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Half a Million Fragments From an Egyptian Rubbish Heap

Oxyrhynchus Papyri

Two Oxford classicists spent six seasons digging the rubbish mounds of a provincial Egyptian town, and recovered more early copies of the New Testament than any other site on earth — most of them still unpublished.

Siglum
P.Oxy. — a running series of numbers, now past 5,000
Type
Papyrus and parchment fragments of every kind, literary and documentary: rolls, codex leaves, scraps. Most are very small
Language
Mostly Greek; also Latin, Coptic, Hebrew, Arabic and Egyptian scripts
Contents
Over 500,000 fragments from the third century BC to the seventh century AD, of which about 6,000 have been published. Documentary texts vastly outnumber literary ones. Among them are more early New Testament papyri than from any other site, and the Greek fragments of the Gospel of Thomas
Written
Third century BC to the seventh century AD across the collection. Individual literary pieces are dated by handwriting alone, which is why several of the New Testament dates are contested Disputed dating
Origin
Oxyrhynchus itself, and its rubbish
Found at
The ancient rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus, modern el-Bahnasa, Middle Egypt
Found in
Excavated over six seasons between the winter of 1896-97 and 1907
Found by
B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, for the Egypt Exploration Fund, now the Egypt Exploration Society
Now held at
The Egypt Exploration Society's collection, housed in the Bodleian Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library, Oxford — formerly the Sackler Library. Papyri distributed by the Society in the early years are in institutions worldwide
Shelfmark
P.Oxy. numbers, plus inventory numbers of the form 101/14(b)
Facsimile
View the manuscript

The Rubbish Mounds

Oxyrhynchus was an ordinary Greek-speaking town in Middle Egypt, on a canal off the Nile, known today as el-Bahnasa. Its distinction is that it is dry, and that for a thousand years its inhabitants carried their waste out beyond the houses and piled it up. Paper in that town was papyrus, and papyrus thrown on a dry heap does not rot. In the winter of 1896-97 B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, two young Oxford classicists working for the Egypt Exploration Fund, began digging those heaps. The project's own account is unromantic about what they found: "What Grenfell and Hunt found was the rubbish of Oxyrhynchus, which had been carried out and piled into a heap until it became more convenient to start another heap elsewhere, and so on."

They dug there over six seasons between 1896 and 1907, and the Egypt Exploration Society, which still owns the collection, describes it as "over 500,000 fragments of literary and documentary texts dating from the third century BCE to the seventh century CE". They are tax returns, private letters, contracts, shopping lists, school exercises, lost plays, and scripture. About six thousand texts have been published in the volumes of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri — the eighty-eighth appeared in 2025, at roughly one a year — which means that well over a century later the great majority of the find has still never been read by anyone. The collection is housed at Oxford, in what was until recently the Sackler Library and is now the Bodleian Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library.

On the second day of digging they found the piece that made the site famous. It was a page from a papyrus book carrying sayings of Jesus that were not in the Gospels, and they rushed it into print in 1897, a year ahead of the first volume. Grenfell and Hunt took it for an independent collection of sayings, possibly first-century. The project's own history records the outcome carefully: "Later research has identified the text as from the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, known from a Coptic version." Two more fragments of the same work turned up in the fourth volume.

What It Gave the New Testament

No other place has produced anything like as many early copies of the New Testament. A great many of the catalogued New Testament papyri come from this one rubbish heap, and the earliest fragments of several books are among them. P1 is a leaf of Matthew, P.Oxy. 2, published in the very first volume. P5 is a copy of John's Gospel, P13 is Hebrews, P77 is Matthew again. P90 preserves John 18:36-19:7 and was edited by T. C. Skeat; the Oxyrhynchus project's own catalogue entry for it reads "Unusually early in date (second century AD)." P104 carries a few verses of Matthew 21 and is assigned to the late second century. P137 is the small fragment of Mark that was announced for years as first-century and published in 2018 as late second or early third.

The most striking single reading came in P115, a papyrus of Revelation edited by J. Chapa. At Revelation 13:18 it gives the number of the beast not as 666 but as 616. The reading was already known to exist — Irenaeus mentions it in the second century in order to reject it — but here it is in a manuscript, and, as Oxford's own note on the papyrus puts it, "this is the earliest instance that has so far been found." That is a good illustration of what this material does: it does not overturn the text, and it does not leave it unchanged either. It shows a real variant, already known from a Church Father's complaint about it, actually written down by a scribe.

Two Kinds of Honesty This Site Demands

The first is about dates. Almost every date attached to these papyri rests on handwriting alone, because a literary papyrus carries no year. B. Nongbri has pressed the methodological point hardest, and it is worth stating in his own terms: this kind of dating "cannot reliably produce such a narrow window of possible dates for Greek literary writing of the Roman era", and "Date ranges of more than a century are sensible when attempting to establish dates for Greek literary manuscripts of the Roman period solely on paleographic grounds." His sharpest objection concerns codices specifically: "the pool of securely dated or datable samples of literary writing contains almost no codices" — and every New Testament papyrus is a codex. He is not alone in resisting early dates, and not everyone who resists them agrees with him: P. Orsini and W. Clarysse defend comparative palaeography as a method while concluding that "There are no first-century New Testament papyri and only very few papyri can be attributed to the (second half of the) second century." The editors of P137 were candid about their own difficulty: "Dating this hand presents even more difficulties than usual, since the sample is so small and damaged and the scribe inconsistent."

The second is about ownership. Since 2019 the Egypt Exploration Society has published a series of statements about papyri removed from its collection without authorisation and sold on. It has recovered thirteen items identified in 2019 and twenty-one more in 2020, all returned by the Museum of the Bible, which had received them from Hobby Lobby. The Society has reported that the Museum of the Bible told it eleven of the items had been "sold to Hobby Lobby Stores by Professor Obbink", formerly one of the general editors of the series. He denies it, in a statement issued through his lawyers: "The allegations made against me that I have stolen, removed or sold items owned by the Egyptian Exploration Society collection at the University of Oxford are entirely false." He was arrested in 2020 on suspicion of theft and fraud and released under investigation. No charging decision has ever been publicly reported, and nothing has been proved against him in court. The Society's own most recent word, an update dated 24 July 2025, says that "Thames Valley Police is continuing its investigation into the removal of papyri from the EES collection". The honest statement is that the matter is unresolved.

Both of these bear on how a reader should hold this material. A collection of half a million fragments, mostly unread, in the care of a scholarly society and a university, is an extraordinary inheritance — and it is being published slowly, argued over publicly, and policed imperfectly by people who are still working out how to do it. That is what real evidence looks like while it is still being handled. The Society's own statement in 2019 about what remains unpublished is the right note to end on: "Some twenty New Testament inedita have been identified, none of them apparently earlier than the late 2nd to early 3rd century AD." Nothing so far identified in the boxes is a first-century Gospel.

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Reflect

Almost everything we have of this town survives because nobody thought it worth keeping. What are you throwing out that someone might one day need?

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