Rylands Library Papyrus P52
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The Rylands Library Papyrus P52, also known as the St John's fragment, is a papyrus fragment conserved at the John Rylands Library, Manchester, UK. The front (recto) contains lines from the Gospel of John 18:31-33, in Greek, and the back (verso) contains lines from verses 37-38.
Although Rylands P52 is generally accepted as the earliest extant New Testament canonical record (see 7Q5 for an alternate candidate), the dating of the papyrus is by no means the subject of consensus among critical scholars. The style of the script is strongly Hadrianic, which would suggest a date somewhere between 125 and 160 CE. But the difficulty of fixing the date of a fragment based solely on paleographic evidence allows for a range of dates that extends from before 100 CE to well into the second half of the second century.
The original translation of the work was not done until 1934 by C.H. Roberts, who published the essay “An Unpublished Fragment of the Fourth Gospel in the John Rylands Library” in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library XX, 1936, pp 45-55. Roberts found comparator hands in papyri then dated between 50 CE and 150 CE, with the closest match of Hadrianic date. Since the contents could hardly have been written before circa 100 CE, he proposed a date of the first half of the second century. Over the 70 years since Roberts' essay, the estimated ages of his particular comparator hands have been revised (in common most other undated antique papyri) towards dates a couple of decades older; while other comparator hands have subsequently been discovered with possible dates ranging into the second half of the second century.
Skepticism about the date (not about the fragment's authenticity) is based on two issues. First, no other scrap of Greek has ever been so narrowly dated based on the handwriting alone, without the support of textual evidence. Secondly, in common with every other surviving early Gospel manuscript, this fragment is not from a scroll but from a codex; a bound book not a roll. If it dates to the first half of the second century, this fragment would be an uncharacteristically early example of a codex (around 90 CE, Martial describes the codex form as then new to Rome). Nevertheless, while some experts in paleography have disputed the dating, it is agreed that this piece of papyrus is the earliest text for any portion of the New Testament. Its closest rival in date is the Egerton Gospel, a late-second-century fragment of a codex that records a gospel not identical to any of the canonical four, but which has closer parallels to John than with the synoptic gospels; and whose hand employs letter forms consistently rather later than those of P52. Thus the Egerton Gospel may represent a less-developed example of the Johannine gospel tradition (though in a manuscript of slightly later date).
In recent years the early date favoured by many New Testament scholars has been challenged by A. Schmidt, who favours a date in the later second century. Both earlier and later dating tendencies have been criticised by Brent Nongbri in his essay "The Use and Abuse of P52: Papyrological Pitfalls in the Dating of the Fourth Gospel" (Harvard Theological Review 98 [2005], page 48). In his conclusion Nongbri states:
- "What emerges from this survey is nothing surprising to papyrologists: paleography is not the most effective method for dating texts, particularly those written in a literary hand. Roberts himself noted this point in his edition of P52. The real problem is the way scholars of the New Testament have used and abused papyrological evidence. I have not radically revised Roberts's work. I have not provided any third-century documentary papyri that are absolute "dead ringers" for the handwriting of P52, and even had I done so, that would not force us to date P52 at some exact point in the third century. Paleographic evidence does not work that way. What I have done is to show that any serious consideration of the window of possible dates for P52 must include dates in the later second and early third centuries. Thus, P52 cannot be used as evidence to silence other debates about the existence (or non-existence) of the Gospel of John in the first half of the second century. Only a papyrus containing an explicit date or one found in a clear archaeological stratigraphic context could do the work scholars want P52 to do. As it stands now, the papyrological evidence should take a second place to other forms of evidence in addressing debates about the dating of the Fourth Gospel."
Udo Schnelle writes on the palaeographic dating: "Cf. A. Schmidt, 'Zwei Ammerkungen zu P. Ryl. III 457,' APF 35 (1989) 11-12, who dates P52 in the period around 170 AD (+/- 25) on the basis of a comparison with P Chester Beatty X, and thus excludes an early dating around ca. 125 for P52! The result for the dating of p52 is that the 125 AD period, usually given with extraordinary certitude, must now be stated with some doubt. One must at least allow a margin of 25 years, that one could think of a dating around 150." (The History and Theology of the New Testament Writings, p. 477 n. 119) Nevertheless, most papyrologists continue to favor the earlier dating as highly probable, so that P52 "may with some confidence be dated in the first half of the second century A.D."[1]
The significance of P52 rests on both its early date, and its geographic dispersal from the presumed site of authorship. 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 dating of P52. 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 fact that the fragment is from a codex testifies to the very early adoption of this mode of writing amongst Christians, in stark contrast to the invariable practice of contemporary Judaism. Furthermore, an assessment of the length of 'missing' text between the recto and verso readings corresponds with that in the counterpart canonical Gospel of John; and hence confirms that there are unlikely to have been substantial additions or deletions in this whole portion. Since this fragment is small—about nine by five centimeters— it is uncertain whether it comes from a full copy of the John that we know; but it may be presumed that the original text must have been of near full gospel length to be worth the extra care and time required in writing in codex form.
Unfortunately, P52 is not a valuable attestation to the form of John's Gospel extant at the time of the writing of the parchment. The fragment contains so few lines that it is not useful for comparison to later documents containing a more complete record of the work.
