The Bodmer Papyrus and the Prologue of St. John's Gospel

Abstract

On the 28th of December I956 The Times printed a photograph of the first thirteen lines of St. John's Gospel from this MS which was acquired recently by the BODMER Library of Geneva. Its date is thought to be about 200 A.D., i.e. at least Ioo years earlier than Codex Vaticanus and its only rival Sinaiticus, which was purchased from the Russians for the British Museum in 1933 for Ioo,ooo. There is extant a precious scrap of papyrus (in JOHN RYLANDS Library) which contains a few words of St. John's Gospel, dated about I30 A.D., but this BODMER papyrus is an even greater treasure, for it is a witness to the text of almost the whole of the Gospel, copied at a date which can hardly be more than Ioo years removed from the original dictation. According to the famous Anti-Marcionite preface, which is preserved only in a few ancient MSS of the Vulgate, but was derived from a Greek document of the middle of the 2nd Century A.D., and ultimately from statements of PAPIAS, this Gospel was written down from John's dictation by the hand of MARCION. This brilliant son of the Bishop of Sinope was soon afterwards excommunicated-as the preface tells usby John; and also by his own father. Half a century later he had become the most famous of heretics. In c. 154 A.D., when, in Rome, he met POLYCARP, the faithful disciple of John and martyr Bishop of Smyrna, he had the impudence to remind him of their former acquaintance; for they had both been pupils of the aged Apostle. Do you not recognise me, Polycarp ? Yes, he replied, I recognise you as the first-born of Satan. This expression is found also in the Epistle of POLYCARP, in close connection with a quotation from the Ist Epistle of St John, which was also directed against the heretical, docetic, opinions of Marcion, who denied Jesus Christ to have come in the flesh and did not acknowledge the witness of the Cross.