The original documents of the New Testament, the letters Paul dictated and the Gospels as their authors finished them, are long gone. The oldest copies we have are written on papyrus, almost all found in Egypt, and most of them are fragments. They are called the New Testament papyri, and they are numbered with a P (often written in a Gothic letter) followed by a number, in the order in which they were catalogued: P1, P2, and so on. More than 140 have been registered by the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Münster, which keeps the official list.

This article introduces the most important of them, explains how they are dated, and asks what they can and cannot tell us.

P52: the famous fragment

In 1934, a young scholar named Colin Roberts was sorting through papyri bought in Egypt for the John Rylands Library in Manchester. He found a small fragment, about 9 by 6 centimetres, written on both sides. On one side were parts of John 18:31–33, Pilate’s words to the Jewish leaders; on the other, parts of John 18:37–38, Pilate’s question “What is truth?”

Roberts published it in 1935 and dated it, by comparing its handwriting with dated documents, to the first half of the second century. Other leading papyrologists agreed. P52, as it was numbered, became famous as the oldest known fragment of the New Testament, and as evidence that John’s Gospel, usually dated to the 90s CE, had reached Egypt and was being copied within a few decades of being written.

That claim is still often repeated, but it needs care. In 2005, Brent Nongbri re-examined the handwriting comparisons and argued that the script of P52 has close parallels in documents from the later second and even early third centuries. A date of “around 125 CE,” he concluded, is possible but cannot be insisted on. In 2012, Pasquale Orsini and Willy Clarysse, in a review of the dates of all the early New Testament manuscripts, placed P52 in the range 125–175 CE. P52 remains one of the earliest New Testament manuscripts, perhaps the earliest, but it should be described as “second century,” not as precisely dated.

How papyri are dated

This leads to an important point. Very few early manuscripts carry a date. Scholars date them mainly by palaeography, the study of handwriting. Handwriting styles change over time, so an undated literary hand can be compared with dated documents (letters, contracts, receipts) written in similar styles.

Palaeography is a real skill and gives real results, but it has limits. Scribes trained in one period might go on writing the same way for decades; styles overlap; and literary hands change more slowly than documentary ones. Most specialists today think palaeographic dates should normally be given as a range of fifty years or more, and Nongbri, in God’s Library (2018), urges even wider ranges. Other evidence can help: where and with what the manuscript was found, the format of the book, and occasionally radiocarbon dating, though that requires destroying a small piece and also gives a range.

So when you read that a manuscript dates from “around 200 CE,” read it as “probably sometime in the late second or third century.” That is still very early by the standards of ancient literature.

The Chester Beatty papyri

In the early 1930s, the American mining magnate and collector Alfred Chester Beatty acquired a group of papyrus codices from the antiquities market in Egypt. They included three of the most important early New Testament manuscripts, published by Frederic Kenyon from 1933 to 1937. Most are now in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, with some leaves in Michigan and Vienna.

  • P45 is a codex of the four Gospels and Acts, from the third century. Only parts of thirty leaves survive, of an original 220 or so. It shows that the four Gospels were already bound together in one book, along with Acts.
  • P46 is a codex of the letters of Paul, usually dated around 200 CE. Eighty-six leaves survive, about three-quarters of the original. It contains Romans, Hebrews, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians and 1 Thessalonians, in that order. Placing Hebrews right after Romans shows that the early church in Egypt counted it among Paul’s letters. The pastoral letters (1–2 Timothy and Titus) seem not to have been included, though the missing leaves make this uncertain.
  • P47 contains part of Revelation, from the third century.

The Bodmer papyri

In the 1950s, the Swiss collector Martin Bodmer acquired another remarkable collection of papyri from Egypt, probably from the same find in Upper Egypt. They include:

  • P66, a codex of John, usually dated around 200 CE, preserving most of the first fourteen chapters. Its scribe made many mistakes and corrected many of them, which makes it a valuable window into how copying was done.
  • P72, from the third or fourth century, the earliest known copy of 1 and 2 Peter and Jude, bound in a miscellaneous codex with other Christian writings.
  • P75, a codex of Luke and John, usually dated around 175–225 CE. It is carefully written, and its text is extremely close to that of Codex Vaticanus, copied more than a century later.

P75’s agreement with Vaticanus was one of the most important discoveries of twentieth-century New Testament scholarship. Before it was found, some scholars thought the text of Vaticanus was the result of a fourth-century scholarly revision. P75 showed that the same text had already existed, and been copied accurately, more than a century earlier. In 2007, P75 was given to the Vatican Library, where it now sits near Vaticanus itself.

Like P52, P66 and P75 have been re-examined. Nongbri has argued that both could be as late as the fourth century. Other scholars defend the traditional dates. The debate is a healthy one, and it is a good reason not to overstate the precision of any one date.

The Oxyrhynchus papyri

Many smaller papyri come from Oxyrhynchus, the Egyptian town whose ancient rubbish heaps were excavated from 1896 by Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt. The Oxyrhynchus collection, mostly in Oxford, is still being published, volume by volume, more than a century later. Its New Testament fragments include some of the earliest copies of Matthew, John, Romans, Hebrews and Revelation.

A warning: the “first-century Mark”

In 2012, it was announced in public debates and talks that a fragment of Mark’s Gospel dating from the first century had been found, and would soon be published. The claim spread widely. When the fragment was finally published in 2018, as P137 (P.Oxy. 83.5345), its editors dated it to the later second or early third century. It is a valuable early fragment, but it is not from the first century. Investigations that followed raised serious questions about how some Oxyrhynchus papyri had been handled and sold.

The lesson is simple: claims about sensational early manuscripts should wait for publication by qualified editors and for scholarly review. The evidence we already have is strong enough that it never needs to be exaggerated.

What the papyri tell us

Taken together, the early papyri show several things.

  • Early spread. By around 200 CE, and in some cases earlier, copies of the Gospels, Acts, Paul’s letters and other books were being read and copied in Egypt, far from where they were written.
  • Collections. The four Gospels were bound together, Paul’s letters were bound together, and Gospels were bound with Acts.
  • Textual stability. The text of the early papyri, though it contains the usual copying errors and a variety of readings, is recognisably the same text found in the later manuscripts. Scholars who have studied it, such as the contributors to The Early Text of the New Testament (2012), find no evidence of a radically different early form of the New Testament books.
  • Valuable readings. In particular passages, the papyri support one reading over another, and they are among the most important witnesses in the critical editions on which modern translations are based.

The papyri do not take us all the way back to the authors. There is still a gap, though a short one, between the writing of the books and the earliest copies. That gap is bridged not by any one manuscript, but by the agreement of many independent witnesses, as later articles in this series explain.

Sources

  • Hill, Charles E., and Michael J. Kruger, eds. The Early Text of the New Testament. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
  • Kenyon, Frederic G. The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri. 8 fascicles. London: Emery Walker, 1933–1958.
  • Nongbri, Brent. “The Use and Abuse of P52: Papyrological Pitfalls in the Dating of the Fourth Gospel.” Harvard Theological Review 98 (2005): 23–48.
  • Nongbri, Brent. God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.
  • Orsini, Pasquale, and Willy Clarysse. “Early New Testament Manuscripts and Their Dates: A Critique of Theological Palaeography.” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 88 (2012): 443–474.
  • Roberts, C. H. An Unpublished Fragment of the Fourth Gospel in the John Rylands Library. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1935.
  • Royse, James R. Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri. Leiden: Brill, 2008.
  • Institute for New Testament Textual Research (INTF), Kurzgefasste Liste online: ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/liste.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article gives its own literal rendering.