Although scrolls were aesthetically pleasing, imagine trying to study the Bible with someone! The Repentance study alone would need the scrolls of 2 Peter, Acts, 2 Corinthians and Mark in its simplest form, and then you have to scroll through to find the reference! Very clumsy. The codex is normally associated with the Christians, scrolls with the Jews. Before this, Scriptures were normally written on a scroll, on one side, although just possibly there were double-sided scrolls. This means it is likely to have been part of a book form, known as the Codex (plural codices). Codex Sinaiticus contains our whole New Testament and is written on parchment. A few manuscripts are written on ostraca, pieces of pottery, but the remainder are written on parchment or vellum, made of animal skin. Papyrus was a widely used writing material made from the papyrus plant that grew in the marshes of the Nile Delta in Egypt. Ninety-nine are fragmentary pieces of papyrus containing one or more passages or books of the New Testament. We have thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament in whole and part. It is beyond the scope of this paper to digress further. There may be a manuscript near you! Douglas Jacoby has listed many of them with their p numbers in the archived material for his column, the Bible on Trial, at under Week 10 The Originals. And no, if someone today gives you your P45, it is more likely you are looking for a new job rather than that you have been handed a priceless manuscript! It was bought in Egypt in 1920 and dated to 100-150 by the same scholar from St John’s, Oxford, C.H. It is quite small, around 2 ½ x 3 ½ inches. It contains five verses of John 18, three verses on one side and two on the other. The oldest manuscript in the world is in Manchester, the John Rylands Papyrus. So this paper will not be the most systematic (as the title indicates), but will break down into the following parts:įor beginners to manuscripts, they are catalogued with a “p” number. Two years and much soul-searching and mental argumentation later, I now feel sufficiently distant from the experience to see false arguments for what they are and confident enough to expose them in a reasoned manner. “If accepted, this date would revolutionise our understanding of the origin of the gospels and just about every other aspect of earliest Christianity.” The debate reminded me of the immense pressure I experienced as a theology student in Cambridge in 1998 to accept liberal ideas concerning the origins of the Holy Scriptures. However, what also came out of the discussion was the question of the implications of an earlier dating. Graham Stanton is a New Zealander, formerly of Kings College when I was a student there doing law.
In short, there is insufficient evidence for a firm conclusion either way on the redating at this stage.
It is hard to have a firm opinion due to the expert knowledge required, for example concerning the shape of certain letters and whether ink has flaked off the papyrus. Then there is the question of the redating. As usual, such a study has brought up a number of related issues which deserve to be commented upon. The manuscript itself merits a paper, regardless of the redating. The librarian, Dr Christine Ferdinand, is not sure she appreciates all the extra visitors! I went to see the papyrus and took the Ministry Teaching Programme students earlier this month. A few years ago a German scholar proposed a redating of the papyrus to the first century, bringing controversy and a pilgrimage of interested parties to Magdalen. It is already the oldest copy of any part of Matthew’s gospel, having been dated c. P64, a parchment manuscript kept in Magdalen College old library. Emily and I moved to Oxford to start the new millennium, and one thing I was eager to see was the controversial “Jesus Papyrus” a.k.a.
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