Subject: More C-14

From: Timothy John Finney <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Aug 1996 12:24:39 +0800 (WST)

Sorry to mention C-14 in the first place. The comment about the testing 
the ink was interesting, but I don't think many curator's would take 
kindly to someone scraping all the ink off as many pages as it takes to 
get the required sample size. But there are other less destructive 
procedures you could do to get some useful information from early NT mss.

1) Fluorescent spectroscopy to determine ink composition.
2) Create an 'image cube' of particularly important mss. E.g. Codex 
Ephraemi Rescriptus (04) to try to recover the underlying text. An image 
cube is a set of narrow wavelength band images of the same think. The 
procedure is described by Gregory H. Bearman and Sheila I. Spiro in their 
article 'Archaeological applications of advanced imaging techniques', 
_Biblical Archaeologist_, 59:1 (1996).
3) Get a pollen sample from the ms (use a clean piece of sticky tape, 
press it on, pull it off and you have a pollen sample). Give this to 
someone with an electron microscope and they might be able to tell you 
where in the world it came from. I have no idea how reliable this test is.

All of these procedures would be expensive. I think the second one is the 
most promising.

Tim Finney

[email-masked]
Baptist Theological College
and Murdoch University
Perth, W. Australia