Papyrus 75

Half of Luke and Half of John

P75 is a single-quire papyrus codex, about 13 centimetres wide and 26 tall, written in one column of 38 to 45 lines. Its editors, V. Martin and R. Kasser, calculated that it originally ran to 144 pages, of which more than 100 survive. What is on those pages is the Gospel of Luke followed by the Gospel of John — and the honest extent has gaps in it: Luke 3:18-4:2, 4:34-5:10, 5:37-18:18, 22:4-24:53, then John 1:1-11:45, 11:48-57, 12:3-13:10 and 14:8-15:10. Luke 18:18 to 22:4 is missing entirely, and nothing survives after John 15:10.

That the two Gospels stand together in one book is itself worth noticing. It is among the earliest evidence for Gospels being bound as a set rather than circulating singly, and the order, with Luke first, is the one the codex's scribe chose. The Vatican Library, which now holds it, notes that it preserves the Lord's Prayer in Luke's shorter form.

Like the rest of the Bodmer group, it was not excavated. It surfaced through the antiquities trade in the 1950s. Additional fragments were recovered from the codex's own leather cover at the British Museum in the 1970s, and further pieces have been published since.

Why It Was Called the Most Important Papyrus Ever Found

Before P75, the earliest substantial copies of the Gospels were the great fourth-century parchment Bibles, and a serious body of scholarship held that the text of Codex Vaticanus was not simply ancient but edited — the product of a fourth-century revision. K. Clark summed up that position in 1954: "The most influential factor in recent criticism is the general view that the Neutral text is itself a derived text which has passed through a process of revision." If that were right, Vaticanus would be a good witness to the fourth century and a poor one to the second.

P75 disturbed that. Its text agrees with Vaticanus to a degree no other pair of early New Testament manuscripts approaches. Measured against the Munster test passages, P75 and Vaticanus agree in 86.1 per cent of readings in Luke and 79.1 per cent in the Gospel of John, where Vaticanus and Sinaiticus — themselves close relatives — agree in only 67.9 and 41.3 per cent. B. Metzger drew the conclusion in 1962: "Hitherto scholars lacked clear and unambiguous evidence that [the 'B Text'] existed earlier than the fourth century codices Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. Now it is proved that the scribes (or editors) of these two great parchment codices did not create this type of text, but transmitted it." K. and B. Aland put it more strongly still, calling the recension theory "no longer defensible" and one of its main pillars "demolished".

G. D. Fee, who did the detailed collation, put it more carefully than the summaries of him do. He wrote that the relationship between P75 and Vaticanus in the Gospel of John "is far closer than the relationship between any two other New Testament MSS of any kind in the first four Christian centuries", and that this affirmed Hort's judgement that Vaticanus preserves a very ancient text. On the second half of Hort's claim he was more careful than a paraphrase can be: "Whether this text is, as Hort further maintained, 'a very pure line of very ancient text' or not, Porter has shown that B represents a very pure line of descent of a very ancient text." And he added that if this text-type is a recension, "it is a recension which was created in the second century".

The Argument Being Reopened

Every one of those conclusions rests on P75 being early. V. Martin and R. Kasser assigned it to AD 175-225 by comparing its hand with five Oxyrhynchus papyri. B. Nongbri's objection, published in the Journal of Biblical Literature in 2016, is that those five papyri were themselves dated only by their handwriting: "Yet all of these papyri were themselves dated only on the basis of paleography and are thus of no independent value for establishing the date of p75." His general point is that the method "can become completely circular when an undated manuscript is assigned a date based on paleographic similarity to manuscripts that were themselves dated only by means of paleography, with no tether to a secure date anywhere in the process."

Nongbri then turns the famous agreement with Vaticanus around: if P75's script and codicology are also consistent with a fourth-century date, then its closeness to a fourth-century Bible may be evidence for a fourth-century date for P75, rather than evidence for a second-century date for Vaticanus's text. He is explicit about how far this goes: "While one cannot absolutely rule out a late-second- or early-third-century date for p75 on the basis of the evidence presently available, the materials analyzed in this essay point toward the fourth century as an equally likely, if not more likely, date for this codex." Nongbri says so himself; it is his popularisers, not his article, who turn the proposal into a result. Others have assigned dates in between — P. Orsini and W. Clarysse gave 200-250 in 2012, and Orsini later moved to the third or fourth century.

There was an earlier and sharper complaint. W. Petersen argued that the whole framing was self-serving: P75, he wrote, "is often regarded as having the 'purest' text of the early papyri," but "this claim is made, of course, only because P75's text is closer to our modern, critically reconstructed text. If it were the text of Clement of Alexandria that came closest to our modern critical text, then it would be Clement who would be hailed as the preserver of the 'true text,' and not P75. A more unscientific, hubris-filled, and self-serving approach to scholarship is hard to imagine." Petersen — a specialist in the Diatessaron, writing in 2002 — was not disputing the agreement figures, which are real. His target is the word "purest": if a manuscript earns that title by resembling the text scholars have reconstructed, the compliment is circular. The obvious reply is that the reconstructed text is itself built out of the manuscripts, so resembling it is not pure question-begging. But the caution is worth keeping, because "purest" does more work in popular writing than the evidence licenses.

Scripture references

• Luke 3:18 — Where the surviving text of P75 begins
• Luke 11:1-4 — The Lord's Prayer in Luke's shorter form, preserved here
• John 1:1 — John follows Luke in the same codex
• John 15:10 — Where the surviving text breaks off

Sources

• Holding institutionBiblioteca Apostolica Vaticana: Pap.Hanna.1(Mater.Verbi), DigiVatLib — Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana · The holding library's own digitisation, 108 plates, free to view. Its IIIF manifest publishes the shelfmark exactly as given here. The library's separate feature page dates the donation to January 2007 and credits the Hanna family and the Solidarity Association. Images are stamped "ALL RIGHTS RESERVED" and are linked, not reproducedSupports: The shelfmark, the current location, and the terms of the 2007 donation
• 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, read in full for this article. Source of the circularity argument (pp. 408-409), the 2006 Christie's sale (p. 406), the Text und Textwert agreement figures (p. 435 n. 71), the Clark, Metzger, Aland, Fee and Petersen quotations, and the conclusion at p. 437Supports: The dating challenge, the agreement figures, and every quotation in the second and third sections
• 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. Fee's own statement of the P75-Vaticanus relationship and his refusal to go beyond it are at pp. 192-193, and are quoted here from that text rather than from later summaries of himSupports: Fee's assessment of the relationship between P75 and Codex Vaticanus, in his own words
• ScholarshipC. L. Porter, "Papyrus Bodmer XV (P75) and the Text of Codex Vaticanus" — Calvin L. Porter · Journal of Biblical Literature 81 (1962), 363-376; DOI 10.2307/3265091. The study that first established the closeness of P75 to Vaticanus in John. Cited here from Nongbri's and Fee's references; the article itself was not opened, and no free copy was found · paywalledSupports: The original demonstration of the P75-Vaticanus relationship
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Papyrus 75

Further reading

• Vatican Library: the Hanna Papyrus 1 (Mater Verbi)
• B. Nongbri, "Reconsidering the Place of Papyrus Bodmer XIV-XV (P75)"
• Wikipedia: Papyrus 75

Reflect

A discovery that seemed to settle a question is now being used to reopen it. Where have you treated a settled answer as though it could never be revisited?