Papyrus 75

Papyrus 75, is an early Greek New Testament manuscript written on papyrus containing text from the Gospel of Luke 3:18–24:53, and John 1:1–15:8. It is designated by the siglum in the Gregory-Aland numbering of New Testament manuscripts. It is generally described as "the most significant" papyrus of the New Testament to be discovered so far. Using the study of comparative writing styles, it has been traditionally dated to the third century, although some recent studies have provided arguments to consider date ranges into the early fourth century, and not just the third century. It is due to the traditional early dating that the manuscript has a high evaluation, and the fact its text so closely resembles that of the fourth-century Codex Vaticanus (B).
It is currently housed in the Vatican Library in Rome.

Description

The manuscript is a codex, made of papyrus, in single quire format, measuring. It has between 38 and 45 lines per page, containing most of the text of the Gospel of Luke and the beginning of the Gospel of John. It originally contained about 144 pages, 102 which have survived, of which 20 are fragmentary. The papyrus is of a smooth and fine quality, with the verso nearly as smooth as the recto, and feels like hand-woven linen. The writing is a clear and careful majuscule. is one of the earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of Luke, containing most of Luke 3:18-24:53. An unusual feature of this codex is that when the Gospel of Luke ends, the Gospel of John begins on the same page.
It uses a staurogram in Luke 9:23, 14:27, and 24:7.

Text

The Greek text of this codex is considered a representative of the Alexandrian text-type.. Textual critic and biblical scholar Kurt Aland placed it in Category I of his New Testament manuscript text classification system. Category I manuscripts are described as being manuscripts "of a very special quality, i.e., manuscripts with a very high proportion of the early text, presumably the original text, which has not been preserved in its purity in any one manuscript."
The text is closer to Codex Vaticanus than to Codex Sinaiticus. Agreement between and B is 92% in John, and 94% in Luke. It concurs with.
According to Aland, is the key for understanding the primitive textual history of New Testament, but recently palaeographer and religious history scholar Brent Nongbri has argued that though one can not conclusively rule out dating to the late second or early third century, increasing the date range to include the fourth century is just as likely. Accordingly, the similarity of the text in and Codex Vaticanus might be better explained by considering both as products of a sort of textual recension which occurred in the fourth century.

Some notable readings

The manuscript lacks the Pericope of the Adulteress, usually placed in translations at John 7:53–8:11. This omission is supported by: B A C L N T W X Δ Θ Ψ 0141 0211 3 9* 22 33 72 96 97 106 108 123 131 139 157 179* 249 250 253 565 1241 1333 1424 2768 a f l q sy ly pbo bo^pt; Or Hier^mss; plus according to Tischendorf, at least 50 others.
Luke 22:43–44

History

The codex was discovered in the 1950s and once belonged to the Swiss book collector Martin Bodmer. It was sold in 2006 and donated to the Vatican Library, which now refers to the manuscript as "Hanna Papyrus 1 ". The history before its discovery is unknown, but it is generally agreed the codex was originally made and used in Egypt. Evidence for this comes from a piece of papyrus stuck to the back of the codex's leather case, on which there was Coptic writing. Its writing appearance and use of paragraphos to indicate a change of speaker, also points towards an Egyptian provenance.

Date

The codex was originally assigned palaeographically to 175-225 CE by Victor Martin and Rodolphe Kasser. They compared the handwriting to manuscripts P.Oxy. XXI 2293, P.Oxy. XXII 2322, P.Oxy. XXIII 2362, P.Oxy. XXIII 2363, and P.Oxy. XXII 2370. However, in 2016 Brent Nongbri pointed out that all of these manuscripts had themselves been dated by means of comparative handwriting analysis and thus were not useful for establishing a date for P75. Martin and Kasser also drew attention to two more objectively dated manuscripts, but Nongbri pointed out that the scripts of these two pieces do not actually resemble the appearance of the script of P75. He argued that the closest dated comparisons for the script of P75 were P.Herm. 4 and 5, which are from a fourth-century archive. Nongbri also pointed out codicological features of P75 which accorded with manuscripts firmly dated to the fourth century.
An alternative dating of 225–275 was suggested by Eric G. Turner, however he does not appear to have provided any palaeographical parallels for this dating. It is currently dated by the INTF to 200–225 CE. The Leuven Database of Ancient Books, however, assigns P75 to a date of "AD 275-325."