THEOLOGICAL

made a good fight, if not to have held its own, in Egypt against vellum so long as Greek MSS. manuscripts continued to be written there. At Oxyrhynchus it was certainly the material more generally employed from the fifth to the seventh century. The literary fragments of the Byzantine period which we have obtained from other sources in Egypt during the last three or four years, and hope to publish before long, have as often been papyrus as vellum. Only in Coptic MSS. vellum, for some reason, seems to have been more commonly used.

We should therefore demur to Mr. Kenyon’s dictum (Palaeography, p. 112) that ‘in the sphere of literary papyri there is no Byzantine period.’ Papyrus remained in use in Egypt, both for classical and theological literature, down to the end of that period; and the types of handwriting which appear upon it have a continuous history of their own. Though no doubt the literary hand, as practised upon vellum, reacted upon the papyrus script, we should say that the debt of papyrus to vellum was unappreciable as compared with that of vellum to papyrus. The prototype of the handwriting of the great biblical codices is to be found in papyrus MSS. of the second and third centuries. The broad heavy strokes, supposed to be characteristic of writing upon vellum, can be shown in literary papyri considerably anterior to the vellum period. The vellum hands, so far from affording any sure basis for determining the age of literary papyri of the Byzantine epoch, are rather themselves to be referred to the papyri for their explanation and date.

[I am a] voice [crying] in the wilderness,
"Make straight the way of the Lord," as the
prophet Isaiah said. And they had been sent
from the Pharisees, and they asked him, "Why then do you
5 baptize if you are not the Christ, nor Elijah,
nor the prophet?" John answered them,
saying, "I baptize with
water. In the midst of you stands one whom you
10 do not know, the one coming after me,
of whom I am not worthy to unloose his
thong of the sandal."
These things happened in Bethany,
across the Jordan where John was