It’s interesting that they’re organized by date. On an intuitive level, that makes sense. But so many of the dates are hotly debated, and reorganizing the list would produce such a different impression, that it’s a surprising choice.
I am not a scholar of such things, but a quick glance at the documents I am familiar with suggests that the date ranges represent uncertainty within the compiler’s point of view. That’s reasonable, but when it’s linked out of context it’s not immediately obvious that it doesn’t reflect the range of debate in the broader secular scholarship, let alone secular and conservative religious scholarship taken together. So caveat lector.
That said, the breadth of documents linked here is really impressive.
Historical documents should really have four dates:
1) Oldest full manuscript to be carbon dated (or similarly rigorous scientific dating) 2) Oldest fragments to be carbon dated 3) Oldest citations 4) Estimated date from internal factors within the text
The initial methods would serve as an objective upper bound for age, and the later would give a more accurate subjective view.