Rylands Library Papyrus P52
The Rylands Library Papyrus P52, also known as the St John's fragment and with an accession reference of Papyrus Rylands Greek 457, is a fragment from a papyrus codex, measuring only at its widest, and conserved with the Rylands Papyri at the John Rylands University Library Manchester, UK. The front contains parts of seven lines from the Gospel of John 18:31–33, in Greek, and the back contains parts of seven lines from verses 37–38. Since 2007, the papyrus has been on permanent display in the library's Deansgate building.
Although Rylands ? is generally accepted as the earliest extant record of a canonical New Testament text, the dating of the papyrus is still debated. The original editor proposed a date range of 100–150 CE, while a recent exercise by Pasquale Orsini and Willy Clarysse, aiming to generate consistent revised date estimates for all New Testament papyri written before the mid-4th century, has proposed a date for ? of 125–175 CE. A few scholars say that considering the difficulty of fixing the date of a fragment based solely on paleographic evidence allows the possibility of dates outside these range estimates, such that "any serious consideration of the window of possible dates for P52 must include dates in the later second and early third centuries."
The fragment of papyrus was among a group acquired on the Egyptian market in 1920 by Bernard Grenfell, who chose several fragments for the Rylands Library and began work on preparing them for publication before becoming too ill to complete the task. Colin H. Roberts later continued this work and published the first transcription and translation of the fragment in 1935. Roberts found comparator hands in dated papyrus documents between the late 1st and mid 2nd centuries, with the largest concentration of Hadrianic date. Since this gospel text would be unlikely to have reached Egypt before, he proposed a date in the first half of the 2nd century. Roberts proposed the closest match to ? as being an undated papyrus of the Iliad conserved in Berlin; and in the 70 years since Roberts's essay the estimated date of this primary comparator hand has been confirmed as being around 100 CE, but other dated comparator hands have also since been suggested, with dates ranging into the second half of the 2nd century, and even into the 3rd century.
Greek text
The papyrus is written on both sides and hence must be from a codex, a sewn and folded book, not a scroll, roll or isolated sheet; and the surviving portion also includes part of the top and inner margins of the page. The recto consequently preserves the top left corner of a right-hand page; while the verso preserves the top right corner of a left-hand page. The characters in bold style are the ones that can be seen in Papyrus ?. The recto text comes from the Gospel of John 18:31–33:Eleven lines of the text are lost, containing 18:34–36. The text translates as:
The verso text comes from the Gospel of John, 18:37–38:
The text translates as:
There appears insufficient room for the repeated phrase in the second line of the verso, and it is suggested that these words were inadvertently dropped through haplography.
The writing is generously scaled – letter forms vary between in height, lines are spaced approximately apart, and there is a margin of at the top. It can be determined that there were 18 lines to a page. C. H. Roberts commented: "... to judge from the spacing and the size of the text, it is unlikely that the format was affected by considerations of economy". There are no apparent punctuation marks or breathings shown in the fragment; but the diaeresis is applied to an initial iota at both the second line of the recto and the second line of the verso; and possibly too on the first line of the recto. Taken together with the over-scaled writing, this suggests that the manuscript may have been intended for congregational reading. If the original codex did indeed contain the entire text of the canonical Gospel of John, it would have constituted a single quire book of around 130 pages ; measuring approximately when closed. Roberts noted a glued vertical join in the papyrus slightly inside the inner margin and visible on the verso, indicating that the large sheets used for the codex were likely to have been specially prepared for the purpose, each having been constructed from two standard sized sheets measuring approximately, with a central narrower sheet approximately constituting the spine. Roberts describes the handwriting as "heavy, rounded and rather elaborate", but nevertheless not the work of "a practised scribe". Roberts notes comments that had recently been made by the editors of the Egerton Gospel ; and says similarly it could be said of ? that it "has a somewhat informal air about it and with no claims to fine writing is yet a careful piece of work".
In total, 114 legible letters are visible on the two sides of the fragment, representing 18 out of the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet; beta, zeta, xi, phi, chi, and psi being missing. Roberts noted that the writing is painstaking and rather laboured, with instances of individual letters formed using several strokes "with a rather clumsy effect" at line three of the recto, and the eta. Several letters are inclined to stray away from the notional upper and lower writing lines. Another peculiarity is that there are two distinct forms of the letter alpha ; most are formed from a separate loop and diagonal stroke, where the top of the stroke has a distinctive decorative arch while the bottom is hooked; but on the fourth line of the verso there is a smaller alpha formed by a single spiralling loop with no arch or hooks. Also present in two forms is the letter upsilon ; the more common form is constructed from two strokes, each stroke terminating in a decorative hook or finial ; but on the fourth line of the verso is an upsilon formed from a single looped stroke with no decoration. These observations support Roberts's supposition that the scribe was an educated person writing carefully in imitation of a calligraphic hand, rather than a professional scribe writing to order; such that, on occasion, the writer inadvertently reverted to the undecorated letter forms of his everyday hand.
Roberts noted that in addition to alpha and upsilon, other letters also tend to be given decorative hooks, especially iota and omega . He also drew attention to the forms of epsilon , delta and mu . Nongbri confirms Roberts observations, and also notes distinctive forms of rho , pi and kappa . Aside from their sometimes clumsy construction, the sigma and eta are also distinctive in form; the sigma facing fully to the right, and the eta having a distinctive high cross stroke.
In 1977, Roberts surveyed 14 papyri believed to be of Christian origin – 12 codices and two scrolls – comprising all the Christian manuscripts then commonly assessed as likely having a 2nd century date, including ?. He considered that only three of these texts had a calligraphic bookhand, such as was then standard in formal manuscripts of Greek literature, or in most Graeco-Jewish biblical scrolls. Of the other eleven, including ?, he states that their scribes were:
It may be added that the codex of ?, with its good quality papyrus, wide margins, large clear even upright letters, short lines in continuous script, decorative hooks and finials, and bilinear writing, would have presented an overall appearance not far from that of professionally written Christian codices such as ? or ?, even though its actual letter forms are not as fine, and are closer to documentary exemplars.
Date
The significance of ? rests both upon its proposed early dating and upon its geographic dispersal from the presumed site of authorship, traditionally thought to have been Ephesus. As the fragment is removed from the autograph by at least one step of transmission, the date of authorship for the Gospel of John must be at least a few years prior to the writing of ?, whenever that may have been. The location of the fragment in Egypt extends that time even further, allowing for the dispersal of the documents from the point of authorship and transmission to the point of discovery. The Gospel of John is perhaps quoted by Justin Martyr, and hence is highly likely to have been written before c. 160 CE; but 20th century New Testament scholars, most influentially Kurt Aland and Bruce Metzger, have argued from the proposed dating of ? prior to this, that the latest possible date for the composition of the Gospel should be pushed back into the early decades of the second century; some scholars indeed arguing that the discovery of ? implies a date of composition for the Gospel no later than the traditionally accepted date of c. 90 CE, or even earlier.Scepticism about the use of ? to date the Gospel of John is based on two issues. First, the papyrus has been dated based on the handwriting alone, without the support of dated textual references or associated archeology. Secondly, like all other surviving early Gospel manuscripts, this fragment is from a codex, not a scroll. If it dates from the first half of the second century, this fragment would be amongst the earlier surviving examples of a literary codex. The year before Roberts published ?, the British Museum library had acquired papyrus fragments of the Egerton Gospel which are also from a codex, and these were published in 1935 by H. Idris Bell and T.C. Skeat. Since the text of ? is that of a canonical gospel, the Gospel of John, whereas that of the Egerton Gospel is not, there was considerable interest amongst biblical scholars as to whether ? could be dated as the earlier of the two papyri.
Colin Roberts
? is a literary text and, in common with almost all such papyri, has no explicit indicator of date. Proposing a date for it ultimately required comparison with dated texts, which tend to be in documentary hands. Nevertheless, Roberts suggested two undated literary papyri as the closest comparators to ?: P. Berol. 6845 which he suggested is "the closest parallel to our text that I have been able to find, a view that I was glad to find shared by so great an authority as Sir Frederic Kenyon"; and P.Egerton 2 itself, which was then estimated to date around 150 CE. Roberts stated that in the Egerton Gospel, "most of the characteristics of our hand are to be found, though in a less accentuated form"; and he particularly noted similar forms of upsilon, mu and delta.Establishing the Berlin Iliad P. Berol 6845 as a comparator was key to Roberts proposing an early 2nd century date as plausible for ?; as the Berlin papyrus had been dated to the end of the first century by Wilhelm Schubart, in a landmark papyrological study which demonstrated the close similarity of its hand to that of P. Fayum 110, a personal letter, but written by a professional scribe in a "literary type" hand and with an explicit date of 94 CE. In proposing a date of around the middle of the second century for P. Egerton 2, Skeat and Bell had also relied on comparison with P.Fayum 110; together with Abb 34, a letter in a documentary hand of the time of Trajan; and P.Lond. 1.130, a horoscope of late first or early second century date. The Berlin Iliad has since been re-edited in the light of more recent discoveries, but confirming Schubart's conclusions as to its dating around 100 CE, and its close relationship to the dated literary type hand of P.Fayum 110; and it remains a primary exemplar of a particularly distinctive form of first/early second century CE calligraphic book hand. Roberts in turn was also to advance P. Fayum 110 and Abb 34 as dated comparators to ?, identifying P. Fayum 110 as the "most important parallel" he could find among dated documents, and noting in particular that both of these showed the same two forms of alpha in simultaneous use. Nongbri notes other instances where the letter forms in P. Fayum 110 are a closer match to those in ? than are the counterpart forms in P. Berol 6845; specifically delta, pi, rho and epsilon. In his later career, Roberts reasserted the close resemblance of P. Fayum 110 to both ? and P. Egerton 2.
Roberts also proposed two further dated papyri in documentary hands as comparators for ?: P. London 2078, a private letter written in the reign of Domitian, and P. Oslo 22, a petition dated 127 CE; noting that P. Oslo 22 was most similar in some of the more distinctive letter forms, e.g. eta, mu and iota. Roberts circulated his assessment to Frederic G. Kenyon, Wilhelm Schubart and H. I. Bell; all concurred with his dating of ? in the first half of the 2nd century. Kenyon suggested another comparator in P. Flor 1. 1, a loan contract dated 153 CE; but Roberts did not consider the similarity to be very close, other than for particular letters, as the overall style of that hand was cursive. In the same year 1935, Roberts's assessment of date was supported by the independent studies of A. Deissmann, who, while producing no actual evidence, suggested a date in the reigns of Hadrian or even Trajan. In 1936 the dating was supported by Ulrich Wilcken on the basis of a comparison between the hand of ? and those of papyri in the extensive Apollonius archive which are dated 113–120.