New Sayings of Jesus and Fragment of a Lost Gospel from Oxyrhynchus

century. The outward appearance of the two papyri is indeed different, 2 being a leaf from a handsomely-written book, which may well have been a valuable trade-copy, while 1 is in roll form and was written on the back of a comparatively trivial document. The practice of writing important literary texts on such material was, however, extremely common, and the form of 1 lends no support to the hypothesis that the papyrus is a collection of notes made by the writer himself. In the uncial character of the handwriting, the absence of abbreviations and contractions other than those usually found in early theological MSS., and the careful punctuation, 1 shares the characteristics of an ordinary literary text such as 2. Since 2 is the 11th page of a book, it must have formed part of a large collection of Sayings, while 1 comes from the beginning of a manuscript and provides no direct evidence of the length of the roll. But the document on the other side is not a letter or contract which would be likely to be short, but an official land-survey list, and these tend to be of very great length; so far therefore as can be judged from externals, 1 like 2 probably belongs to an extensive collection of Sayings which may well have numbered several hundreds.

Turning next to the contents of the two papyri, no one can fail to be struck with their formal resemblance. Postponing for the moment the introduction of 1 (ll. 1-5), which, since it necessarily presupposes the existence of the Sayings introduced and may have been added later, stands on a different footing from the Sayings and requires separate treatment, the five Sayings partly recorded in 1 begin like those in 2 with the plain formula "Jesus saith"; and both fragments contain Sayings which to a greater or less degree have parallel passages in the Synoptic Gospels side by side with Sayings which are new. In 2 the style was simple and direct, and the setting with the constant balancing of the words and sentences and the absence of connecting particles, highly archaic; the same features, though obscured unfortunately by the incompleteness of the papyrus, are also distinctly traceable in 1. There is, however, one difference in the two papyri in point of form. To the 5th Saying in 1 (ll. 36 sqq.) is prefixed (ll. 32-6) a brief account of the question to which it was the answer; but this is the exception, not the rule, and the fact that the Sayings in 2 agree with the first four Sayings in 1 in omitting the context.