Sunni Apologist Hadith Fragment (AP 259) Dishonesty

In a recent debate with Sunnis on Discord, some individuals cited a scholarly paper to claim proof of hadith manuscripts from the first century Hijri. In their typical fashion, rather than sending a link to the article, they only sent a screenshot of the article’s first page, underlining a single sentence:

“The date of this text, based on paleography, can be placed in the first two Islamic centuries (7th–8th centuries C.E.).”

From this, they triumphantly concluded that this was definitive proof of written hadith from the first century. However, this selective citation represents a profound misunderstanding—or deliberate misrepresentation—of the scholarly evidence, making it appear as if the article says something fundamentally different from its own conclusion regarding the dating of the text.

The Scholar’s Actual Conclusion

The paper in question is “ A Ḥadīth Fragment on Papyrus” by Petra M. Sijpesteijn, published in Der Islam 92, no. 2 (2015): 321-331. The fragment is designated as A.P. 00259 (R/V), and when we examine the full study rather than a decontextualized sentence, the evidence points in an entirely different direction.

The person sharing this screenshot highlighted and underlined this one sentence but failed to share the rest of the article, which would have undermined their entire argument. Far from supporting claims of first-century dating, Sijpesteijn explicitly states her conclusion, “T he papyrus can roughly be dated to the second/eighth-early third/ninth century.”