I. THEOLOGICAL

CCVIII. ST. JOHN’S GOSPEL, CHAPS. I AND XX.

THE following fragments of St. John’s Gospel are contained upon a sheet of a papyrus codex an early book format consisting of bound leaves rather than a continuous scroll. In its original position the sheet was folded down the middle, thus forming two leaves, each of which had on either side a single column of writing. The outer edges of the two leaves have been broken away, so that only the beginnings and ends of lines remain. The left-hand leaf, which is the more complete, having lost but three entire lines at the bottom of either side, contains verses 23-31 and 33-41 from the first chapter. The right-hand leaf, which, besides being more defective at the end, has a lacuna gap in the middle, gives parts of verses 11-17 and 19-25 from chapter xx.

If, then, the original book contained the whole of the Gospel, which is certainly the most natural supposition, our sheet was very nearly the outermost of a large quire a gathering of folded sheets, and within it were a number of other sheets sufficient to hold the eighteen intervening chapters. Written upon the same scale as the surviving fragments, these eighteen chapters would fill twenty-two sheets. The whole book would thus consist of a single quire gathering of twenty-five sheets, the first leaf being probably left blank, or giving only the title. Such an arrangement certainly seems rather awkward, particularly as the margin between the two columns of writing in the flattened sheet is only about 2 cm. wide. This is not much to be divided between two leaves at the outside of so thick a quire gathering. But as yet little is known about the composition of these early books; and it is by no means improbable that the simpler and more primitive form of a large number of sheets gathered into a single quire gathering was prevalent before the more