The Magdalen Papyrus

Three Scraps in Oxford, Two in Barcelona

In 1901 C. B. Huleatt, an Oxford-educated clergyman, bought three small papyrus fragments from a dealer in Luxor, recognised them as Matthew's Gospel, and gave them to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he had been a scholar. No findspot came with them. The envelope he kept them in carries the note "these found year after but evidently from same leaf", which suggests either two purchases or further pieces since lost. They are Magdalen Greek 17, catalogued in the Gregory-Aland list as P64, and they carry parts of Matthew 26:7-8, 10, 14-15, 22-23 and 31-33 — six written sides in all, from a book laid out in two columns of about fifteen or sixteen letters and thirty-five lines each.

In 1956 R. Roca-Puig published two further fragments in Barcelona, carrying Matthew 3:9, 15 and 5:20-22, 25-28; they are now catalogued as P.Monts.Roca inv. 1 in the Roca-Puig collection at the Abbey of Montserrat, and the catalogue there records them as being from the same manuscript as the Oxford leaf. C. H. Roberts, who had published the Oxford pieces, and Roca-Puig agreed that the two sets came from the same manuscript, and they have been treated as one ever since: P64 and P67 are two halves of a single codex of Matthew. A third manuscript, P4 — fragments of Luke in the Bibliotheque nationale de France, found with a codex of Philo, though accounts differ over whether they were in its binding or between its pages — is similar in size and layout, and whether it belongs with them is a separate and still-open question.

The date has never sat still. Huleatt himself suggested the third century. The Oxford librarian reported that A. S. Hunt — the Hunt of Grenfell and Hunt — preferred the fourth, and because of who he was, that stood for half a century. C. H. Roberts published the fragments properly in 1953, argued that Hunt's date rested on the outdated assumption that codices had to be late, and placed the hand "in the later second century", with H. I. Bell, T. C. Skeat and E. G. Turner agreeing. That was the settled position for forty years.

The First-Century Claim

In 1994 and 1995 C. P. Thiede reopened it. Thiede was a German scholar of papyrology and literature who directed a research institute in Paderborn, and Head's reply runs to thirty-five pages, which is the measure of how seriously the challenge was taken. His article, published in the Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik and reprinted in the Tyndale Bulletin, offered a fresh transcription of all six sides and then argued for a much earlier date by comparing the hand with manuscripts that had become available since Roberts wrote — material from Qumran, from Herculaneum, from the Judean desert. His own conclusion is carefully hedged, and deserves to be quoted as he wrote it: the fragments "remain the oldest extant papyrus of that gospel; but it may be argued that it could be redated from the late second to the late first century, some time after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem." Asked directly, he was more specific, writing to P. M. Head in January 1995: "I do not give a precise date, but suggest a date in the last third of the first century: The 'starting point' is the middle of the century; I allow for a variation of c. 20 years + / — and then opt for the later end, 'soon after A.D. 70'."

The public version was less hedged. Matthew d'Ancona's report in The Times on 24 December 1994 spoke of the mid-first century, and Head records that at a public lecture in London the following month Thiede "referred repeatedly to 'a first-century date'". A popular book by Thiede and d'Ancona followed. If the fragments were from the 60s, they would be within living memory of the events they describe, and that is why the story travelled as far as it did.

What the Papyrologists Said, and Why It Matters Who Said It

The case did not hold. K. Wachtel, of the Institute for New Testament Textual Research at Munster, answered it in the same journal Thiede had published in. He wrote in German; his closing section is given here whole, in this article's English: "C. P. Thiede deserves credit for having prompted a review of the dating and the extent of the oldest direct manuscript witness to the Gospel of Matthew, even though he brings less than half of P64/67 into the investigation. In every discipline it is useful from time to time to reassure oneself of its material foundations. Thiede's argument for a first-century dating of P64/67 must, however, be rejected as methodologically inadequate and factually wrong. The conventional dating to around 200, by contrast, has proved to be well founded. In the list of New Testament manuscripts, only the inventory number under which the Magdalen fragments are now kept will need changing. The suggestion that Matthew 26:22 in P64 might be read otherwise than Roberts read it requires checking against the original; at that place there is in any case no occasion for constituting the text differently." The most detailed response came from P. M. Head in the Tyndale Bulletin — the journal of Tyndale House in Cambridge, an evangelical research institute — and his verdict is worth reading in full because of how it is phrased: "Although we recognise the service that he has performed in facilitating a re-examination of methodological presuppositions, our verdict on his claims is a negative one. The very early manuscripts to which Thiede appealed for close parallels to P64 turned out to be not as close as the somewhat later ones which he had overlooked. Although there is no absolutely definite evidence by which P. Magd. Gr. 17 = P64 can be dated with certainty, the available evidence points to a date around AD 200. To be on the safe side I would suggest plus or minus fifty years as the possible range." Magdalen College's own page says the same thing more briefly: Thiede's claim "has prompted much discussion, however it has not been widely accepted by the academic community."

Two things follow, and both are uncomfortable in the right way. The first is that the correction came from inside evangelical scholarship, not from outside it. Head's article is the definitive refutation, it appeared in an evangelical journal, and that journal printed Thiede's claim and its answer in consecutive issues — saying so in print at the end of Thiede's own article. That is worth more than an early date would have been. The second is that a claim can be technically hedged in a journal and unhedged everywhere else. Thiede wrote "it may be argued that it could be redated"; the newspaper wrote "the mid-first century AD". Both are on the record, and a reader who has only ever met the second version has been misinformed by the process rather than by the paper. Whether Thiede accepted the verdict is not reported here. He died on 14 December 2004, at fifty-two.

There is also a separate question that is still genuinely open, and it should not be confused with the dating one. T. C. Skeat argued in 1997 that P4, P64 and P67 all come from a single codex of all four Gospels — which, if true, would make it the oldest four-Gospel book known. Head answered him in 2005 and current opinion tends to keep P4 apart from P64 and P67, partly on grounds Thiede himself had published. His own stated reason, in the article quoted above, was that the Paris codex "is written on much darker, brownish papyrus and is considerably later (by up to one hundred years)"; Head's footnote credits a fuller set of codicological objections, including fibre and letter formation, to a companion note Thiede published in the same issue, which this article has not read. The disagreement is narrower than it looks: Head and S. Charlesworth argue against one codex on codicological grounds while accepting Skeat's palaeographic case that the same scribe wrote all three. It is about how the sheets were folded rather than about dates, nobody's faith rests on it, and it has not been settled.

Scripture references

• Matthew 26:7 — The anointing at Bethany — the first surviving words of P64
• Matthew 26:14-15 — Judas goes to the chief priests; preserved on fragment 3
• Matthew 26:31 — "All of you will be made to stumble" — the last surviving passage
• Matthew 3:15 — Preserved by P67, the Barcelona half of the same codex
• Matthew 5:20-22 — Also on the Barcelona fragments

Sources

• Holding institutionMagdalen College, Oxford: "The Magdalen Papyrus P64" — Magdalen College, University of Oxford · The holding college's own page, 30 October 2013, with images. It gives the shelfmark as "Magd. MS. Gr. 17", the contents as passages of Matthew 26, an estimated text block of 10.5 x 16.8 cm, a date of "the late second century or c.200 A.D.", and the gift by Charles Bousfield Huleatt in 1901. On Thiede it says his claim "has prompted much discussion, however it has not been widely accepted by the academic community"Supports: The shelfmark, the acquisition, the current date, and the college's own view of the first-century claim
• ScholarshipP. M. Head, "The Date of the Magdalen Papyrus of Matthew (P. Magd. Gr. 17 = P64): A Response to C. P. Thiede" — Peter M. Head, Tyndale House, Cambridge · Tyndale Bulletin 46.2 (1995), 251-285; DOI 10.53751/001c.31625; open access and read in full for this article. Source of the acquisition history, the Hunt and Roberts dates, Thiede's private clarification of 20 January 1995, the report of his London lecture, and the conclusion quoted hereSupports: The refutation of the first-century date, and the history of the fragments before 1994
• ScholarshipC. P. Thiede, "Papyrus Magdalen Greek 17 (Gregory-Aland P64): A Reappraisal" — Carsten Peter Thiede · Tyndale Bulletin 46.1 (1995), 29-42; DOI 10.53751/001c.30393; reprinted with minor corrections from Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik 105 (1995), 13-20. Open access and read in full, so that the claim is quoted from Thiede's own page rather than from his critics' summaries of itSupports: Thiede's proposal in his own words, and his own transcription of the fragments
• ScholarshipK. Wachtel, "P64/67: Fragmente des Matthausevangeliums aus dem 1. Jahrhundert?" — Klaus Wachtel, Institut fur Neutestamentliche Textforschung, Munster · Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik 107 (1995), 73-80. The journal's own open-access offprint, read in full. The passage quoted in this article is his closing section, headed FAZIT, entire — both of its paragraphs and all six of its sentences — rendered into English here. The German of the two sentences that carry the verdict reads "Thiedes Argumentation fur eine Datierung des P64/67 ins 1. Jahrhundert ist jedoch als methodisch unzulanglich und sachlich falsch zuruckzuweisen. Die herkommliche Datierung in die Zeit um 200 hingegen hat sich als gut begrundet erwiesen." Wachtel prints the siglum with the papyrological P, which this article writes as P64/67Supports: The Munster institute's published verdict on the first-century dating
• Holding institutionDVCTVS: P.Monts.Roca inv. 1 (P67), Fondo Roca-Puig, Abadia de Montserrat — DVCTVS, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, for the Abadia de Montserrat · The catalogue of the holding collection; its server is slow and intermittently times out, so retry rather than concluding it is dead. It gives the current inventory number, a date of "II AD", the contents as Matthew 3:9, 15 and 5:20-22, 25-28, the fragment dimensions (1.1 x 1.8 cm and 5 x 4.9 cm), the hand as biblical uncial, the provenance as unknown, and "Same MS as Oxford, Magdalen College Gr. 17"Supports: P67's current shelfmark, extent, date and its identity with the Oxford fragments
• ReferenceDeutsche Nationalbibliothek, GND authority record 11558126X: Carsten Peter Thiede — Deutsche Nationalbibliothek · The German national library's authority file gives 8 August 1952 and 14 December 2004; the Bibliotheque nationale de France's own record (data.bnf.fr, ark 123725546) gives the same years. The linked address is the machine-readable form, which is what resolved when this was checked; the human-readable d-nb.info page was returning a server error. Two national libraries are used here rather than an obituary because both newspaper obituaries were unreachable from this projectSupports: Thiede's dates
• ScholarshipT. C. Skeat, "The Oldest Manuscript of the Four Gospels?" and P. M. Head's reply — T. C. Skeat; Peter M. Head · Skeat, New Testament Studies 43:1 (1997), 1-34, DOI 10.1017/s0028688500022475; Head, "Is P4, P64 and P67 the Oldest Manuscript of the Four Gospels? A Response to T. C. Skeat," New Testament Studies 51:3 (2005), 450-457, DOI 10.1017/s0028688505000238; S. D. Charlesworth, "T. C. Skeat, P64+67 and P4, and the Problem of Fibre Orientation in Codicological Reconstruction," New Testament Studies 53 (2007), 582-604. The Skeat and Head citations were verified against the Crossref registry and the Charlesworth citation against the Montserrat catalogue's bibliography; none of the three articles was opened, and this article reports only the shape of the disagreement, not any author's detailed argument · paywalledSupports: That whether P4 belongs with P64 and P67 is a live and separate question
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Magdalen papyrus

Further reading

• Magdalen College, Oxford: the Magdalen Papyrus P64
• P. M. Head, "The Date of the Magdalen Papyrus of Matthew: A Response to C. P. Thiede"
• C. P. Thiede, "Papyrus Magdalen Greek 17 (Gregory-Aland P64): A Reappraisal"

Reflect

The correction to this story came from people who wanted it to be true and checked anyway. What would it cost you to check something you would rather not have to?