Oxyrhynchus Papyri are currently housed in institutions all over the world. The most recent published volume was Vol. This is thought to represent only 1 to 2% of what is estimated to be at least half a million papyri still remaining to be conserved, transcribed, deciphered and catalogued. Since 1898, academics have collated and transcribed over 5,000 documents from what were originally hundreds of boxes of papyrus fragments the size of large cornflakes. Texts in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac and Pahlavi have so far represented only a small percentage of the total. Īlthough most of the papyri were written in Greek, some texts written in Egyptian ( Egyptian hieroglyphics, Hieratic, Demotic, mostly Coptic), Latin and Arabic were also found. Most of the papyri found seem to consist mainly of public and private documents: codes, edicts, registers, official correspondence, census-returns, tax-assessments, petitions, court-records, sales, leases, wills, bills, accounts, inventories, horoscopes, and private letters. Only an estimated 10% are literary in nature. The manuscripts date from the time of the Ptolemaic (3rd century BC) and Roman periods of Egyptian history (from 32 BC to the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 640 AD). The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a group of manuscripts discovered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by papyrologists Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt at an ancient rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt ( 28☃2′N 30☄0′E / 28.533°N 30.667☎ / 28.533 30.667, modern el-Bahnasa). They believe that “all Scripture is inspired of God.” ( 2 Timothy 3:16) Nonetheless, how reassuring it is when priceless gems from the past confirm what the Bible has said all along: “The saying of Jehovah endures forever”! - 1 Peter 1:25.Class=notpageimage| Site where the Oxyrhynchus Papyri were discovered Excavations at Oxyrhynchus 1, c. True, Christians do not base their faith on archaeological finds. In his book The Bible as History, Werner Keller concluded: “These old are the most convincing answer to all doubts as to the genuineness and reliability of the text that we have in our Bibles today.” Of course, the Rylands fragment of John’s Gospel is but one piece of evidence among the thousands of fragments and manuscripts that confirm the reliable transmission of the original Bible text. The Rylands fragment thus shows that the Bible has not been altered despite being copied and recopied over time. Though the fragment contains just a few verses from John’s Gospel, its contents agree almost exactly with what we read today in our own copies of the Bible. Thus, the Gospels were copied over and over again, and this no doubt contributed to the rapid growth of Christianity.Ī second reason why the Rylands fragment is important to us today is that it reveals how reliably the original Bible text was transmitted. The codex also made it easier for congregations and individuals to make their own copies of the Scriptures. ( Acts 5:42 17:17 20:20) So having access to the Scriptures in a compact format was much more practical. ( Matthew 24:14 28:19, 20) They spread the Bible’s message wherever they could find people -in homes, in marketplaces, and on the street. What were the advantages of the codex over the scroll? Well, the early Christians were evangelizers. A codex was made from sheets of parchment or papyrus that were sewn together and folded in a format resembling a book. This suggests that it came from a codex rather than a scroll. However, the tiny fragment that Roberts discovered has handwriting on both sides. In most cases, only one side of a scroll was used for writing. This sheet could then be rolled up and unrolled whenever needed. Scrolls were pieces of papyrus or parchment that were pasted or stitched together to form one long sheet. In the second century C.E., written text came in two formats -the scroll and the codex. Why is this fragment of John’s Gospel so important to lovers of the Bible today?
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