The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Part 1

THE OXYRHYNCHUS PAPYRI

the extent of the lacuna, any attempt to fill it up must be purely hypothetical. And a conjecture which presupposes a definite number of lines lost is thereby rendered very doubtful.

The difficulties of the fifth Saying have not yet been surmounted. Of the numerous restorations of the three mutilated lines we on the whole prefer that of Blass, [legei Iesous op]ou ean osin [b, ouk] e[isi]n atheoi; kai [o]pou e[is] estin monos, [le]go, ego eimi met’ aut[ou] Jesus says, Wherever they may be (two), they are not without God; and wherever there is one alone, I say, I am with him, though neither the cipher b two nor lego I say are very satisfactory (but cf. ii. recto 9 for a number in the text written in figures). With regard to the last part of the Saying ‘Raise the stone,’ etc., we do not think that the pantheistic meaning is in itself either probable or relevant to the context, though it might have been imported into it at a later period when the original meaning had been lost sight of. We incline to the view that raising the stone and cleaving the wood are meant to typify the difficult work of life, see Heinrici (Theol. Literaturzeitung, Aug. 21, 1897); but we are of opinion that the reference to Ecclesiastes x. 9, in which Professors Swete and Harnack find the key to the problem, raises difficulties greater than those it can solve. The objections to it have been excellently stated by Lock (op. cit. p. 24). Though unable to offer any better suggestion, we are somewhat less confident than we were about the correctness of the reading egeiron raise. The o seems to be joined by a ligature to the preceding letter, which we should therefore expect to be s rather than r. But the apparent ligature might be accounted for by supposing that the o was badly written.

Alone of restorations Swete’s akoueis [e]is to en otion sou to [de eteron synekleisas] thou hearest with one ear, but the other thou hast closed in the eighth Saying is quite convincing. The sense is ‘Thou hearest with one ear, but the other thou hast closed,’ i.e. ‘thou attendest imperfectly to my message.’

Lastly, with regard to the questions of origin and history, we stated in our edition our belief in four points: (1) that we have here part of a collection of sayings, not extracts from a narrative gospel; (2) that they were not heretical; (3) that they were independent of the Four Gospels in their present shape; (4) that they were earlier than 140 A.D., and might go back to the first century. These propositions, especially the first, have, as is natural, been warmly disputed. Attempts have been made to show that the ‘Logia’ were extracts from the Gospel according to the Egyptians (Harnack), the Gospel according to the Hebrews (Batiffol), or the Gospel of the Ebionites (Zahn); and Gnostic, mystic, Ebionite, or Therapeutic tendencies, according to the point of view, have been discovered in them. On the other hand our position has received the general support of critics such as Swete, Rendel Harris, Heinrici, and Lock; and so far the discussion has tended to confirm us in our original view.