Egerton Papyrus 2

Bought, Not Dug

In July 1934 the dealer M. Nahman sent a batch of papyri from Cairo to Paris, and the British Museum bought part of it. Among the pieces were three fragments of a codex leaf carrying Greek text about Jesus. H. I. Bell and T. C. Skeat published them the following year as Fragments of an Unknown Gospel and Other Early Christian Papyri, and the shelfmark has been Egerton Papyrus 2 ever since; the collection passed to the British Library when it separated from the Museum in 1973. The Library still holds the correspondence about the purchase, including the envelope, sealed by Egypt's Department of Antiquities, that the fragments travelled in.

Where they came from is unknown, and the editors said so on the page: "Unfortunately the provenance of the fragments is unknown. They formed part of a miscellaneous collection bought from a dealer." They guessed Oxyrhynchus from what else came in the same purchase, and immediately qualified the guess. That is the honest position and it has not improved since.

Fifty-three years later a fourth piece turned up in a different country. M. Gronewald identified Papyrus Köln 255, in the collection of the Institut für Altertumskunde at Cologne, as part of the same codex, joining the bottom of the first fragment. It is a small thing, about five centimetres by three, and it changed the argument about the date more than anything else in the file.

Four Scenes, One of Them Unrepeatable

How many episodes the fragments hold depends on who is counting: this article follows the four substantial ones below, while Attridge separates the attempted stoning as a fifth and puts the scene at the Jordan before the tribute question rather than after. In the first, Jesus argues with lawyers and rulers in language that runs remarkably close to the fifth and ninth chapters of John's Gospel — searching the Scriptures, Moses as accuser, not knowing where Jesus is from — followed by an attempt to seize and stone him that fails because his hour had not yet come. The wording there is not quite that of the Fourth Gospel: it specifies the hour of his handing over, which J. W. Pryor notes reads the hour "in a quite unjohannine way: instead of being the hour of his glorification, it is now the time of his arrest."

In the second a leper approaches, addressing Jesus as teacher, and explains that he caught the disease while travelling and eating with lepers at an inn. Jesus heals him and sends him to the priests. Bell and Skeat noted that the form of address is unparalleled in the Gospels and that the dismissal agrees more closely with Luke's ten lepers than with the Synoptic healing accounts. In the third, questioners ask whether it is lawful to pay to kings the things that belong to their rule — kings, not Caesar — and Jesus answers with Isaiah's line about honouring with the lips while the heart is far away.

The fourth has no parallel anywhere. Jesus stands at the edge of the Jordan, stretches out his right hand, sprinkles something on the water, and something comes up and bears fruit. Bell and Skeat were candid about how little of it can be read: "This is the only passage to which no even possible parallel can be found in the canonical Gospels, which therefore supply no help towards filling up the lacunae; and unfortunately this is the page in which the surface of the papyrus is in the worst condition." What is scattered is not certain — seed and salt have both been proposed — and their own reading was that the incident is more likely symbolic than a display of power. Anyone who tells you confidently what happened at the Jordan in this text is telling you more than the papyrus does.

Two Things This Papyrus Is Used to Prove, and Neither Is Settled

The first is the date, and here the popular story runs in both directions and gets the editors wrong at both ends. Bell and Skeat did make a strong claim — the papyrus "is unquestionably the earliest specifically Christian manuscript yet discovered in Egypt" — but note how narrow that is: earliest specifically Christian, in Egypt, its rivals being Septuagint books whose Christian ownership cannot be shown. It is not the flat claim, oldest Christian text anywhere, that popular accounts put in their mouths. And they hedged hard. Palaeography was "the sole evidence of date" and "always a somewhat precarious basis"; their conclusion was that it seemed "extremely improbable" the manuscript was later than the middle of the second century, not that it was proven earlier.

The Cologne fragment then supplied an argument for a later date: it carries a hooked apostrophe between double consonants, which Gronewald took as a third-century practice, pushing the codex to about AD 200. His own publication is in German and behind a paywall this article could not get through, so what follows is his argument as his critic reports it, which is a weaker footing than it should be. That is now widely repeated as settled, and it is not. S. E. Porter went back to E. G. Turner, whom Gronewald was citing, and quotes what Turner actually wrote — that in the first decade of the third century the practice "suddenly becomes extremely common and then persists" — observing that this says the habit became common then, not that it did not exist before. Porter points to a documentary instance from AD 101 that he calls "virtually identical" to the Cologne example, and concludes that "we are essentially back where we began in 1935." The British Library's own catalogue still dates the papyrus 130 to 170; L. R. Zelyck's 2019 critical edition gives 150 to 250. The honest statement is a range, roughly the mid-second to the mid-third century, with no agreed point inside it.

The second is dependence, and this is where the popular retelling most often makes the editors say the opposite of what they said. Bell and Skeat concluded that as far as the Synoptic Gospels go the text "appears to represent a quite independent tradition", and on the Fourth Gospel they leaned the other way from what a reader might expect, writing that it "would be rash to reject off-hand" the possibility that the Fourth Gospel depended on this papyrus rather than the reverse. They then refused to decide, in as many words, on the ground that neither of them "can claim any wide acquaintance with this field of study". Bell changed his mind two years later, moving toward dependence on the Fourth Gospel in a book of 1937 — a shift this article takes from Pryor's footnote and not from Bell's own volume. The independence case was pressed hardest by H. Koester and J. D. Crossan — Crossan arguing that this text's handling of the Isaiah quotation is more primitive than the version in Mark's Gospel, since here Jesus applies it to himself inside the tribute controversy while Mark's Gospel places it elsewhere and applies it to God. This article has not opened Koester's or Crossan's volumes and reports both at second hand.

Against them, J. Jeremias argued that "the Johannine material is shot through with Synoptic phrases and the Synoptic with Johannine usage", which would point to an author who knew all four. F. Neirynck found a common Lukan vocabulary running through the leper story. H. W. Attridge makes the sharpest version of the case: the detail that Jesus's opponents do not know where he is from "reflects not simply a floating tradition, but a theme that structures a major portion of the Fourth Gospel," which "strongly suggests that the papyrus depends on the Gospel." One caution belongs beside that. Pryor, whose own conclusion is that the author knew the Fourth Gospel and respected it while owing the Synoptics nothing, directly denies Jeremias's premise, writing that apart from three lines the text "displays no tendency to mix Johannine and other traditions" at all. The two most recent full technical treatments, by T. Nicklas and by Zelyck, both favour Johannine influence, so the ground has moved — but it has moved by argument, in public, with the editors' own hedges still on the record. That is what an unsettled question looks like when it is handled properly.

Scripture references

• John 5:39 — Searching the Scriptures — one of the closest verbal contacts in the first fragment
• John 9:29 — Not knowing where Jesus is from: the detail Attridge reads as decisive for dependence on John
• Mark 1:40-44 — The Synoptic leper, against which the papyrus's version is measured
• Isaiah 29:13 — Honouring with the lips while the heart is far away — quoted in the tribute scene

Sources

• Holding institutionBritish Library, Archives and Manuscripts: Egerton Papyrus 2 — The British Library · The holding library's own record, giving the title "Egerton Gospel (P. Lond. Christ. 1, P. Egerton 2, TM 63527, LDAB 4736)", three fragments of a codex mounted in glass with their measurements, the note that P. Köln VI 255 is from the same codex, the provenance line "Possibly found at Oxyrhynchus: Bell and Skeat (1935), p. 7", and a date of mid second century AD (130-170) — which is worth noting because it is the holding institution declining to adopt the later dating. The catalogue carries a banner explaining that it is an interim version following the 2023 cyber-attackSupports: The shelfmark, the physical description, the Cologne join, and the Library's own dating
• Holding institutionUniversität zu Köln, Institut für Altertumskunde: P.Köln VI 255 (Inv. 608) — Institut für Altertumskunde, Universität zu Köln · The Cologne papyrus database's own record: inventory 608, publication P.Köln VI 255, second century, 5.5 by 3 centimetres, described as an unknown gospel or gospel harmony with Synoptic and Johannine similarities, with images of recto and verso released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0Supports: The fourth fragment, its identification and its measurements
• ScholarshipH. I. Bell and T. C. Skeat, Fragments of an Unknown Gospel and Other Early Christian Papyri — Harold Idris Bell and Theodore Cressy Skeat · London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1935, printed by Oxford University Press. Note that the publisher is the Museum's trustees, not OUP, and not the British Library, which did not exist until 1973 — both errors are in circulation. A scan was consulted for verification and every sentence quoted here was compared against it; the volume is still in copyright and is neither hosted nor linked. Source of the provenance statement, the palaeographic hedges, the "earliest specifically Christian manuscript" claim in its exact scope, the note on the leper's form of address, the description of the Jordan fragment's condition, and the editors' explicit refusal to settle the question of dependence · paywalledSupports: Everything attributed to the original editors, quoted in their own words
• ScholarshipS. E. Porter, "Recent Efforts to Reconstruct Early Christianity on the Basis of Its Papyrological Evidence" — Stanley E. Porter · In S. E. Porter and A. W. Pitts, eds., Christian Origins and Greco-Roman Culture (Brill, 2013), 71-84. Read in full from a copy hosted by a third party, which is why no URL is given here rather than give one this project cannot vouch for. Source of the Turner quotation and of Porter's argument that Gronewald's inference from it is invalid, of the AD 101 documentary parallel, and of his own conclusion. Porter's dating of the manuscript is early; his view of its literary relationships is not, and the article does not conflate the twoSupports: That the redating to about AD 200 is contested, and on what grounds
• ScholarshipJ. W. Pryor, "Papyrus Egerton 2 and the Fourth Gospel" — John W. Pryor · Australian Biblical Review 37 (1989), 1-13, free PDF, downloaded and read in full. Source of his reading of the hour of the handing over, of his own conclusion that the author knew and respected John while owing the Synoptics nothing, of his direct denial of Jeremias's mixing claim, and of the Jeremias and Neirynck positions as he reports them — this article has not opened Jeremias's or Neirynck's own publications and takes both from Pryor, who is arguing against themSupports: The third section's account of the dependence debate on both sides
• ScholarshipH. W. Attridge, "John and Other Gospels" — Harold W. Attridge · Chapter 4 of The Oxford Handbook of Johannine Studies (Oxford University Press, 2018), 44-61; the author's proof PDF is freely available and was read. Source of the summary of the four episodes and of Attridge's own argument from the where-is-he-from motifSupports: The contents of the fragments, and the strongest current argument for dependence on John
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Egerton Gospel

Further reading

• British Library: Egerton Papyrus 2
• Universität zu Köln: P.Köln VI 255 (Inv. 608)
• J. W. Pryor, "Papyrus Egerton 2 and the Fourth Gospel" (open access)