. And if you lay out a series of manuscripts side by side, you will see how writing styles change.
You could do it with writing in English. In my father's day, children were taught copperplate handwriting in school, and to my father's last days, he wrote, in his letters and ordinary things, copperplate handwriting—beautiful stuff it was. I cannot attain to that glory, and I notice a lot of my contemporaries don't either. The change in style of English writing is obvious. Given enough manuscripts, you can, therefore, allocate manuscripts, not only to their century, but very often to within ten or twenty years.
That is the most common way that they date the ancient manuscripts. There are other ways of dating when manuscripts are dug up and are found in a certain layer of material that can be dated. They know at least that the manuscript was not younger than the rubbish that was eventually placed on top of it, whatever dating that rubbish might provide.
