Papyrus 66

A Whole Gospel, Almost

Most early New Testament papyri are scraps. P66 is a book. Seventy-five identifiable leaves survive, plus numerous fragments, from a codex that once held the whole of John's Gospel. The Fondation Martin Bodmer, which holds the bulk of it, describes the state of the survival precisely: the first four quires and most of the fifth — John 1:1 to 14:26 — are preserved as an intact book block, while the remaining leaves, carrying portions of John 14:29 to 21:9, are conserved between glass plates. So "P66 contains the Gospel of John" is nearly true for the first fourteen chapters and steadily less true after that.

The pages are small: 14.2 by 16.2 centimetres, one column, fourteen to twenty-five lines to a page, written in soot-based black ink in a single hand. The scribe numbered his own pages up to 99; the numbers above 100 appear to be in a different hand. B. van Regemorter noticed that the codex had been bound twice. Not all of it is in Geneva — one leaf is at the Chester Beatty in Dublin, and further pieces are at the Institute for Ancient Studies in Cologne. Like the rest of the Bodmer group it was not excavated; the bulk of it reached Geneva in 1955 by purchase.

The Scribe and His Second Thoughts

P66 carries roughly 450 corrections. G. D. Fee counted them for his 1966 doctoral thesis and found that the majority — about 235 — are simple repairs of slips, while the rest alter the text in ways where both the original and the corrected reading are found in other important manuscripts. His verdict on the copyist is blunt and worth quoting whole: "Both their quantity and the nature of the errors lead to one conclusion: The scribe was a careless and ineffective workman." E. C. Colwell, working on the same material a year earlier, had written that "Wildness in copying is the outstanding characteristic of P66."

But the corrections are almost all the copyist's own. V. Martin, who first published the codex, judged that the repair of the omissions was in all probability the work of the original scribe and that nothing compelled attributing them to another hand; Fee agreed, while noting one place — the addition at John 13:19 — where the letter forms seem to demand a second hand. J. R. Royse's study of scribal habits in the early papyri reaches the same conclusion, and the Bodmer Lab's own catalogue summarises it: nearly all the corrections can be attributed to the copyist of the manuscript. Fee was careful to add that he had probably been too confident on this point himself, and that the question belonged to an experienced palaeographer.

The picture that emerges is not flattering to the scribe and is very useful to everyone else: a bad copyist who reread his own work and fixed it, without — in Fee's phrase — apparent controls, and giving no sign of having been a textual critic. Royse's larger finding across the six most extensive early papyri is that the general tendency of these scribes was to omit rather than to add. That is worth knowing, because it is the opposite of what a reader who has been told that manuscripts "grew" over time would expect.

The Date Has Moved, and Not by a Little

P66 is usually given as "about AD 200". That figure is V. Martin's, assigned in 1956 on the basis of the handwriting, and it is not the only one on offer. The holding institution's own catalogue prints the whole spread, with each date attached to the scholar who proposed it: early second century (H. Hunger); about 200 (V. Martin); third century (E. G. Turner); third to fourth century (P. Orsini); fourth century (B. Nongbri). The official Liste maintained at Munster assigns the early third century. The library that owns the manuscript publishes a range of two hundred years; a single number does not report that.

Nongbri's argument, in Museum Helveticum in 2014, is the furthest-reaching. His abstract states it exactly: palaeographic estimates have ranged from the early second century to the first half of the third, "There are, however, equally convincing palaeographic parallels among papyri securely dated to as late as the fourth century," and so the range "needs to be broadened to include the fourth century". His claim is a two-step one, and collapsing it misrepresents him: the palaeographic range must be widened, and once the codicology and the rest of the Bodmer find are weighed, the later end becomes the likelier. He does not claim to have proved a fourth-century date, and in his own later summary he puts it as "more likely", not as settled.

What survives all of this is what the manuscript actually shows. A complete Gospel of John was being copied as a bound book in Egypt, by an ordinary and rather poor scribe who cared enough to go back over his own work several hundred times, at a date somewhere in a window running from the second century into the fourth. For all that, the Gospel he copied is the Gospel we read: the several hundred places where his text differs affect wording rather than the story or its claims, and because the manuscript is online anyone can check that for themselves. That is a real and modest claim, and it does not need the earliest possible date to be worth making.

Scripture references

• John 1:1 — The codex opens here, in the intact book block
• John 14:26 — Where the intact block ends; what follows survives in fragments
• John 7:53 — The account of the woman caught in adultery is absent from P66
• John 13:19 — The one correction Fee thought was made by a second hand

Sources

• Holding institutionBodmer Lab: PB 2 (P.Bodmer II) catalogue record and Mirador viewer — Bodmer Lab, Universite de Geneve and Fondation Martin Bodmer · The holding institution's own record. It supplies the extent ("The first four quires and most of the fifth quire (containing John 1:1-14:26) are conserved as an intact book block. The remaining folios (containing portions of John 14:29-21:9) have been conserved between glass plates."), the measurements, the two bindings, the pagination in two hands, the other holding institutions, the 1955 arrival in Geneva, and the full list of proposed dates with the scholar attached to each. 163 scans are viewable freeSupports: Every physical fact in this article, the honest extent, and the dating range
• ScholarshipG. D. Fee, "The Significance of Papyrus Bodmer II and Papyrus Bodmer XIV-XV for Methodology in New Testament Textual Criticism" — Gordon D. Fee · PhD dissertation, University of Southern California, 1966; freely readable at the Internet Archive. The count of the corrections, the figure of approximately 235 simple slips, the judgement on the scribe, the John 13:19 exception, and Fee's own retraction of his earlier confidence are all at pp. 167-170. Fee's published monograph on P66 (Studies and Documents 34, 1968) is a different work and is not the source of these figuresSupports: The 450 corrections, the assessment of the scribe, and the second-hand correction at John 13:19
• ScholarshipB. Nongbri, "The Limits of Palaeographic Dating of Literary Papyri: Some Observations on the Date and Provenance of P.Bodmer II (P66)" — Brent Nongbri, Macquarie University · Museum Helveticum 71:1 (2014), 1-35. The linked page is Macquarie University's repository record, which carries the abstract quoted in this article; the article itself is behind a subscription and the Swiss open-access host was gated when this was checked, so the body text was not read here · paywalledSupports: The argument that the palaeographic range must be broadened to include the fourth century
• ReferenceJ. R. Royse, Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri — James R. Royse · New Testament Tools, Studies and Documents 36 (Brill, 2008); the publisher's description states that it studies "P45, P46, P47, P66, P72, and P75, the six most extensive early New Testament manuscripts" and that "the general tendency of these early scribes was to omit rather than to add". Royse's treatment of P66 is at pp. 399-544. The book itself is behind a paywall and was not read here; his conclusion that nearly all P66's corrections are the copyist's own is quoted from the Bodmer Lab catalogue, which cites those pagesSupports: That the corrections are the copyist's own, and the omission tendency of early scribes
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Papyrus 66

Further reading

• Bodmer Lab: PB 2 (P.Bodmer II)
• G. D. Fee, "The Significance of Papyrus Bodmer II and Papyrus Bodmer XIV-XV for Methodology in New Testament Textual Criticism"
• Wikipedia: Papyrus 66

Reflect

This scribe was bad at his job and went back over his own work four hundred and fifty times. Which of those two facts would you rather be true of you?