The Text of the Gospel of John in Third-Century Egypt

Abstract

Recent years have seen the startling recovery and the publication of third-century copies of the Greek New Testament text. Some of these early copies are of considerable extent and are surprisingly well preserved. These new acquisitions are highly significant because they provide the textual resources for a fresh approach to the primitive text and the textual history, at a time when research has reached an impasse. All of these new acquisitions are papyrus manuscripts and they offer direct testimony particularly to the text of Egyptian Christianity. Furthermore, these recent acquisitions include substantial texts from the third century, whereas the basic sources for earlier textual studies have been of the fourth century. The two latest acquisitions, of the Bodmer Library in Geneva, contain third-century texts of the Gospel of John and one of the Gospel of Luke, thus providing for the first time two primitive copies of the Gospel of John with substantial overlapping throughout chapters I-I4. It is this new condition that has suggested the present study on the text of the Gospel of John in third-century Egyptian Christianity 1). We possess today about twenty-five papyrus copies of Greek New Testament text which were written as early as A.D. 300. Most of these are only small fragments and, prior to the recent publication of the Bodmer manuscripts P 66 and P 75, these fragments have rarely offered dual testimony to any part of the text. For example, there are four papyrus copies (P I, 37, 45, 53) which contain text in the Gospel of Matthew. Three of these are short fragments and one (Beatty MS P 45) has fragmentary text through six chapters