Assigning a date to Greek literary manuscripts of the Roman era is a difficult task. In some cases, we are lucky enough to have clues that can give us a firm terminus post quem or terminus ante quem, but most of the time, especially with fragmentary Christian manuscripts, we are forced to resort to the inexact art of paleography to assign a date. . . . The bottom line is that if you see reports of dates like “circa 150 CE” or “about the year 200” in reference to an early Christian manuscript, you should be very suspicious. Chances are good that the sources of such reports simply do not understand the complexities of how these manuscripts are dated. These sorts of issues need to be constantly kept in mind as we move on to survey the earliest Christian manuscripts (Brent Nongbri, God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts, 81-82).