Oxyrhynchus Papyri

Background

Oxyrhynchus was an ancient Egyptian city on the west side of the Nile, south of Cairo. Its modern name is el-Bahnasa. The Greek name means "sharp-nosed fish," after a fish venerated in the region. The city flourished as a provincial administrative center through the Ptolemaic, Roman, and Byzantine periods. Its inhabitants discarded used documents on rubbish mounds outside the city, and because the climate there is dry, with almost no rainfall, papyrus (an ancient writing material made from reed stalks) survived for centuries without decaying.

Excavation and Publication

Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt of the University of Oxford excavated these rubbish mounds from late 1896 until about 1907. The two men recovered an enormous quantity of document fragments dating from the centuries before Christ to around the seventh century, most of them written in Greek. A smaller number of documents are in Latin, Coptic (the language of Egyptian Christians), and Arabic.

Early in the excavation, in 1897, a Greek fragment containing a collection of sayings of Jesus was found, and it was published that same year under the title Sayings of Our Lord. In 1898 the Egypt Exploration Society began issuing the serial publication The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, which has now reached more than eighty volumes. Most of the fragments are held at Oxford, and a considerable number are reported to remain unpublished.

Findings and Influence

Most of the documents are everyday texts such as contracts, tax records, and letters. For this reason they serve as a key source for the study of the society and economy of Roman Egypt. Portions of lost works of ancient Greek literature, including works by Sappho and Menander, have also been recovered from the collection.

For the study of Christianity, the following materials are especially significant:

• New Testament manuscripts: A fragment of chapter 1 of the Gospel of Matthew, published in the first volume of the series, is classified as number 1 in the list of New Testament papyri. Early fragments of several other books, including Hebrews and Revelation, have also been found. One fragment of Revelation is known to give the "number of the beast" in Revelation 13:18 as 616 rather than 666.
• Gospel of Thomas fragments: Three Greek fragments published in 1897 and 1904 were identified as belonging to the same work after the complete Coptic Gospel of Thomas was discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945. These fragments are thought to be copies dating from roughly the third century.
• Other early Christian literature: Fragments of unidentified gospels, a fragment of the Gospel of Mary, and copies of the Shepherd of Hermas have been found. The collection also includes the "Oxyrhynchus Hymn," dating from around the late third century, which is regarded as the oldest known Christian hymn with musical notation.
• Manuscript fragments of the Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament) were also unearthed.

Assessment

Scholars regard the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, together with the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library, as among the important discoveries of twentieth-century biblical studies and early Christian research. In particular, the papyri contributed substantial early manuscript evidence to textual criticism, which seeks to reconstruct the New Testament text as closely as possible to the original.

Interpretations differ. Evangelical scholars and churches point to the identification of numerous early New Testament manuscripts as evidence that the New Testament text was transmitted in a relatively stable form. They hold that apocryphal works (writings not included in the canon) such as the Gospel of Thomas should be treated as distinct from the canon. Some other scholars, by contrast, interpret the discovery of a variety of gospel fragments as evidence that Egyptian Christians in the early church period read a range of writings. Scholars also continue to debate the extent of Gnostic influence on the Gospel of Thomas and the date of its origin.