I. NEW SAYINGS OF JESUS

Our first excavations in 1897 on the site of Oxyrhynchus, one of the chief cities of ancient Egypt, situated on the edge of the western desert 120 miles south of Cairo, were rewarded by the discovery of a very large collection of Greek papyri dating from the first to the seventh century of the Christian era. Of the numerous theological and classical texts which were then brought to light, none aroused wider interest than a page from a book containing Sayings of Jesus and published by us under the title ΛΟΓΙΑ ΙΗΣΟΥ Sayings of our Lord. After an interval of six years, during which we were principally engaged in the search for documents of the first three centuries B.C. Before Christ in the Fayûm, we returned in February 1903 to Oxyrhynchus, with a view to an exhaustive examination of what has been on the whole the richest site in Egypt for papyri. This process of clearing the numerous mounds on a large scale has already resulted in further important discoveries, but will necessarily be both long and costly in the case of a town which is more than a mile in length; and after the termination of a third season’s work there, the end is still far from being in sight.

By a curious stroke of good fortune our second excavations at Oxyrhynchus were, like the first, signalized by the discovery of a fragment of a collection of Sayings of Jesus. This consists of forty-two incomplete lines on the back of a survey-list of various pieces of land (see Frontispiece). The survey-list, which was written in a cursive hand of the end of the second or early part of the third century before the back of the papyrus came to be used, provides a terminus a quo limit from which (the earliest possible date) for the writing on the other side. This, which is an upright informal uncial of medium size, we should assign to the middle or end of the third century; a later date than A.D. 300 Anno Domini 300 is most unlikely. The present text is therefore nearly contemporary with the ‘Logia’ papyrus discovered in 1897, which also belongs to the third century, though probably to an earlier decade. In its general style and arrangement the present series of Sayings offers great resemblance to its predecessor. Here, as in the earlier ‘Logia,’ the individual Sayings