John 1:18 - The Only Begotten Son

John 1:18 in Codex Macedonianus (Y, 034)

            In the preceding three posts about John 1:18, we have considered (1) the case for rendering μονογενὴς as “only begotten,” (2) some patristic evidence for rival readings in John 1:18, and (3) the probable background of Codex Sinaiticus’ exemplar for this verse. 

            Today, we consider the basic question of which reading in John 1:18 was the original text: 

(a)    ὁ μονογενὴς θεός (the only begotten God) or

(b)   μονογενὴς θεός (only begotten God) or

(c)    ὁ μονογενὴς υἱός (the only begotten Son).

            None of these options seems to have been regarded as distinctly unorthodox in the early church:  “only begotten Son” was used by orthodox writers such as Hippolytus, Hilary, Ambrose, Augustine, and Chrysostom; meanwhile “only begotten God” was used by orthodox writers such as Basil, Epiphanius, and Cyril of Alexandria; other writers appear to have used both readings.  However, “only begotten God” appears to have been especially favored by the non-orthodox – specifically, by Valentinian Gnostics. 

            The case that the text of John 1:18 was altered, whether by intent or by accident, in the 100s, and that Valentinian Gnostics favored the text with θεός, begins with evidence that doctrinally driven changes to the text were made by heretics in the second century.  In Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History Book 5:28, one finds excerpts from a composition known as the Little Labyrinth, composed (or at least attributed to) Caius, a presbyter in Rome, written when Zephyrinus was bishop of Rome (in 180-217).  Its author makes the following charges against the Valentinians:

            “They have boldly falsified the sacred Scriptures, and they have rejected the canons of the ancient faith, and they have ignored Christ, not inquiring what the sacred Scriptures say, but laboriously seeing to discover what form of syllogism might be contrived to establish their impiety.”  And a little further on:  “Regarding those men who abuse the arts of the unbelievers to establish their own heretical doctrine, and by the craft of the impious adulterate the simple faith of the divine Scriptures, what need is there to say that these are not near the faith? 

            Because of this they have boldly laid their hands upon the divine Scriptures, alleging that they have corrected them.  And that I do not state this against them falsely, anyone who pleases may ascertain.  For if anyone should choose to collect and compare all their copies together, he would find many discrepancies among them.  The copies of Asclepiades [this was probably intended to refer to “Asclepiodotus,” an individual mentioned earlier in the composition], at any rate, will be found at variance with those of Theodotus. 

            And many such copies are to be had, for their disciples were very zealous in inserting the corrections, as they call them, that is, the corruptions that each of them made. . . . .  Either they do not believe that the divine Scriptures were spoken by the Holy Spirit, and thus are unbelievers, or else they think themselves wiser than the Holy Spirit, and in that case what else are they than demoniacs?  For they cannot deny the commission of the crime, since they copies have been written by their own hands.  For they did not receive such Scriptures from their instructors, nor can they produce any copies from which they were transcribed.”    

            Theodotus, to whom Caius refers, was a leader of the Valentinians.  Samples of his writings are found in Extracts from Theodotus.  (The person who preserved these excerpts, and commented on them, is unknown; some have suggested that it was Clement of Alexandria.)  In Parts 6-8 of the Extracts from Theodotus, we find the following (notice the use of two different forms of John 1:18, in bold print): 

            “The Valentinians understand the verse, ‘In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God” like this:  they say that “the Beginning” is the “only Begotten,” and that he is also called God, as also in the verses which immediately follow, it is explained that he is God, for it says, ‘The only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him.’  Now they say that the Logos – in the beginning (that is to say, in the Only Begotten, in the Mind and the Truth – indicates the Christ, the Logos and the Life.  Wherefore he also appropriately called him God who is in God, the Mind.   ‘That which came into being in Him’ – the Logos – ‘was Life,’ the Companion.  Therefore the Lord also says, ‘I am the Life.’” 

            Therefore the Father, being unknown, wished to be known to the Aeons, and through his own thought, as if he had known himself, he put forth the Only Begotten, the spirit of Knowledge which is in Knowledge.  So he, too, who came forth from Knowledge, that is, from the Father’s Thought, became Knowledge, that is, the Son, because ‘through the Son the Father was known.  But the Spirit of Love has been mingled with the Spirit of Knowledge, as the Father with the Son, and Thought with Truth, having proceeded from Truth as Knowledge from Thought.  And he who remained ‘Only begotten Son in the bosom of the Father’ explains Thought to the Aeons through Knowledge, just as if he also had been put forth from his bosom; but him who appeared here, the Apostle no longer calls ‘Only begotten,’ but, ‘as Only begotten,’ ‘Glory as of an Only Begotten.’  This is because, being one and the same, Jesus is the ‘Firstborn’ in creation, but in the Pleroma is ‘Only begotten.’  But he is the same being to each place such as can be contained [in it]. 

            The author (ceasing to quote his Gnostic source) then says in Part 8:  “But we maintain that the essential Logos is God in God, who is also said to be ‘in the bosom of the Father,’ continuous, undivided, one God.”

            There are quite a few Gnostic concepts that need to be unpacked here; for some idea of what was meant by the references to “Aeons,” “Knowledge,” “Mind,” “Truth,” and “Logos,” see Robert Grant’s introductory description of Gnostic cosmology in his book Irenaeus of Lyons.  The things to see, for our present purpose, is that as the Valentinians assigned fantastical meanings to terms used in the opening chapter of John (especially John 1:1-18), they referred to “the Only Begotten” as a supernatural emanation of God.  They considered “Christ” to be another emanation, dependent on Knowledge.  Irenaeus was justified in his concern that these false teachers attempted to turn “Jesus” and “Christ” into two entities. 

            (Such a concern ought to raise a red flag when we see, in À* in John 1:17, that the word “Christ” is missing.  Perhaps concern should also be felt when we see the editors of the Nestle-Aland compilation (27th ed.) avoid mentioning this in their apparatus.  Did I say that out loud?)     

           
            Irenaeus primarily countered Gnostic teachings that were spread at Rome.  As I proposed earlier, it seems probable (as much as one can gauge probabilities from such limited evidence) that the Valentinians in Rome, such as Heracleon, used a text of John 1:18 which referred to “the Only Begotten,” followed by neither “God” nor “Son.”  But Caius attests that the Valentinians’ copies disagreed among themselves, and nothing precludes the idea that the Valentinians corrupted John 1:18 by putting their phrase “only begotten God” into John’s text. 

            There is no clear evidence that Heracleon, in the West, supported such a corruption.  But what about Basilides and the Gnostics in Egypt in the second and third centuries? 

            There is not much to go on – although it is clear that Clement of Alexandria was well-acquainted with Basilides’ writings known as the Exegetica, because he (Clement) quoted from the 23^rd book of this 24-book presentation of Basilides’ teachings, in Stromateis, Book 4, chapter 12.  Some insight, though, may be gained by considering the contents of the sixteen-page Gnostic composition known as the Trimorphic Protennoia (or, the First Thought in Three Forms), one of the texts among the Nag Hammadi papyri – in Codex XIII.     

            In Trimorphic Protennoia (which resembles in some points another Gnostic composition, the Apocryphon of John), as the author depicts the pre-existent Word as the emanator of celestial entities called Aeons, he writes as follows: 

            “Then the Perfect Son revealed himself to his Aeons, who originated through him, and he revealed them and glorified them, and gave them thrones, and stood in the glory with which he glorified himself. They blessed the Perfect Son, the Christ, the only-begotten God.  And they gave glory, saying, ‘He is!  He is!  The Son of God!  The Son of God!  It is he who is! The Aeon of Aeons, beholding the Aeons which he begot.” 

            A little further along, after the names of the Aeons are listed, the author writes:   “Now those Aeons were begotten by the God who was begotten – the Christ – and these Aeons received as well as gave glory. They were the first to appear, exalted in their thought, and each Aeon gave myriads of glories within great untraceable lights, and they all together blessed the perfect Son, the God who was begotten.”

            If Hort had been aware of the existence of the Trimorphic Protennoia in 1876, he might not have claimed (as he did on p. 9 of his Dissertation), “Neither in the Valentinian nor in any other known Gnostical system could there have been any temptation to invent such a combination as μονογενὴς θεός.”

            I submit that μονογενὴς θεός entered the text of John 1:18 in a manuscript used by Gnostics – a manuscript in which the text of this verse had already been altered (via a mild harmonization to 1:14) so as to contain no explicit reference to the only begotten Son, but only to the Only-Begotten.  A Valentinian scribe added θεός to reinforce Gnostic doctrine about the pre-existent Word as a celestial persona consisting of God’s first thought. 

            This reading became popular in Egypt not only among Gnostics, but also among the orthodox, who gave it an altogether different significance, affirming the deity of Christ.  It may be worth mentioning that Ambrose – not Ambrose of Milan, but Ambrose the Alexandrian who financed Origen – was formerly a Valentinian before being led out of that belief-system by Origen, and Ambrose’s copies of the Gospel of John may have been among the first to have this reading; if so, they were well-situated to have their contents be recopied in Egypt and later in Caesarea, alongside Origen’s copy of Heracleon’s commentary on John.  

In the hands of orthodox fourth-century writers such as Gregory of Nyssa and the well-traveled Basil of Caesarea (not the same Caesarea where Eusebius was bishop in the early 300s, but the Caesarea in what is now central Turkey), ὁ μονογενὴς θεός was not considered intrinsically supportive of Gnosticism.  The translators of the Peshitta must have viewed it as an orthodox statement.  Similarly in modern times, the term is often considered a useful affirmation of the deity of Christ, as if although Westcott and Hort’s revision of the New Testament effectively removed Romans 9:5, and Acts 20:28, and Ephesians 3:9, and Colossians 2:2, and First Timothy 3:16 from the Trinitarian arsenal, compensation was given via the deposit of John 1:18 therein.       

This scenario – in which ὁ μονογενὴς θεός originated in Valentinian manuscripts, in Egypt (or perhaps first in Rome, and then Egypt) – fits the evidence rather snugly.  In addition, despite the use of the phrase by Basil, Eusebius, and the Peshitta, resistance to this reading – expressed by its non-inclusion in the Byzantine Text – may be succinctly accounted for by scribes’ awareness of its association with Egyptian Gnosticism; also notable is Athanasius’ persistent use of ὁ μονογενὴς υἱός.  Although an adept theologian such as Basil could use John 1:18b with θεός in the cause of orthodoxy, forms of John 1:18b with θεός are practically unheard of in Latin antiquity; the Alexandrian reading is not shared by the Western Text, nor the Caesarean Text, nor the Byzantine Text, whether we consult the earliest or youngest Greek representatives. 

There is one piece of the puzzle, however, which does not seem to fit this theory:  Irenaeus’ use of ὁ μονογενὴς θεός in Against Heresies Book 4:11.  It is hard to account for this, especially since Irenaeus quoted John 1:18 with “only begotten Son” at the end of Against Heresies 4:6, introducing the verse with “as is written in the Gospel.”  While I do not want to multiply speculations, I would rather say something instead of nothing when facing this puzzle, so:

I suspect that Irenaeus had encountered a corrupted form of John 1:18 in Valentinian writings, and, while focused on anecdotes in the books of Daniel and Revelation (which he proceeded to investigate), added this quotation somewhat casually and parenthetically, introducing it not with “As it is written in the Gospel of John,” but with the phrase, “of whom also the Lord said.”  Irenaeus quoted from memory at this point, and his memory was influenced by the Valentinian compositions which he had been studying – not unlike the way in which a Christian apologist, after spending days reading the Watchtower Society’s New World Translation, might absentmindedly make a parenthetical quote from it, rather than from his own Bible.  Of course it is impossible to prove this, but the theory wraps up this loose end.       

Just two more things:

(1)  It is sometimes proposed (by Allen Wikgren, for instance, in a brief note added in Metzger’s Textual Commentary) that one reading or the other originated as a transcriptional error; Wilkgren proposed that the reading with θεός originated in the Alexandrian Text when a scribe, using nomina sacra contractions, wrote ΘΣ instead of ΥΣ, a difference of a single letter. 

By itself, this theory does not seem likely, inasmuch as the letters Θ (theta) and Υ (upsilon) do not resemble one another.  But if one introduces a scenario – one I have proposed previously – in which one scribe wrote the main text, leaving overlines with blank space below them, and a proof-reader added the nomina sacra contractions as he proof-read – well, the chance that the proof-reader could write the wrong nomina sacra is higher than the chance that any copyist could mistake  Θ for Υ or Υ for Θ.  (There are many textual contests between competing nomina sacra, or between the presence and absence of a nomen sacrum; I doubt that there are more than a few variant-units anywhere that constitute a contest between Θ and Υ.)  In which case, ὁ μονογενὴς υἱός wins the contest as the reading favored by much more diverse support from early patristic and versional witnesses, besides the enormous manuscript-evidence in its favor; as Ezra Abbot stated in his detailed essay on this subject, the witnesses for ὁ μονογενὴς υἱός “represent every important division of the Christian world.”

(2)  It is sometimes proposed that internal evidence favors “God,” on the grounds that copyists would tend to harmonize it to the more familiar phrase “only begotten Son” that appears elsewhere in the Gospel of John.  But against this theory, no such harmonization was made to 1:14, although the wording there is not found again.  Plus, a consideration of authorial style favors “only begotten Son,” a phrase which is used by John several times, while μονογενὴς θεός is non-Johannine.  Metzger depends on precisely this sort of argument quite often elsewhere; yet here it is abandoned when it weighs in against an Alexandrian reading.


Readers are invited to explore the embedded links to additional resources.

Papyrus 4 and the Mystery at Coptos

            First century Matthew!  In 1994, that was how papyrologist Carsten Peter Thiede described Papyrus 64, three fragments written on papyrus, containing Greek text from Matthew 26 (to be precise, Matthew 26:7-8, 10, 14-15, 22-23, and 31-33).  The fragments are housed at Magdalen College in Oxford, England, and they are for this reason called “The Magdalen Papyri.”  Thiede’s case was a cumulative one, involving subtle factors such as the similarity of the lettering in Papyrus 64 and some of the lettering in the Dead Sea Scroll 4QLXXLev (4Q119). 

            Papyrus 64 is indeed early, but subsequent researchers have responded to Thiede’s claim with strong arguments for assigning a later production-date to P64, around the beginning of the 200s. 

            This is from the same manuscript as Papyrus 64!  That was the verdict of Colin H. Roberts when he described Papyrus 67, a Greek fragment (presently housed at the Abby of Montserrat, west of Barcelona, Spain) with text from Matthew 3:9, 3:15, 5:20-22, and 5:25-28.  Other researchers, after comparing the two manuscripts, have reached the same conclusion:  although P64 and P67 were published separately and were assigned separate identification-numbers, they are really only one manuscript. 

            Where did it come from?  Probably somewhere in Upper (i.e., southern) Egypt – and therein lies a tale which implies that several important New Testament papyri come from the same place.  The acquisition of P64 is no secret; it was purchased by Charles E. Huleatt in 1901 in Luxor, Egypt.  North of Luxor, in the area of Naqada, are various monasteries.  Northwest of Luxor is Nag Hammadi, where a collection of Gnostic texts were excavated.  And northeast of Nag Hammadi is the town of Dishna – which is, as far as anyone seems to be able to tell, where a large collection of papyri were recovered – papyri which eventually ended up in the collections of Chester Beatty and Martin Bodmer.  As specialist Dr. James Robinson has pointed out, the whole collection probably constitutes the remains of a Pachomian monastery’s library, hidden near Dishna in the 600s, along with a variety of Old Testament manuscripts and other documents (some in Greek, some in Coptic), including copies of some letters composed by Pachomius. 

            This means that when textual scholars rely upon Papyrus 66 (Bodmer MS 50), Papyrus 72 (Bodmer MSS 7-8), and Papyrus 75 (previously Bodmer MSS 14-15, but now housed at the Vatican Library and renamed the Hanna Papyrus), they are relying on manuscripts from Upper Egypt.  A variant shared by P66 and P75 represents one, not two, locales.        

            Papyrus 64 and Papyrus 67 were not part of the large collection found near Dishna; they probably came from a location east of there:  the city of Coptos (now called Qift), which, after its citizens rebelled against the government, was destroyed by Roman forces acting on orders from the Emperor Diocletian in 292 (or later in his reign).  What justifies this idea?  Enter Papyrus 4.          

Part of Papyrus 4
(enhanced pseudo-replica)

             Papyrus 4 is a manuscript that consists mainly of substantial fragments from the opening chapters of the Gospel of Luke (1:58-59, 1:62-2:1, 2:6-7, 3:8-4:2, 4:29-32, 4:34-35, 5:3-8, NS 5:30-6:16), written in two columns per page.  P4 also includes a heavily damaged page which appears to have been blank when produced, except for the book-title “Ευαγγελιον Κα[τ]α Μαθ’θαιον.”  Papyrus 4 has been assigned to the late 100s or early 200s – the same era to which P64 and P67 have been assigned.  The handwriting in P64, P67, and P4 is so similar that Colin H. Roberts (the researcher who identified and dated Papyrus 52 as a fragment of the Gospel of John from the first half of the 100s) believed that all three manuscripts were actually parts of a single manuscript.  Philip W. Comfort concurs with Roberts in this view.  So did T. C. Skeat, who developed a theory that these fragments are from one early codex which, when pristine, contained the four Gospels.  Scott D. Charlesworth, however, disagrees with Skeat’s theory, and has offered a nuanced case that at the very least, P64/67, and P4 could not be parts of the same single-quire codex.      

          

            It is generally not denied, though, that the handwriting in all three fragments is very similar, which implies that these fragments share the same production-center or even the same copyist.  If this is granted, then if one fragment’s source can be found, it is very likely that the source of the other two is the same.

            The source of Papyrus 4 is a known quantity, more or less.  In 1889 (not 1880), someone found Papyrus 4 in the ruins of the city of Coptos, and within two years it was obtained by Vincent Scheil at nearby Luxor, along with a leather satchel-like cover and another papyrus manuscript.

            The other manuscript’s text, written on eighty-nine pages, consisted of two compositions – Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres (Who is the Heir of Divine Things?) and De Sacrificiis Abelis et Cainis (The Sacrifices of Abel and Cain) – two parts of a series of treatises by Philo, containing his allegorical interpretations of passages in Genesis.  The manuscript, it seems, had been found inside the wall which was part of the ruins of a house.  According to James R. Royse in his essay The Biblical Quotations in the Coptos Papyrus of Philo, the text of Philo’s two treatises is written on eighty-nine pages:  “the two sides of forty-four folios and one final page that is attached to the inside back cover of the binding.”

            An account of the discovery of both these manuscripts (and their leather container) was provided by Jean Merell in an article in the 1938 Revue Biblique.  Here are Merell’s prefatory comments about the discovery of P4, translated from French: 

            In the course of working on the New Testament papyri, I had the opportunity to study the originals very closely.  I have thus found interesting details, and I had even the good fortune to make some small discoveries; one of them will be the subject of this article.

            This is the papyrus P4, published for the first time in 1892, and later in Memoirs of the French Archaeological Mission at Cairo by Father Scheil. It is now in the National Library [of France], under no. 1120, suppl. 2.

            After careful study of this document, I have found that some fragments have not yet been – as far as I know – deciphered and published. They constitute a larger part than the part already published, and their publication will not be without interest, especially since I can accompany it with photographic reproductions previously unpublished.

            I will give the entire text, for the parts already known call for some adjustments.

History of the manuscript.

            Father Scheil pointed out to me last June that having bought a codex containing two treatises of Philo of Alexandria in 1891, he had the good fortune to find fragments of our biblical papyrus.

            The papyrus was found in Coptos, Upper Egypt, in 1889. [“1880” was a printing error.]  Considered undoubtedly in ancient times as a very precious thing, it had been enclosed and walled up in a niche. The hollow sound of the wall in this place aroused its discoverers’ attention. After opening up the wall, they drew from this hiding place two treatises of Philo of Alexandria.

            The whole thing is in a known format, almost eight inches square, like the Arabic books.  It was contained in a leather cover, with a tongue and a cord of leather falling on the cover.  The book must have been squashed in its hiding place; the mortar was as if it were inlaid on the outside; the pages adhered strongly together in a mass, and were, in addition, fastened to one another by a quantity of small grains of salt [or sand], produced over the ages by a condensation-process in the vegetable tissue.

            Following the forty-fourth leaf [i.e., sheet, consisting of the front and back of a page], in the form of padding [“en guise de bourre”], I think, and to fill the capacity of the cover, there were several fragments of sheets stuck together.  One of them contained κατα Μαθθιον, and the others, fragments of Saint Luke.

            Of the fourteen columns which compose the total, Father Scheil has published four of them. Father Lagrange has reproduced them in his Textual Critique (pp. 118-124).

            Father Scheil gave the papyrus to the National Library [of France].

            I have not been able to ascertain, in spite of much research, the details of the conservation of this papyrus. A paper of April 24, 1913, written by Gregory, however, indicates that the restorer should be Doctor Ibscher of Berlin.

            In Philip W. Comfort’s The Complete Text of the Earliest New Testament Manuscripts (page 27), the phrase “en guise de bourre” is translated as “in the form of a wad.”  However, I think “padding” is a better rendering.  What is meant by “to fill the capacity of the cover” is that the pages that consisted of Papyrus 4 were placed alongside the manuscript of the two treatises of Philo so that the treatises of Philo would be secure and snug within the leather satchel-cover.  This could be done by flat pages better than by a “wad.” 

The satchel in which P4 was found,
along with two treatises by Philo.

            Although T. C. Skeat described Scheil’s discovery as “A papyrus codex, containing two works of Philo, in a leather binding which had been reinforced by leaves from a Gospel manuscript glued together,” some adjustments should be made to that description.  First, the cover being described is not a binding (like a book-binding); it is a leather satchel – basically a rectangular purse made to hold a manuscript slightly smaller than itself. 

            Second, inasmuch as a page of the second treatise by Philo is stuck to the satchel – meaning that P4 was inserted between this page and the rest of the pages of Philo’s treatises – this means, it seems to me, that the pages containing text from Luke were not added merely as padding-material.  It is easy to see how a person could slide a second manuscript alongside the first one, and not notice that a page of the first manuscript had been caught behind the second manuscript, if the purpose was merely to store them both in the satchel.  But it is much more difficult to imagine that anyone would insert discarded pages into the satchel, as permanent padding, without noticing that a page of the Philo-volume was intervening between the padding-material and the leather satchel itself. 

            When Vincent Scheil first analyzed Papyrus 4, he assigned it a production-date in the 500s.  This does not interlock well with the premise that the wall from which P4 was taken collapsed (with P4 and the two treatises of Philo within a leather satchel-cover inside it) in 292 or shortly thereafter.  Scheil did not explain the basis for dating P4 so late; perhaps he thought that the wall’s collapse did not occur until the 500s.  In any event, practically everyone else has assigned a much earlier production-date to the manuscript, usually a period around 200.
            However, a substantial part of the argument for that date depends on the premise that P4, when it was placed in the leather satchel with the two treatises of Philo, was used as padding – the idea being that only decayed or damaged pages would be recycled as padding-material, and that some time would need to be posited between the production of P4 and the time when it was considered suitable only for use as padding-material. 

The page in P4 with
"The Gospel
According to Matthew"
(See Novum Testamentum,
2012, p. 216) 

            If that is the case, and if Roberts, Skeat, and Comfort are correct in their view that P4, P64, and P67 are parts of the same manuscript, then it implies that either (a) P64 and P67 were part of the initial find in 1889, and were taken away from the rest, before P4 was obtained by Scheil in 1891, or (b) the manuscript was indeed in a state of disrepair when part of it (the P4 part) was recycled as padding, and the rest of it (of which P64 and P67 are the surviving representatives) was set aside elsewhere.

            Another possibility – somewhat imaginative, I grant – is that a group of Gospels-readers at Coptos in the 200s had a single unbound Gospels-codex to share among themselves, and they divided it into parts, one of which was eventually hidden with the Philo-treatises when the city was under siege in 292, one which survived elsewhere (barely) as P64+67, and the rest of which is lost.   

              I suspect that P64+P67 constitute part of an unbound codex (not a single-quire codex) that contained the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke together.  The page with “Ευαγγελιον Κα[τ]α Μαθ’θαιον” written on it is, in this case, the final page of the Gospel of Matthew – that is, we see here the closing-title of the Gospel of Matthew, not a flyleaf or opening title-page.  P4 was probably produced by the same copyist, but not necessarily at the same time as the volume of which P64 and P67 are the surviving parts.

   

            Not every question about P4, P64, and P67 has been answered, but at least we may draw the following conclusions:

            (1)  Even before the establishment of Pachomian monasteries in the region, there was a Gospel-reading community in Upper Egypt, and its Gospels-text is represented by P4, P64, and P67.

            (2)  The Alexandrian text of Matthew and Luke was in use in Upper Egypt in the mid-200s. 

            (3)  The arrangement of the text in a format of two columns per page is not a sign of lateness; it was used in the 200s.

            (4)  Reckoning that P4 was not used as binding-material, but was kept in the leather satchel alongside the two treatises of Philo (and also reckoning that P4 is a separate manuscript from P64/67), there is no impetus for the assumption that its pages had worn out prior to being placed in the leather satchel, and this may justify a production-date closer to the mid-200s rather than around 200. 

            Here are a few online resources that one may consult for more information about P4 and/or P64 and P67:
            ● A Comparative Textual Analysis of P4 and P64+67, by Tommy Wasserman, from the 2010 TC Journal.  Wasserman concludes that all three fragments share the same kind of text, correcting an earlier assessment by Kurt Aland, who made a distinction between them.  (At every point of disagreement between Wasserman’s transcription and the one provided by P. W. Comfort, Wasserman’s should be favored.)

            ● The Earliest Manuscript Title of Matthew’s Gospel (BnF Suppl. gr. 1120 ii 3/P4, by Simon Gathercole (downloadable at Academia.edu, for which membership, needed to download documents, is free), published in Novum Testamentum in 2012.  Gathercole provides a clear photograph of the page of P4 which has the title of the Gospel of Matthew written on it.  He transcribes the title (correcting earlier editors’ mistakes) and describes the page insightfully.  Yet I disagree with his view that this page is a “flyleaf.”  It seems more likely that it is a page from a codex in which the text of the Gospel of Matthew ended neatly at the end of the preceding page, and what we see on this page is the closing-title.   

            ● The Oldest Manuscript of the Four Gospels?, by T. C. Skeat, is a chapter in The Collected Biblical Writings of T. C. Skeat, beginning on page 158.  This volume was edited by J. K. Elliott and most of the essay is accessible at Google Books.  Skeat maintained that P64, P67, and P4 are all parts of the same manuscript.  He provided plenty of interesting information about small but significant aspects of the manuscript, such as the similarities between its section-divisions and the section-divisions in Codex Vaticanus.

Some Nag Hammadi codices,
with their satchels.

            ● T. C. Skeat and the Problem of Fiber Orientation in Codicological Reconstruction, by Scott Charlesworth, is a somewhat technical essay in which the author presents obstacles against Skeat’s view that P4 is part of the same manuscript as P64 and P67.

            ● Papyrus Magdalen Greek 17 (Gregory-Aland P64) – A Reappraisal, by Peter Carsten Thiede, features his proposal, in 1995, that P64/67 is a manuscript from the first century.  Thiede provides a transcription and photographs.

            ● The Date of the Magdalen Papyrus of Matthew (P. Magd. Greek 17 = P64):  A Response to C. P. Thiede, by Peter Head (initially published in Tyndale Bulletin in 1995)  tests and effectively refutes Thiede’s dating of P64 and P67 to the first century.

            ● Fragmentary Papyri, by Wieland Willker, in which P4’s Alexandrian text is described and several of its readings are listed (for example, καὶ ἀμφότεροι συντηροῦνται (“and both are preserved”) is not included in P4 at the end of Luke 5:38.)             

 

The satchel of the
Fadden More Psalter.

          In closing:  the discoveries of P64, P67, and P4 raise some questions which are yet to be fully answered:   

            ● Prior to the introduction of Pachomian monasticism, were the New Testament manuscripts in Upper Egypt made by orthodox Christians, or by groups such as the Gnostics in nearby Nag Hammadi?  Even the discovery of a manuscript in the collection of a monastery is no guarantee of the orthodoxy of its text, for many a monk may have studied his theological opponents’ writings so as make a knowledgeable reply against them. 

            ● Is there a connection between the codex-production methods used in Upper Egypt, and the methods used in Ireland?  A link between Upper Egypt and Ireland may seem unlikely, until one notices the popular use of leather satchels in both regions, a persistent tradition about seven Egyptian monks who worked in western Ireland, similarities in some Irish and Egyptian book-illustrations, the papyrus-padded cover of the Fadden More Psalter, and occasional rare readings shared between Egyptian Greek and Irish Latin manuscripts. 

            ● Can manuscripts’ texts be grouped according to the methods used to divide the text into sections?  The ways in which scribes divided the text into paragraphs may shine some light on historical connections between manuscripts.  Perhaps the text-divisions in manuscripts should be handled the same way textual variants are treated.

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