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157-407: Although Rylands 𝔓 is generally accepted as the earliest extant record of a canonical New Testament text, the dating of the papyrus is by no means the subject of consensus among scholars. 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

314-491: A digraph and be pronounced as one sound, are instead to be read as separate vowels in two syllables. For example, in the spelling "coöperate", the diaeresis reminds the reader that the word has four syllables co-op-er-ate , not three, *coop-er-ate . In British English this usage has been considered obsolete for many years, and in US English, although it persisted for longer, it is now considered archaic as well. Nevertheless, it

471-494: A "round block script" graphic stream that is attested from the first century onwards; and notes eleven dated examples ranging from P.Oxy. 3466 (81–96 CE) to P.Oxy.3183 (292 CE) and including all the later parallels proposed by Nongbri and Turner as well as P.Fayum 110 (94 CE) from Roberts's original study. Otherwise, however, Barker rejects from this graphic stream all the other comparators proposed by Roberts and his correspondents, including P. Flor 1. 1 (153 CE). Barker maintains that

628-570: A 3rd–4th century Christian author wrote in his early-4th-century Latin Institutiones Divinae ( Divine Institutes ): But all scripture is divided into two Testaments. That which preceded the advent and passion of Christ—that is, the law and the prophets —is called the Old; but those things which were written after His resurrection are named the New Testament. The Jews make use of the Old, we of

785-426: A Christian, rather than Jewish or pagan, origin. Nevertheless, since all of these papyri have been dated paleographically, and mostly with reference to the same dated documentary comparators, they may be considered as a manuscript cluster whose estimated dates will vary as a group, amongst which 𝔓 is commonly recognised as having earlier features. Moreover, despite the small quantity of text, the text that survives in 𝔓

942-629: A Gentile, and similarly for the Gospel of Matthew, though most assert Jewish-Christian authorship. However, more recently the above understanding has been challenged by the publication of evidence showing only educated elites after the Jewish War would have been capable of producing the prose found in the Gospels. Authorship of the Gospels remains divided among both evangelical and critical scholars. The names of each Gospel stems from church tradition, and yet

1099-463: A corpus of fourteen "Pauline" epistles. While many scholars uphold the traditional view, some question whether the first three, called the "Deutero-Pauline Epistles", are authentic letters of Paul. As for the latter three, the "Pastoral epistles", some scholars uphold the traditional view of these as the genuine writings of the Apostle Paul; most regard them as pseudepigrapha . One might refer to

1256-549: A date nearer to 200 AD, but there is as yet no convincing evidence that any earlier fragments from the New Testament survive. Carbon-dating is a destructive method and has not been used on the Fragment." Finds of early Christian papyri from Egypt represent the earliest surviving indisputable physical evidence for Christianity and the Gospels. There is a considerable degree of overlap in the proposed ranges of dates for these papyri, and consequently it cannot be stated categorically that 𝔓

1413-656: A date of the second or third century could be assigned to P.Ryl. 457"." Pasquale Orsini and Willy Clarysse also adopt the "graphic stream" approach; and have applied it to reviewing the dating for all New Testament manuscripts proposed as having been written before the mid-fourth century, including 𝔓. Since none of these papyri and parchments carry explicit dates, all must be dated paleographically; so Orsini and Clarysse propose that manuscript comparisons for such paleographic dating should be made only between hands that are similar to one another. However, and in contrast to Don Barker, their classification of hands conforms rigorously to

1570-449: A diaeresis mark is placed on the second vowel: without this the words raïm [rəˈim] ("grape") and diürn [diˈurn] ("diurnal") would be read * [ˈrajm] and * [ˈdiwrn] , respectively. In Dutch , spellings such as coëfficiënt are necessary because the digraphs oe and ie normally represent the simple vowels [u] and [i] , respectively. However, hyphenation is now preferred for compound words so that zeeëend (sea duck)

1727-658: A different tradition and body of testimony. In addition, most scholars agree that the author of Luke also wrote the Acts of the Apostles . Scholars hold that these books constituted two-halves of a single work, Luke–Acts . The same author appears to have written the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, and most refer to them as the Lucan texts. The most direct evidence comes from the prefaces of each book; both were addressed to Theophilus , and

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1884-476: A diphthong. Examples include the given names Chloë and Zoë , which otherwise might be pronounced with a silent e . To discourage a similar mispronunciation, the mark is also used in the surname Brontë . (See also Umlaut (diacritic) § Use of the umlaut for special effect .) In French , the diaeresis is referred to as a tréma . Some diphthongs that were written with pairs of vowel letters were later reduced to monophthongs , which led to an extension of

2041-492: 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 𝔓. 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

2198-494: A feature infrequent in dated second century papyri; which accordingly has been taken as implying a date for the Egerton Gospel closer to 200 CE – and indicating the perils of ascribing a date for a papyrus text of which only a small part of two pages survives. The early date for 𝔓 favoured by many New Testament scholars has been challenged by Andreas Schmidt, who favours a date around 170 CE, plus or minus twenty-five years; on

2355-474: 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

2512-536: 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 𝔓; 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,

2669-451: A lord over them, saith the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the LORD, I will put My law in their inward parts, and in their heart will I write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people; and they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying: 'Know the LORD'; for they shall all know Me, from

2826-612: A novelty.) The year before Roberts published 𝔓, the British Museum library had acquired papyrus fragments of the Egerton Gospel (P.Egerton 2) which are also from a codex, and these were published in 1935 by H. Idris Bell and T.C. Skeat. Since the text of 𝔓 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 𝔓 could be dated as

2983-425: A parallel to 𝔓 as any of these adduced by Roberts". Nongbri also produces dated documents of the later second and early third centuries, each of which display similarities to 𝔓 in some of their letter forms. Nongbri suggests that this implied that older styles of handwriting might persist much longer than some scholars had assumed, and that a prudent margin of error must allow a still wider range of possible dates for

3140-409: 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 (now known as B.G.U. 1.22 and dated ca. 110–117 CE), a letter in a documentary hand of the time of Trajan; and P.Lond. 1.130,

3297-405: A professional bookhand). Roberts notes comments that had recently been made by the editors of the Egerton Gospel (P.Egerton 2); and says similarly it could be said of 𝔓 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

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3454-511: A scholarly consensus that many New Testament books were not written by the individuals whose names are attached to them. Scholarly opinion is that names were fixed to the gospels by the mid second century AD. Many scholars believe that none of the gospels were written in the region of Palestine . Christian tradition identifies John the Apostle with John the Evangelist , the supposed author of

3611-425: A silent e is added to the sequence gu , to show that it is to be pronounced [ɡy] rather than as a digraph for [ɡ] . For example, when the feminine ‑e is added to aigu [eɡy] "sharp", the pronunciation does not change in most accents: aiguë [eɡy] as opposed to the city name Aigues-Mortes [ɛɡ mɔʁt] . Similar is the feminine noun ciguë [siɡy] "hemlock"; compare figue [fiɡ] "fig". In

3768-411: A single quire book of around 130 pages (i.e. 33 large folded papyrus sheets written on both sides); measuring approximately 21 cm × 20 cm (8.3 in × 7.9 in) 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

3925-454: A succession of dated late first to mid second century papyri could be confirmed, two later dated papyri, both petitions, also showed strong similarities (P. Mich. inv. 5336, dated around 152 CE; and P.Amh. 2.78, an example first suggested by Eric Turner , that dates to 184 CE). Nongbri states "The affinities in letter forms between (P. Mich. inv. 5336) and 𝔓 are as close as any of Roberts's documentary parallels", and that P.Amh. 2.78 "is as good

4082-594: A uniformity of doctrine concerning the Mosaic Law , Jesus, faith, and various other issues. All of these letters easily fit into the chronology of Paul's journeys depicted in Acts of the Apostles. The author of the Epistle of James identifies himself in the opening verse as "James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ". From the middle of the 3rd century, patristic authors cited the Epistle as written by James

4239-558: A variant of ï in a few proper nouns, as in the name of the Parisian suburb of L'Haÿ-les-Roses [la.i le ʁoz] and in the surname of the house of Croÿ [kʁu.i] . In some names, a diaeresis is used to indicate two vowels historically in hiatus, although the second vowel has since fallen silent, as in Saint-Saëns [sɛ̃sɑ̃s] and de Staël [də stal] . The diaeresis is also used in French when

4396-418: A variety of reasons the majority of modern scholars have abandoned it or hold it only tenuously. It is significantly different from the synoptic gospels, with major variations in material, theological emphasis, chronology, and literary style, sometimes amounting to contradictions. Diaeresis (diacritic) Diaeresis ( / d aɪ ˈ ɛr ə s ɪ s , - ˈ ɪər -/ dy- ERR -ə-siss, -⁠ EER - )

4553-420: A vowel, as in ακαδημαϊκός ( akadimaïkós , "academic"), or in combination with an acute accent , as in πρωτεΐνη ( proteïni , "protein"). The Occitan use of diaeresis is very similar to that of Catalan: ai, ei, oi, au, eu, ou are diphthongs consisting of one syllable but aï, eï, oï, aü, eü, oü are groups consisting of two distinct syllables. In Portuguese , a diaeresis ( Portuguese : trema )

4710-638: Is a collection of Christian texts originally written in the Koine Greek language, at different times by various authors. While the Old Testament canon varies somewhat between different Christian denominations , the 27-book canon of the New Testament has been almost universally recognized within Christianity since at least Late Antiquity . Thus, in almost all Christian traditions today, the New Testament consists of 27 books: The earliest known complete list of

4867-523: Is a name for the two dots diacritical mark ( ◌̈ ) as used to indicate the separation of two distinct vowel letters in adjacent syllables when an instance of diaeresis (or hiatus) occurs, so as to distinguish from a digraph or diphthong . It consists of a two dots diacritic placed over a letter, generally a vowel ; when that letter is an ⟨i⟩ , the diacritic replaces the tittle : ⟨ï⟩ . The diaeresis diacritic indicates that two adjoining letters that would normally form

Rylands Library Papyrus P52 - Misplaced Pages Continue

5024-784: Is aimed at and achieved. Such hands may be described as "reformed documentary". (One advantage for the paleographer in such hands is that with their close links to the documents they are somewhat less difficult to date than purely calligraphic hands). It may be added that the codex of 𝔓, 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 𝔓 or 𝔓 , even though its actual letter forms are not as fine, and are closer to documentary exemplars. The significance of 𝔓 rests both upon its proposed early dating and upon its geographic dispersal from

5181-439: Is at least one known dated example in a papyrus of 101 CE and three others of mid or late second century date. "The result is to bring the two manuscripts together, somewhere in the middle of the second century, perhaps tending towards the early part of it." Stanley Porter has also questioned Nongbri's assertion that valid comparisons can be made between 𝔓 and documentary papyri of the later second and early third centuries; noting

5338-447: Is constructed from two strokes, each stroke terminating in a decorative hook or finial (see the second line of the recto); 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,

5495-565: Is directed at those subsequent commentators and scholars who have tended to take the midpoint of Roberts's proposed range of dates, treat it as the latest limit for a possible date for this papyrus, and then infer from this that the Gospel of John cannot have been written later than around 100 CE. . The relationship of 𝔓 to P.Egerton 2 has been further re-examined in detail by Stanley E. Porter. Porter offers two further comparator early biblical papyri for both texts, P. Oxy IV 656 (a fragment of Genesis) and P.Vindob. G. 2325 (another apocryphal gospel,

5652-494: Is earlier than other New Testament fragments of apparent 2nd century date, such as 𝔓 , 𝔓 and 𝔓 ; it also cannot be stated categorically that it is earlier than some early apocryphal texts, such as P. Egerton. 2 , P.Oxy. LX 4009. There are, in addition, a number of papyrus fragments of Old Testament books in Greek (chiefly Psalms) which have also been dated to the 2nd century, and whose characteristics have been advanced as indicating

5809-500: Is foreign to the original Hebrew word brit (בְּרִית) describing it, which only means 'alliance, covenant, pact' and never 'inheritance instructions after death'. This use comes from the transcription of Latin testamentum 'will (left after death)', a literal translation of Greek diatheke (διαθήκη) 'will (left after death)', which is the word used to translate Hebrew brit in the Septuagint . The choice of this word diatheke , by

5966-499: Is generously scaled – letter forms vary between 0.3–0.4 cm (0.12–0.16 in) in height, lines are spaced approximately 0.5 cm (0.20 in) apart, and there is a margin of 2 cm (0.79 in) 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

6123-476: Is now spelled zee-eend . In Modern English , the diaeresis, the grave accent and the acute accent are the only diacritics used apart from loanwords . It may be used optionally for words that do not have a morphological break at the diaeresis point, such as " naïve ", " Boötes ", and "Noël". It was previously used in words such as "coöperate" and "reënter" but this usage is considered by prescriptive writing guides to be largely archaic . In such cases,

6280-404: Is often thought that John the Apostle is John the Evangelist , i.e. author of the Gospel of John ) or to another John designated " John of Patmos " after the island where the text says the revelation was received (1:9). Some ascribe the writership date as c.  81–96 AD, and others at around 68 AD. The work opens with letters to seven local congregations of Asia Minor and thereafter takes

6437-440: Is proposed that the hand in question should first be identified to a graphic stream representing the overall development of a particular handwriting style. "The way that individual letters are formed within these graphic streams is secondary to the overall style of the script". Don Barker, reviewing the proposed comparators and range of datings that have been advanced over the years for 𝔓, maintains that this papyrus can be placed in

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6594-529: Is scholarly debate as to the reason why the translators of the Septuagint chose the term diatheke to translate Hebrew brit , instead of another Greek word generally used to refer to an alliance or covenant. The use of the phrase New Testament ( Koine Greek : Ἡ Καινὴ Διαθήκη , Hē Kainḕ Diathḗkē ) to describe a collection of first- and second-century Christian Greek scriptures can be traced back to Tertullian in his work Against Praxeas . Irenaeus uses

6751-452: Is small, and although a plausible reconstruction can be attempted for most of the 14 lines represented, the proportion of the text of the Gospel of John for which it provides a direct witness is necessarily limited, so it is rarely cited in textual debate. There has, however, been some contention as to whether the name 'ΙΗΣΟΥ' (Jesus) in the 'missing' portions of recto lines 2 and 5 was originally written as nomen sacrum ; in other words,

6908-577: Is sometimes used in transcribed Greek , where it represents the Greek letter υ (upsilon) in hiatus with α . For example, it can be seen in the transcription Artaÿctes of the Persian name Ἀρταΰκτης ( Artaüktēs ) at the very end of Herodotus , or the name of Mount Taÿgetus on the southern Peloponnesus peninsula, which in modern Greek is spelled Ταΰγετος . In Catalan , the digraphs ai , ei , oi , au , eu , and iu are normally read as diphthongs. To indicate exceptions to this rule ( hiatus ),

7065-451: Is still used by the US magazine The New Yorker . In English language texts it is perhaps most familiar in the loan words naïve , Noël and Chloë , and is also used officially in the name of the island Teän and of Coös County . Languages such as Dutch , Afrikaans , Catalan , French , Galician , and Spanish make regular use of the diaeresis. (In some Germanic and other languages,

7222-684: Is sufficient to provide early witness to a number of key historical claims about the Historical Jesus ; though not mentioned by name, the verses in 𝔓 show a man tried before the Roman authorities at a specific date (the governorship of Pontius Pilate), at a specific place (the Praetorium in Jerusalem), sentenced to a specific death (crucifixion), and all at the instigation of the Jewish Temple authorities. If

7379-412: Is that there are two distinct forms of the letter alpha ( 'Α' ); 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 ( 'Υ' ); the more common form

7536-626: Is the second division of the Christian biblical canon . It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus , as well as events relating to first-century Christianity . The New Testament's background, the first division of the Christian Bible, is called the Old Testament , which is based primarily upon the Hebrew Bible ; together they are regarded as Sacred Scripture by Christians. The New Testament

7693-501: Is written as follows: "Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James". The debate has continued over the author's identity as the apostle, the brother of Jesus, both, or neither. The Gospel of John, the three Johannine epistles , and the Book of Revelation , exhibit marked similarities, although more so between the gospel and the epistles (especially the gospel and 1 John) than between those and Revelation. Most scholars therefore treat

7850-565: The Codex Vaticanus , whereas the Codex Sinaiticus , Codex Alexandrinus and the Majority Text all have the alternative word order of "ΕΙΣ ΤΟ ΠΡΑΙΤΩΡΙΟΝ ΠΑΛΙΝ Ο ΠΙΛΑΤΟΣ" ; however, this is not considered a significant variant. Since this fragment is small – about 9 cm × 6 cm (3.5 in × 2.4 in) – it cannot be proven that it comes from a full copy of

8007-614: The Epistle to the Laodiceans and the Third Epistle to the Corinthians as examples of works identified as pseudonymous. Since the early centuries of the church, there has been debate concerning the authorship of the anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews, and contemporary scholars generally reject Pauline authorship. The epistles all share common themes, emphasis, vocabulary and style; they exhibit

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8164-509: The Fayum Fragment ); and provides a wide-ranging survey of the history and range of opinion amongst papyrologists for the dating of 𝔓 and P.Egerton 2, presenting arguments to support Robert's judgement that the two are close parallels, that they are unlikely to be of widely separate dates, and that 𝔓 is more likely the earlier. Specifically he notes that P.Egerton 2 is in "a less heavy hand with more formal rounded characteristics, but with what

8321-434: The Gospel of John . Traditionalists tend to support the idea that the writer of the Gospel of John himself claimed to be an eyewitness in their commentaries of John 21 :24 and therefore the gospel was written by an eyewitness. This idea is rejected by the majority of modern scholars. Most scholars hold to the two-source hypothesis , which posits that the Gospel of Mark was the first gospel to be written . On this view,

8478-504: 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" (e.g. the lunate sigma ( 'Ϲ' ) at line three of the recto, and the eta ( 'H' ) immediately following it). Several letters are inclined to stray away from the notional upper and lower writing lines. Another peculiarity

8635-453: The Jewish Bible 's Book of Jeremiah , Judaism traditionally disagrees: Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah; not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; forasmuch as they broke My covenant, although I was

8792-413: The umlaut diacritic has the same appearance but a different function.) The word diaeresis is from Greek diaíresis ( διαίρεσις ), meaning "division", "separation", or "distinction". The word trema ( French : tréma ), used in linguistics and also classical scholarship , is from the Greek trē̂ma ( τρῆμα ) and means a "perforation", "orifice", or "pip" (as on dice ), thus describing

8949-518: The world so that I would test ify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears of me my voice." Said to him Pilate, "What is truth?" and this having said, again he went out unto the Jews and said to them, "I find not one fault in him." There appears insufficient room for the repeated phrase ( ΕΙΣ ΤΟΥΤΟ ) in the second line of the verso, and it is suggested that these words were inadvertently dropped through haplography . The writing

9106-502: The 1990s, the tendency amongst New Testament commentators, supported by several paleographers such as Philip W. Comfort, had been to suggest a date for 𝔓 towards the earlier half of the range suggested by Roberts and his correspondents. However, a cautionary note was raised by the discovery that a papyrus fragment in Cologne constitutes part of the Egerton Gospel. In this fragment the letters gamma and kappa are separated by an hooked apostrophe,

9263-527: The 27 books is found in a letter written by Athanasius , a 4th-century bishop of Alexandria , dated to 367 AD. The 27-book New Testament was first formally canonized during the councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) in North Africa. Pope Innocent I ratified the same canon in 405, but it is probable that a Council in Rome in 382 under Pope Damasus I gave the same list first. These councils also provided

9420-611: The 2nd century. The Pauline letters are the thirteen New Testament books that present Paul the Apostle as their author. Paul's authorship of six of the letters is disputed. Four are thought by most modern scholars to be pseudepigraphic , i.e., not actually written by Paul even if attributed to him within the letters themselves. Opinion is more divided on the other two disputed letters (2 Thessalonians and Colossians). These letters were written to Christian communities in specific cities or geographical regions, often to address issues faced by that particular community. Prominent themes include

9577-636: The Apostle ( Acts 16:10–17 ; arguing for an authorship date of c.  AD 62 ), which is corroborated by Paul's Letter to the Colossians ( Col. 4:14 ), Letter to Philemon ( Philem. 23–24 ), and Second Letter to Timothy ( 2 Tim. 4:11 ), the gospel account of Luke "was received as having apostolic endorsement and authority from Paul and as a trustworthy record of the gospel that Paul preached" (e.g. Rom. 2:16 , according to Eusebius in Ecclesiastical History 3.4.8). The word testament in

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9734-437: The Apostles is a narrative of the apostles' ministry and activity after Christ's death and resurrection, from which point it resumes and functions as a sequel to the Gospel of Luke . Examining style, phraseology, and other evidence, modern scholarship generally concludes that Acts and the Gospel of Luke share the same author, referred to as Luke–Acts . Luke–Acts does not name its author. Church tradition identified him as Luke

9891-610: The Epistle to the Hebrews does not internally claim to have been written by the Apostle Paul , some similarities in wordings to some of the Pauline Epistles have been noted and inferred. In antiquity, some began to ascribe it to Paul in an attempt to provide the anonymous work an explicit apostolic pedigree. In the 4th century, Jerome and Augustine of Hippo supported Paul's authorship . The Church largely agreed to include Hebrews as

10048-437: The Evangelist , the companion of Paul, but the majority of scholars reject this due to the many differences between Acts and the authentic Pauline letters, though most scholars still believe the author, whether named Luke or not, met Paul . The most probable date of composition is around 80–90 AD, although some scholars date it significantly later, and there is evidence that it was still being substantially revised well into

10205-469: The Gospel of John, 18:37–38: ΒΑΣΙΛΕΥΣ ΕΙΜΙ ΕΓΩ ΕΙΣ TO ΥΤΟ Γ Ε ΓΕΝΝΗΜΑΙ ΚΑΙ (ΕΙΣ ΤΟΥΤΟ) ΕΛΗΛΥΘΑ ΕΙΣ ΤΟΝ ΚΟ ΣΜΟΝ ΙΝΑ ΜΑΡΤΥ- ΡΗΣΩ ΤΗ ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ ΠΑΣ Ο ΩΝ ΕΚ ΤΗΣ ΑΛΗΘΕ I- ΑΣ ΑΚΟΥΕΙ ΜΟΥ ΤΗΣ ΦΩΝΗΣ ΛΕΓΕΙ ΑΥΤΩ Ο ΠΙΛΑΤΟΣ ΤΙ ΕΣΤΙΝ ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ Κ ΑΙ ΤΟΥΤΟ ΕΙΠΩΝ ΠΑΛΙΝ ΕΞΗΛΘΕΝ ΠΡΟΣ ΤΟΥΣ Ι ΟΥ- ΔΑΙΟΥΣ ΚΑΙ ΛΕΓΕΙ ΑΥΤΟΙΣ ΕΓΩ ΟΥΔ ΕΜΙ ΑΝ ΕΥΡΙΣΚΩ ΕΝ ΑΥΤΩ ΑΙΤΙΑΝ The text translates as: ... a King I am. For this I have been born and (for this) I have come into

10362-428: The Gospel of John, but it may be presumed that the original text was at least of near full gospel length, to be worth the extra care and time required in writing in codex form. On the other hand, the generous scale and format of the codex pages of 𝔓 are such that it is highly unlikely that it could originally have comprised the four canonical gospels; Roberts calculated that such a codex might have required 576 pages. 𝔓

10519-407: The Gospels were written forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus. They thus do not present eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus's life and teaching." The ESV Study Bible claims the following (as one argument for gospel authenticity): Because Luke , as a second generation Christian, claims to have retrieved eyewitness testimony ( Luke 1:1–4 ), in addition to having traveled with Paul

10676-513: The Jewish translators of the Septuagint in Alexandria in the 3rd and 2nd century BCE, has been understood in Christian theology to imply a reinterpreted view of the Old Testament covenant with Israel as possessing characteristics of a 'will left after death' (the death of Jesus ) and has generated considerable attention from biblical scholars and theologians: in contrast to the Jewish usage where brit

10833-661: The Just . Ancient and modern scholars have always been divided on the issue of authorship. Many consider the epistle to be written in the late 1st or early 2nd centuries. The author of the First Epistle of Peter identifies himself in the opening verse as "Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ", and the view that the epistle was written by St. Peter is attested to by a number of Church Fathers : Irenaeus (140–203), Tertullian (150–222), Clement of Alexandria (155–215) and Origen of Alexandria (185–253). Unlike The Second Epistle of Peter ,

10990-517: The New Testament were all or nearly all written by Jewish Christians —that is, Jewish disciples of Christ, who lived in the Roman Empire , and under Roman occupation . The author of the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts is frequently thought of as an exception; scholars are divided as to whether he was a Gentile or a Hellenistic Jew . A few scholars identify the author of the Gospel of Mark as probably

11147-521: The New Testament were only a few among many other early Christian gospels. The existence of such texts is even mentioned at the beginning of the Gospel of Luke. Many non-canonical gospels were also written, all later than the four canonical gospels, and like them advocating the particular theological views of their various authors. In modern scholarship, the Synoptic Gospels are the primary sources for reconstructing Christ's ministry. The Acts of

11304-546: The New: but yet they are not discordant, for the New is the fulfilling of the Old, and in both there is the same testator, even Christ, who, having suffered death for us, made us heirs of His everlasting kingdom, the people of the Jews being deprived and disinherited. As the prophet Jeremiah testifies when he speaks such things: "Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new testament to

11461-477: The authors of the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke used as sources the Gospel of Mark and a hypothetical Q document to write their individual gospel accounts. These three gospels are called the Synoptic Gospels , because they include many of the same stories, often in the same sequence, and sometimes in exactly the same wording. Scholars agree that the Gospel of John was written last, by using

11618-490: The authors of the Gospels do not identify themselves in their respective texts. All four gospels and the Acts of the Apostles are anonymous works . The Gospel of John claims to be based on eyewitness testimony from the Disciple whom Jesus loved , but never names this character. The author of Luke-Acts claimed to access an eyewitness to Paul ; this claim remains accepted by most scholars. Objections to this viewpoint mainly take

11775-492: The authorship of which was debated in antiquity, there was little debate about Peter's authorship of this first epistle until the 18th century. Although 2 Peter internally purports to be a work of the apostle, many biblical scholars have concluded that Peter is not the author. For an early date and (usually) for a defense of the Apostle Peter's authorship see Kruger, Zahn, Spitta, Bigg, and Green. The Epistle of Jude title

11932-421: The basis of a comparison with Chester Beatty Papyri X and III , and with the redated Egerton Gospel. Brent Nongbri has criticized both Comfort's early dating of 𝔓 and Schmidt's late dating, dismissing as unsound all attempts to establish a date for such undated papyri within narrow ranges on purely paleographic grounds, along with any inference from the paleographic dating of 𝔓 to a precise terminus ad quem for

12089-493: The beginning of the 3rd century CE – and there is also some overlap with 𝔓 and 𝔓 of the 7th and 2nd centuries respectively. No two of the four contain the same exact text as reconstructed for John 18:31–38, but 𝔓 seems to represent an example of the same proto- Alexandrian text-type . Kurt Aland described it as a "Normal text", and placed it in Category I , due to its age. New Testament The New Testament ( NT )

12246-518: The canon of the Old Testament, which included the deuterocanonical books. There is no scholarly consensus on the date of composition of the latest New Testament texts. John A. T. Robinson , Dan Wallace , and William F. Albright dated all the books of the New Testament before 70 AD. Many other scholars, such as Bart D. Ehrman and Stephen L. Harris , date some New Testament texts much later than this; Richard Pervo dated Luke–Acts to c.  115 AD , and David Trobisch places Acts in

12403-404: The centre-line, as in the fourth line of the verso), delta ( 'Δ' ) (with a decorative arch, as in the first and second lines of the recto) and mu ( 'Μ' ) (with a central stroke dipping down to the baseline, as in the third line of the recto). Nongbri confirms Roberts observations, and also notes distinctive forms of rho ( 'Ρ' ) (with a small head and an undecorated downstroke extending well below

12560-465: The closest parallels to 𝔓 as being P. Berol 6845 and P. Egerton 2, then dated paleographically to 100 CE and 150 CE respectively; and proposed that the most probable date for 𝔓 would lie in between these two. Nongbri rejects paleographically dated comparators on principle, and consequently proposes the closest dated parallels to 𝔓 as being P. Fayum 110 of 94 CE, P.Mich. inv. 5336 of ca. 152 CE and P.Amh. 2.78 of 184 CE; each, he suggests, as close to 𝔓 as

12717-515: The composition of the Fourth Gospel. In particular Nongbri noted that both Comfort and Schmidt propose their respective revisions of Roberts's dating solely on the basis of paleographic comparisons with papyri that had themselves been paleographically dated. As a corrective to both tendencies, Nongbri collected and published images of all explicitly dated comparator manuscripts to 𝔓; demonstrating that, although Roberts's assessment of similarities with

12874-460: The composition of the Gospel rather than those who would still regard it as a work of the middle decades of the second century". Nevertheless, and notwithstanding Nongbri's statement to the contrary, some commentators have interpreted his accumulation of later dated comparators as undermining Roberts's proposed dating; but such interpretations fail to take into account the essential similarity of Roberts's and Nongbri's main findings. Roberts identified

13031-525: The counterpart canonical Gospel of John; and hence confirms that there are unlikely to have been substantial additions or deletions in this whole portion. Other than two iotacisms ( ΗΜ Ε ΙΝ, Ι ΣΗΛΘΕΝ ), and in the probable omission of the second ΕΙΣ ΤΟΥΤΟ from line 2 of the verso, 𝔓 agrees with the Alexandrian text base. In lines 4 and 5 of the recto, the reconstructed text reads "ΠΑΛΙΝ ΕΙΣ ΤΟ ΠΡΑΙΤΩΡΙΟΝ Ο ΠΙΛΑΤΟΣ" , in agreement with 𝔓 and with

13188-423: 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 𝔓 and P. Egerton 2. Roberts also proposed two further dated papyri in documentary hands as comparators for 𝔓: P. London 2078, a private letter written in the reign of Domitian (81–96 CE), and P. Oslo 22, a petition dated 127 CE; noting that P. Oslo 22

13345-481: The date of 𝔓, but apparently approves the relatively cautious terminology both of Roberts's dating, "On the whole, we may accept with some confidence the first half of the second century as the period in which (𝔓) was most probably written"; and also of Roberts's speculations on possible implications for the date of John's gospel, "But all we can safely say is that this fragment tends to support those critics who favour an early date (late first to early second century) for

13502-423: The dating ranges they themselves propose for New Testament papyri are never wider than 100 years, more frequently 50 years, and for several early papyri ( 𝔓 , 𝔓 , 𝔓 ) they propose purely paleographic dates within a 25-year range. In their paper Orsini and Clarysse state that the early parallels proposed for 𝔓 by Comfort and Barrett are "inappropriate"; and, although they cite with approval Nongbri's assessment of

13659-401: The diaeresis appears, it is usually on the stressed vowel, and this is most often on the first of the two adjacent vowels; typical examples are copïo [kɔ.ˈpi.ɔ] (to copy) contrasted with mopio [ˈmɔ.pjɔ] (to mop). It is also used on the first of two vowels that would otherwise form a diphthong ( crëir [ˈkreː.ɪr] ('created') rather than creir [ˈkrəi̯r] ('believed')) and on

13816-660: The diaeresis has been replaced by the use of a hyphen ("co-operate", "re-enter"), particularly in British English, or by no indication at all ("cooperate", "reenter"), as in American English. The use of the diaeresis persists in a few publications, notably The New Yorker and MIT Technology Review under Jason Pontin . The diaeresis mark is sometimes used in English personal first and last names to indicate that two adjacent vowels should be pronounced separately, rather than as

13973-506: The drawing up of his Antitheses, centres in this, that he may establish a diversity between the Old and the New Testaments, so that his own Christ may be separate from the Creator , as belonging to this rival God, and as alien from the law and the prophets . By the 4th century , the existence—even if not the exact contents—of both an Old and New Testament had been established. Lactantius ,

14130-476: The earlier of the two papyri. 𝔓 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 (contracts, petitions, letters). Nevertheless, Roberts suggested two undated literary papyri as the closest comparators to 𝔓: P. Berol. 6845 (a fragment of an Iliad scroll conserved in Berlin and dated paleographically to around

14287-407: The early 2nd century dating of the 𝔓 is in fact correct, then the fact that the fragment is from a codex rather than a scroll would testify to the very early adoption of this mode of writing amongst Christians, in stark contrast to the apparent practice of contemporary Judaism . Furthermore, an assessment of the length of 'missing' text between the recto and verso readings corresponds with that in

14444-413: The early decades of the second century; some scholars indeed arguing that the discovery of 𝔓 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 𝔓 to date the Gospel of John (not about the fragment's authenticity) is based on two issues. First, the papyrus has been dated based on the handwriting alone, without

14601-468: The early/mid second century); and P. Oxy. L 3523 ( 𝔓 ) and P. Oxy. LXIV 4404 ( 𝔓 ) both dated paleographically to the later second century. In addition, the discovery of other papyrus codices with second century hands, such as the Yale Genesis Fragment (P. Yale 1), suggested that this form of book was more common for literary texts at this date than had previously been assumed. Consequently, until

14758-434: The end of the first century) which he suggested (other than in the form of the letter alpha) 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

14915-459: The epistle to the Hebrews, based on its distinctive style and theology, which are considered to set it apart from Paul's writings. The final book of the New Testament is the Book of Revelation , also known as the Apocalypse of John. In the New Testament canon, it is considered prophetical or apocalyptic literature . Its authorship has been attributed either to John the Apostle (in which case it

15072-436: 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. 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

15229-447: 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. Nongbri resists offering his own opinion on

15386-521: The expression "New Testament" refers to a Christian new covenant that Christians believe completes or fulfils the Mosaic covenant (the Jewish covenant) that Yahweh (the God of Israel) made with the people of Israel on Mount Sinai through Moses , described in the books of the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. While Christianity traditionally even claims this Christian new covenant as being prophesied in

15543-442: The extensive Apollonius archive which are dated 113–120. Subsequently, other comparator literary papyri have been suggested, notably P. Oxy. XXXI 2533, where a literary text of the second century in a hand proposed as very close to 𝔓 is found written on the back of a re-used document in a late first century business hand; and also three biblical papyrus codices; P. Oxy. LX 4009 (an apocryphal gospel fragment, dated paleographically to

15700-551: The fact that an unstressed -i- is left between vowels, but constituting its own syllable, which would end with a form identical in writing but different in pronunciation with those of the Present subjunctive ( saiamos , caiades ), as those have said i forming a diphthong with the following a . In addition, identically to Spanish, the diaeresis is used to differentiate the syllables güe [ɡʷe] an güi [ɡʷi] from gue [ɡe] and gui [ɡi] . In German , in addition to

15857-430: The first century) but the letters that tend to be given the most individualization, such as alpha, mu and even sigma, appear to be second century." Both Porter and Nongbri note that Eric Turner, notwithstanding his proposal of P.Amh. 2.78 as a parallel for 𝔓, nevertheless continued to maintain that "The Rylands papyrus may therefore be accepted as of the first half of the second century". Nongbri has subsequently pointed out

16014-444: The five as a single corpus of Johannine literature , albeit not from the same author. The gospel went through two or three "editions" before reaching its current form around AD 90–110. It speaks of an unnamed "disciple whom Jesus loved" as the source of its traditions, but does not say specifically that he is its author; Christian tradition identifies this disciple as the apostle John , but while this idea still has supporters, for

16171-621: The form of an apocalypse , a "revealing" of divine prophecy and mysteries, a literary genre popular in ancient Judaism and Christianity. The order in which the books of the New Testament appear differs between some collections and ecclesiastical traditions. In the Latin West, prior to the Vulgate (an early 5th-century Latin version of the Bible), the four Gospels were arranged in the following order: Matthew, John, Luke, and Mark. The Syriac Peshitta places

16328-458: The form of the diacritic rather than its function. In Greek, two dots, called a trema , were used in the Hellenistic period on the letters ι and υ , most often at the beginning of a word, as in ϊδων , ϋιος , and ϋβριν , to separate them from a preceding vowel. This was needed because writing was scriptio continua , where spacing was not yet used as a word divider . However, it

16485-484: The form of the following two interpretations, but also include the claim that Luke-Acts contains differences in theology and historical narrative which are irreconcilable with the authentic letters of Paul the Apostle . According to Bart D. Ehrman of the University of North Carolina , none of the authors of the Gospels were eyewitnesses or even explicitly claimed to be eyewitnesses of Jesus's life. Ehrman has argued for

16642-514: The fourteenth letter of Paul, and affirmed this authorship until the Reformation . The letter to the Hebrews had difficulty in being accepted as part of the Christian canon because of its anonymity. As early as the 3rd century, Origen wrote of the letter, "Men of old have handed it down as Paul's, but who wrote the Epistle God only knows." Contemporary scholars often reject Pauline authorship for

16799-429: 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

16956-403: The handwriting of 𝔓, 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

17113-414: The house of Israel and the house of Judah, not according to the testament which I made to their fathers, in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; for they continued not in my testament, and I disregarded them, saith the Lord." ... For that which He said above, that He would make a new testament to the house of Judah, shows that the old testament which was given by Moses

17270-450: The late 1st and mid 2nd centuries, with the largest concentration of Hadrianic date (117 CE to 138 CE). Since this gospel text would be unlikely to have reached Egypt before c.  100 CE , he proposed a date in the first half of the 2nd century. Roberts proposed the closest match to 𝔓 as being an undated papyrus of the Iliad conserved in Berlin; and in the 70 years since Roberts's essay

17427-444: The late second century, the four narrative accounts of the life and work of Jesus Christ have been referred to as "The Gospel of ..." or "The Gospel according to ..." followed by the name of the supposed author. The first author to explicitly name the canonical gospels is Irenaeus of Lyon , who promoted the four canonical gospels in his book Against Heresies , written around 180. These four gospels that were eventually included in

17584-414: The least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin will I remember no more. The word covenant means 'agreement' (from Latin con-venio 'to agree' lit. 'to come together'): the use of the word testament , which describes the different idea of written instructions for inheritance after death, to refer to the covenant with Israel in the Old Testament,

17741-424: The letter formation within this the graphic stream "appears to have great holding power", and proposes that it is consequently difficult to place 𝔓 into a narrower time frame within it. " When the general style and individual letter features are kept in close connection and keeping in mind how a scribe writing a documentary text may write a literary text differently, it would seem from the above dated manuscripts, that

17898-530: The limited usefulness of Porter's study due to the fact that it makes no reference to manuscripts with secure dates and thus is entirely circular (several undated manuscripts are used to provide a date for another undated manuscript). An altogether different approach to dating New Testament papyri has been proposed by a number of paleographers in recent years, drawing on the notion of "graphic stream" developed by Guglielmo Cavallo . Rather than comparing letter forms of undated papyri directly with dated comparators, it

18055-413: The lower line, as in the second line of the verso), pi ( 'Π' ) (with an extended horizontal stroke, as in the third line of the recto) and kappa ( 'Κ' ) (formed like the looped upsilon with an additional downwards stroke, as in the fourth line of the recto). 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

18212-581: The major Catholic epistles (James, 1 Peter, and 1 John) immediately after Acts and before the Pauline epistles. The order of an early edition of the letters of Paul is based on the size of the letters: longest to shortest, though keeping 1 and 2 Corinthians and 1 and 2 Thessalonians together. The Pastoral epistles were apparently not part of the Corpus Paulinum in which this order originated and were later inserted after 2 Thessalonians and before Philemon. Hebrews

18369-419: The mid-4th century, has proposed a date for 𝔓 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

18526-557: The mid-to-late second century, contemporaneous with the publication of the first New Testament canon. Whether the Gospels were composed before or after 70 AD, according to Bas van Os, the lifetime of various eyewitnesses that includes Jesus's own family through the end of the First Century is very likely statistically. Markus Bockmuehl finds this structure of lifetime memory in various early Christian traditions. The New Oxford Annotated Bible claims, "Scholars generally agree that

18683-423: The ongoing French spelling reform of 1990, this was moved to the u ( aigüe , cigüe ). (In canoë [kanɔ.e] the e is not silent, and so is not affected by the spelling reform.) In Galician , diaeresis is employed to indicate hiatus in the first and second persons of the plural of the imperfect tense of verbs ended in -aer , -oer , -aír and -oír ( saïamos , caïades ). This stems from

18840-408: The original editors called "cursive affinities"." Porter adds that "Both manuscripts were apparently written before the development of a more formal Biblical majuscule style, which began to develop in the late second and early third centuries." In this respect, Porter also notes that although the hooked apostrophe form found in the Cologne fragment of P.Egerton 2 is unusual in the second century, there

18997-514: The orthographies of Spanish , Catalan , French , Galician and Occitan , the graphemes gu and qu normally represent a single sound, [ɡ] or [k] , before the front vowels e and i (or before nearly all vowels in Occitan). In the few exceptions where the u is pronounced, a diaeresis is added to it. Examples: This has been extended to Ganda , where a diaeresis separates y from n : anya [aɲa] , anÿa [aɲja] . 'Ÿ'

19154-414: The other eleven, including 𝔓, he states that their scribes were: ...not trained in calligraphy and so not accustomed to writing books, though they were familiar with them; they employ what is basically a documentary hand but at the same time they are aware that it is a book and not a document on which they are engaged. They are not personal or private hands; and in most a degree of regularity and of clarity

19311-531: The others, and all three closer than any other dated comparator. The consequence is to extend the range of dated primary reference comparators both earlier and later than in Roberts work; and Nongbri stresses that, simply from paleographic evidence, the actual date of 𝔓 could conceivably be later (or earlier) still. Although Nongbri is concerned to demonstrate that the possibility of a late second (or early third) century date for 𝔓 cannot be discounted, his chief criticism

19468-428: The overall formation, trajectory and style of the script. If, rather than undertaking comparisons document by document, typological letter comparisons are instead applied using published series of dated representative script alphabets, then, Porter asserts, both 𝔓 and P.Egerton 2 "fit comfortably within the second century. There are of course some letters that are similar to those in the third century (as there are some in

19625-403: 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 (117–138) or even Trajan (98–117). In 1936 the dating was supported by Ulrich Wilcken on the basis of a comparison between the hand of 𝔓 and those of papyri in

19782-492: The papyrus: 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 𝔓. 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

19939-404: The pervasive use of umlaut diacritics with vowels, diaeresis above e occurs in a few proper names, such as Ferdinand Piëch and Bernhard Hoëcker . In Modern Greek , αϊ and οϊ represent the diphthongs /ai̯/ and /oi̯/ , and εϊ the disyllabic sequence /e.i/ , whereas αι , οι , and ει transcribe the simple vowels /e/ , /i/ , and /i/ . The diacritic can be the only one on

20096-475: The phrase New Testament several times, but does not use it in reference to any written text. In Against Marcion , written c. 208 AD, Tertullian writes of: the Divine Word, who is doubly edged with the two testaments of the law and the gospel . And Tertullian continues later in the book, writing: it is certain that the whole aim at which he [ Marcion ] has strenuously laboured, even in

20253-482: 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 𝔓 prior to this, that the latest possible date for the composition of the Gospel should be pushed back into

20410-496: The post-resurrection appearances, but the emptiness of the tomb implies a resurrection). The word "gospel" derives from the Old English gōd-spell (rarely godspel ), meaning "good news" or "glad tidings". Its Hebrew equivalent being "besorah" (בְּשׂוֹרָה). The gospel was considered the "good news" of the coming Kingdom of Messiah , and the redemption through the life and death of Jesus, the central Christian message. Starting in

20567-563: The preceding epistles. These letters are believed by many to be pseudepigraphic. Some scholars (e.g., Bill Mounce, Ben Witherington, R.C. Sproul) will argue that the letters are genuinely Pauline, or at least written under Paul's supervision. The Epistle to the Hebrews addresses a Jewish audience who had come to believe that Jesus was the Anointed One (Hebrew: מָשִׁיחַ—transliterated in English as "Moshiach", or "Messiah"; Greek: Χριστός—transliterated in English as "Christos", for " Christ ") who

20724-462: The preface to the Acts of the Apostles references "my former book" about the ministry of Jesus. Furthermore, there are linguistic and theological similarities between the two works, suggesting that they have a common author. The Pauline epistles are the thirteen books in the New Testament traditionally attributed to Paul of Tarsus . Seven letters are generally classified as "undisputed", expressing contemporary scholarly near consensus that they are

20881-461: 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 𝔓, 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

21038-428: The purpose, each having been constructed from two standard sized sheets measuring approximately 21 cm × 16 cm (8.3 in × 6.3 in), with a central narrower sheet approximately 21 cm × 8 cm (8.3 in × 3.1 in) constituting the spine. Roberts describes the handwriting as "heavy, rounded and rather elaborate", but nevertheless not the work of "a practised scribe" (i.e. not

21195-418: The range of dates for 𝔓; which corresponds with the "mid second century" date proposed Stanley Porter, is much narrower than the ranges envisaged by Barker or Nongbri, and implies within their dating schema that 𝔓 and 𝔓 stand as the earliest New Testament papyri so far identified (although, strangely, at the conclusion of their article, Orsini and Clarysse state that 𝔓, 𝔓 , and 𝔓 "probably all [date to]

21352-585: The relationship both to broader " pagan " society, to Judaism, and to other Christians. [Disputed letters are marked with an asterisk (*).] The last four Pauline letters in the New Testament are addressed to individual persons. They include the following: [Disputed letters are marked with an asterisk (*).] All of the above except for Philemon are known as the pastoral epistles . They are addressed to individuals charged with pastoral oversight of churches and discuss issues of Christian living, doctrine and leadership. They often address different concerns to those of

21509-572: The respective papyrological dating approaches adopted by Grenfell, Hunt and Roberts, they do not cite his specific study of 𝔓, and none of his proposed later parallels feature in their list of stylistically similar comparators; nor do any of other papyri advanced by Barker as representatives of his proposed graphic stream. Of the papyri discussed by Roberts and his correspondents, and in contradiction to Barker, Orsini and Clarysse maintain Kenyon's proposed dated parallel, P. Flor 1. 1 (153 CE) as corresponding to

21666-431: The same "Round Chancery Script" graphic type as 𝔓. Two further comparators they propose are PSI V 446, the official proclamation of an edict of the prefect Petronius dated 132–137 CE; and P. Fayum 87, a municipal receipt dated 156 CE; while they also note, as other commentators have done, the close similarity of 𝔓 to 𝔓 for which they propose a date of 100–200 CE. Consequently, Orsini and Clarysse propose 125 to 175 CE as

21823-464: The second half of the second century)." The John Rylands Library states "The first editor dated the Fragment to the first half of the second century (between 100–150 AD). The date was estimated palaeographically, by comparing the handwriting with other manuscripts. However, palaeography is not an exact science – none of the comparable Biblical manuscripts are dated and most papyri bearing a secure date are administrative documents. Recent research points to

21980-403: 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. (Around 90 CE, Martial circulated his poems in parchment codex form, presenting this as

22137-461: The text are lost, containing 18:34–36. The text translates as: ... the Jews, "For us it is not permitted to kill anyone," so that the w ord of Jesus might be fulfilled, which he sp- oke signifyin g what kind of death he was going to die. En tered therefore again into the Praeto- rium P ilate and summoned Jesus and sai d to him, "Thou art king of the J ew s?" The verso text comes from

22294-664: 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 𝔓. The recto text comes from the Gospel of John 18:31–33: ΟΙ ΙΟΥΔΑΙ ΟΙ ΗΜΕ ΙΝ ΟΥΚ ΕΞΕΣΤΙΝ ΑΠΟΚΤΕΙΝΑΙ ΟΥΔΕΝΑ ΙΝΑ Ο Λ ΟΓΟΣ ΤΟΥ ΙΗΣΟΥ ΠΛΗΡΩΘΗ ΟΝ ΕΙ- ΠΕΝ ΣΗΜΑΙΝΩ Ν ΠΟΙΩ ΘΑΝΑΤΩ ΗΜΕΛΛΕΝ ΑΠΟ- ΘΝΗΣΚΕΙΝ ΙΣ ΗΛΘΕΝ ΟΥΝ ΠΑΛΙΝ ΕΙΣ ΤΟ ΠΡΑΙΤΩ- ΡΙΟΝ Ο Π ΙΛΑΤΟΣ ΚΑΙ ΕΦΩΝΗΣΕΝ ΤΟΝ ΙΗΣΟΥΝ ΚΑΙ ΕΙΠ ΕΝ ΑΥΤΩ ΣΥ ΕΙ O ΒΑΣΙΛΕΥΣ ΤΩΝ ΙΟΥ- Δ ΑΙΩ N Eleven lines of

22451-553: The typology of Hellenistic Greek handwriting styles developed by Guglielmo Cavallo ; applying his categorisation of hands into 'styles', 'stylistic classes' or 'graphic types' as appropriate. Orsini and Clarysse propose dates for New Testament papyri that are often rather later than the consensus dates in the Nestle-Aland lists, and considerably later than the counterpart dates proposed by Comfort and Barrett. They criticise Don Barker for assigning dates they regard as extending too early;

22608-509: The value of this diacritic. It often now indicates that the second vowel letter is to be pronounced separately from the first, rather than merge with it into a single sound. For example, the French words maïs [ma.is] and naïve [na.iv] would be pronounced *[mɛ] and *[nɛv] , respectively, without the diaeresis mark, since the digraph ai is pronounced [ɛ] . The English spelling of Noël meaning " Christmas " ( French : Noël [nɔ.ɛl] ) comes from this use. Ÿ occurs in French as

22765-642: The warning from Eric Turner that, "Comparison of book hands with dated documentary hands will be less reliable, the intention of the scribe is different in the two cases." and in respect of this Porter cautions against what he terms Nongbri's 'overly skeptical' insistence on disregarding comparators without an explicit date, forcing comparators for literary texts inappropriately to be confined to purely documentary hands. Porter suggests that Nongbri's proposed late second and third century comparators are in several cases quite different from 𝔓 so that they force comparison to focus on detailed letter forms without consideration of

22922-412: The work of Paul: Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. Six additional letters bearing Paul's name do not currently enjoy the same academic consensus: Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus. The anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews is, despite unlikely Pauline authorship, often functionally grouped with these thirteen to form

23079-409: The writer inadvertently reverted to the undecorated (and often smaller) 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 ( 'Ι' ) and omega ( 'Ω' ) (both seen in the seventh line of the recto). He also drew attention to the forms of epsilon ( 'Ε' ) (with an extended cross-stroke a little above

23236-408: Was also to advance P. Fayum 110 and Abb 34 (though not P.Lond. 1.130) as dated comparators to 𝔓, 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 𝔓 than are

23393-532: Was also used to indicate that a vowel formed its own syllable (in phonological hiatus ), as in ηϋ and Αϊδι . The diaeresis was borrowed for this purpose in several languages of western and southern Europe, among them Occitan , Catalan , French , Dutch , Welsh , and (rarely) English . As a further extension, some languages began to use a diaeresis whenever a vowel letter was to be pronounced separately. This included vowels that would otherwise form digraphs with consonants or simply be silent. For example, in

23550-526: 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

23707-591: Was it contracted to 'ΙΣ' or 'ΙΗΣ' in accordance with otherwise universal Christian practice in surviving early Gospel manuscripts. On the assumption that the nomina sacra were absent from 𝔓, Roberts originally considered that the divine name was more likely to have been written in full, but later changed his mind. This latter view is also the view of Larry W. Hurtado , with Christopher M. Tuckett maintaining Roberts' original opinion. The verses included in 𝔓 are also witnessed in Bodmer Papyrus 𝔓 – usually dated to

23864-438: 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 𝔓 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

24021-468: Was not perfect; but that which was to be given by Christ would be complete. Eusebius describes the collection of Christian writings as "covenanted" (ἐνδιαθήκη) books in Hist. Eccl. 3.3.1–7; 3.25.3; 5.8.1; 6.25.1. Each of the four gospels in the New Testament narrates the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth (the gospel of Mark in the original text ends with the empty tomb and has no account of

24178-604: Was predicted in the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures. The author discusses the superiority of the new covenant and the ministry of Jesus, to the Mosaic Law Covenant and urges the readers in the practical implications of this conviction through the end of the epistle. The book has been widely accepted by the Christian church as inspired by God and thus authoritative, despite the acknowledgment of uncertainties about who its human author was. Regarding authorship, although

24335-405: Was the usual Hebrew word used to refer to pacts, alliances and covenants in general, like a common pact between two individuals, and to the one between God and Israel in particular, in the Greek world diatheke was virtually never used to refer to an alliance or covenant (one exception is noted in a passage from Aristophanes ) and referred instead to a will left after the death of a person. There

24492-613: Was used in (mainly Brazilian) Portuguese until the 1990 Orthographic Agreement . It was used in combinations güe/qüe and güi/qüi , in words like sangüíneo [sɐ̃ˈɡwinju] " sanguineous ". After the implementation of the Orthographic Agreement, it was abolished altogether from all Portuguese words. Spanish uses the diaeresis obligatorily in words such as cigüeña and pingüino ; and optionally in some poetic (or, until 1950, academic) contexts in words like vïuda , and süave . In Welsh , where

24649-471: Was variously incorporated into the Corpus Paulinum either after 2 Thessalonians, after Philemon (i.e. at the very end), or after Romans. Luther's canon , found in the 16th-century Luther Bible , continues to place Hebrews, James, Jude, and the Apocalypse (Revelation) last. This reflects the thoughts of the Reformer Martin Luther on the canonicity of these books. It is considered the books of

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