I. THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS

654. NEW SAYINGS OF JESUS.

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 verso the back of the page of a survey-list of various pieces of land, thus affording another example of the not uncommon practice of using the back of ephemeral documents for literary texts. The survey-list, which is in a cursive hand of the end of the second or early part of the third century, provides a terminus a quo earliest possible date for the writing on the other side. This, which is an upright informal uncial a majuscule script with rounded letters of medium size, we should assign to the middle or end of the third century; a later date than A.D. 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 are introduced by the formula ‘Jesus saith,’ and there is the same mingling of new and familiar elements; but the second series of Sayings is remarkable for the presence of the introduction to the whole collection (ll. 1–5), and another novelty is the fact that one of the Sayings (ll. 36 sqq.) is an answer to a question, the substance of which is reported (ll. 32–6). It is also noticeable that while in the first series the Sayings had little if any connexion of thought with each other, in the second series the first four at any rate are all concerned with the Kingdom of Heaven. That the present