1224. THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS

In the two following columns, we reach firmer and more familiar ground. Fragment 2 verso ii describes, in language similar to that of the Synoptists—though more concisely—the offense taken by the scribes, Pharisees, and priests at seeing Jesus consorting with sinners, along with His answer, which appears to have been in the form given to it by St. Luke. Column i of the recto contains two recorded Sayings put in a novel relation. The injunction to pray for enemies, found in Matthew and Luke, is followed by the sentence "For he that is not against you is with you" (so Luke: "us" in Matthew); and this line of thought is carried on, if the restoration is correct, by an otherwise unrecorded Saying that the man who to-day is afar off will to-morrow be near at hand. The mention of "the adversary" in the next line suggests a further development of the same idea.

How are these fragments to be classified? Are they part of an uncanonical Gospel covering much the same ground as the Synoptic Gospels, or do they come from a collection of Sayings of Jesus like that of which portions have been previously recovered (1, 654, possibly also, as some think, 655 and the Vienna fragment from the Fayûm)? The latter hypothesis may be supported by more than one argument. In the first place, it is to be remarked that in these mutilated remains of six columns, Jesus is always either actually speaking or about to speak. Moreover, the discourse here attributed to Him shows the same admixture of novel and familiar elements as the two Oxyrhynchus fragments of collected Sayings (1, 654) and the so-called fragment of an uncanonical Gospel (655) which has been referred by some critics to the same collection. Again, in each of those three papyri there were certain special points of contact with St. Luke's Gospel; in 1224 specific Lucan affinities may again be observed (1 verso ii. 5-6, 2 recto i. 3). But there is at any rate one notable divergence from 1 and 654: the formula "Jesus saith," which there introduced the various Sayings, is here absent. Instead of this, in Fragment 2 verso ii. 4-5 the words addressed to the murmuring scribes and Pharisees are preceded by "But Jesus, hearing, [said (or saith)," just as in the parallel passages of the Synoptists. There is thus good reason for declining to refer 1224 to the same collection as 1 and 654. Possibly other collections differently put together were in circulation; but the alternative view, that our fragments belong to an uncanonical Gospel, is the more natural. In such scanty remains as these, the absence of pure narration is an extremely precarious argument; and it may be held that the introductions to the Lord's words in Fragment 2 verso are more in the manner of a connected narrative than a collection of Sayings as such. There is indeed the analogy of 654. 32-6, where a series of questions from the disciples are quoted; but nowhere else in that papyrus or in 1 was the context of a Saying given, and the occurrence here of two or—including Fragment 2 recto ii—even three instances within so small a compass