Bodmer Papyri

A library of Greek and Coptic books — Homer and Menander bound alongside John's Gospel and the letters of Peter — that surfaced in Upper Egypt in the 1950s and gave the New Testament three of its most important early copies.

Siglum: P.Bodmer I-LVIII and related codices; the New Testament members are P66, P72, P73, P74 and P75
Type: A group of papyrus and parchment codices, Greek and Coptic, of varying size and quality
Language: Greek and Coptic
Contents: A mixed library rather than a Bible. Biblical books in Greek and Coptic (John, Luke, Genesis, Daniel, Psalms, 1-2 Peter, Jude), Christian works outside the canon (the Protevangelium of James, 3 Corinthians, an Ode of Solomon, Melito's On Pascha, the Apology of Phileas), and classical literature (Menander's comedies, Homer, Thucydides Book 6)
Written: Third to fifth centuries AD, clustering in the fourth, across the collection as a whole. Individual codices are dated separately and several of those dates are disputed Disputed dating
Origin: Egypt. Beyond that, disputed — see the third section
Found at: Not excavated and not recorded at the time. J. M. Robinson's reconstruction places the find at the foot of the cliff Jabal Abu Mana near al-Qurnah, about 5.5 km north-west of Dishna in Upper Egypt; J.-L. Fournet argues for Panopolis and C. Mela for Asyut, and the first editors variously named Panopolis, "unknown" and the neighbourhood of Thebes
Found in: Late in 1952 on Robinson's reconstruction, worked out from interviews conducted between 1974 and 1981. No contemporary record exists
Found by: Hasan Muhammad al-Samman and Muhammad Khalil al-Azzuz, digging for fertiliser, on Robinson's reconstruction. No excavator; the books reached collections through dealers
Now held at: Dispersed. Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cologny-Geneva (the largest share); the Chester Beatty, Dublin; the University of Cologne; Barcelona and Montserrat; the University of Mississippi and Duke; the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (P75); the Schoyen Collection
Shelfmark: "P.Bodmer" numerals for the Geneva holdings; Bodmer Lab catalogues them as PB 1, PB 2, PB 3 and so on
Facsimile: View the manuscript

A Jar of Books at the Foot of a Cliff

In the early 1950s books began appearing on the Egyptian antiquities market that were older and better preserved than almost anything then known, and the Swiss collector Martin Bodmer bought the largest share of them for his library at Cologny, outside Geneva. Others went to the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, to Cologne, to Barcelona and Montserrat, to Mississippi and Duke, and later to the Vatican. They are known collectively as the Bodmer Papyri, and among them are three of the most valuable New Testament manuscripts in existence: P66, a near-complete copy of John's Gospel; P75, a codex of Luke and the Fourth Gospel; and P72, the earliest substantial copy of 1 and 2 Peter and Jude.

Where they came from was worked out afterwards, and by asking people. J. M. Robinson — the same scholar who reconstructed the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices — spent interviews across 1974, 1975, 1976, 1978 and 1980 in the Dishna plain of Upper Egypt, and on 11 August 1981 located the man he concluded had found them. On Robinson's account the discovery was made late in 1952 by Hasan Muhammad al-Samman and Muhammad Khalil al-Azzuz of Abu Mana Bahri, who were digging for sabakh — soil used as fertiliser — about three hundred metres out from the foot of the cliff Jabal Abu Mana, five and a half kilometres north-west of Dishna. Hasan struck a large earthen jar full of books and broke it open with his mattock. Some of what came out was burned on the spot; some leaves of a large papyrus book were crushed up to light a water pipe. The books were then sold on piecemeal through dealers, the bulk reaching Bodmer and Chester Beatty around 1956.

Not a Bible — a Library

This collection is a mixed one, and that is its most interesting feature. Alongside the biblical codices are classical Greek texts: a codex of the comedies of Menander, and another that carries part of Book 6 of Thucydides bound together with the Greek book of Daniel. There is a Coptic codex containing John's Gospel and part of Genesis. There are Christian works that are in nobody's canon — the Protevangelium (a second-century story of Mary's birth and childhood), the correspondence known as 3 Corinthians, an Ode of Solomon, Melito of Sardis on the Passover, the Apology of Phileas.

One codex in the group makes the point on its own. The book usually catalogued as P.Bodmer V, X, XI, VII, XIII, XII, XX, IX and VIII is a single composite volume containing, in order, the Protevangelium, 3 Corinthians, the eleventh Ode of Solomon, the letter of Jude, Melito on the Passover, a hymn, the Apology of Phileas, Psalms 33 and 34, and 1 and 2 Peter. Its New Testament portion is what scholars call P72, and whether the Phileas and Psalms leaves really belong to it has lately been questioned. Whoever bound that volume was not assembling a New Testament; he was assembling a reader's shelf, and canonical and non-canonical works sat on it together. That is a real datum about how early Christians used books, and it is more informative than the tidier story usually told.

The collection's date range is also wider than the famous items suggest. Most of the Bodmer codices are assigned to the third, fourth and fifth centuries, with the largest cluster in the fourth — which matters, because it is the context in which the dating of the individual New Testament codices has to be argued.

How Much of This Is Actually Known

Nothing here was excavated. There is no findspot recorded by an archaeologist, no stratigraphy, no register of what was in the jar. What exists is Robinson's reconstruction, built from interviews conducted more than twenty years after the event, and he was candid about the method: "Obviously in such repeated interviews there are minor fluctuations and contradictions, at times protestations of innocence and self-serving interpretations, but in the cross-examination procedure the basic facts were again and again confirmed." That is a claim about convergent testimony, not about documentary proof, and this article states it as what it is.

The original editors did not say Dishna. V. Martin's first volume, in 1954, named Panopolis; his 1958 volume gave the place of discovery as unknown; R. Kasser in 1961 favoured the neighbourhood of Thebes. Nor is Robinson's answer the only one now. B. Nongbri, surveying the question in the Journal of Biblical Literature in 2016, records that there is consensus only that the books belong to Upper Egypt: Robinson places them at Jabal Abu Mana and identifies them with the library of the nearby Pachomian monastery at Pbow; J.-L. Fournet argues for Panopolis and an educational rather than monastic setting; and a third proposal, which Nongbri reports was espoused by the assistant who helped Martin Bodmer buy many of the manuscripts, places them further north still, at Asyut. Even the size of the find is unsettled: Kasser counted nineteen codices, Robinson considerably more, and Robinson's own published lists do not agree with each other.

None of this makes the manuscripts less valuable, and none of it puts their text in doubt. It does mean that the sentence "the Bodmer papyri came from the Pachomian monastery library at Dishna" is a scholarly reconstruction that a reader deserves to be told is one. It also means that when the date of P66 or P75 is argued from the character of the collection they belong to — which is exactly how the argument now runs — the collection itself is being reconstructed at the same time.

Scripture references

John 1:1 — P66 and P75 both preserve John's opening
Luke 1:1-4 — P75's Gospel of Luke begins from 3:18; Luke's preface states his own method
1 Peter 1:1 — P72 carries 1 Peter complete, bound with works outside the canon
Jude 1:3 — Jude, also complete in the same composite codex

Sources

Holding institutionBodmer Lab (University of Geneva and Fondation Martin Bodmer): the Papyri constellation — Bodmer Lab, Universite de Geneve and Fondation Martin Bodmer · The holding institution's own catalogue and image project. It states that "the majority of these were acquired by Martin Bodmer in the 1950s and early 1960s", and describes the collection's mixed character, naming the Menander codex and the codex carrying Daniel in Greek with Book 6 of Thucydides. The English path returns 404; use the /fr/ pathSupports: The acquisition dates, the mixed contents, and the current Geneva holdings
ScholarshipB. Nongbri, "Reconsidering the Place of Papyrus Bodmer XIV-XV (P75) in the Textual Criticism of the New Testament" — Brent Nongbri, Macquarie University · Journal of Biblical Literature 135:2 (2016), 405-437; DOI 10.15699/jbl.1352.2016.2803. The author's own open-access offprint. Section III surveys the find-site question: "The exact area of the find and the extent of the collection are not entirely clear. There is consensus that the books are to be associated with Upper Egypt." Nongbri names Robinson and Fournet, and in a footnote a third proposal placing the find at Asyut, and notes that Robinson's own inventories disagreeSupports: The three competing find-site proposals, and that the extent of the collection is unsettled
ScholarshipJ. M. Robinson, The Pachomian Monastic Library at the Chester Beatty Library and the Bibliotheque Bodmer — J. M. Robinson · Institute for Antiquity and Christianity Occasional Papers 19 (Claremont, 1990), freely readable at the Internet Archive. Section 2 gives the find account and the Postscript gives the method, including Robinson's own caution about the interviews quoted in this article. The scan's OCR is rough; the passages quoted here were read against it directlySupports: The find account, the finders' names, the 1952 date, and Robinson's own statement of how it was established
EncyclopediaWikipedia: Dishna Papers

Reflect

On the account we have, someone lit a water pipe with pages of an ancient book because nobody had told him what it was. What is in front of you that you have not yet learned to value?