The oldest known piece of any New Testament book is a scrap the size of a playing card, carrying a few broken lines of Jesus' exchange with Pilate. Its importance is a matter of arithmetic: nineteenth-century critics dated John's composition to late in the second century, too late for eyewitness memory. But this copy — and a copy, in codex form, circulating in provincial Egypt — is itself from around the early-to-mid second century. The Gospel had to have been written, published and carried abroad well before that.
- What it is
- A credit-card-sized papyrus codex fragment with Greek text of John 18 on both sides
- Date of artifact
- commonly dated c. AD 125–175
- Discovered
- Egypt (acquired with a papyri lot in 1920; identified in 1934), 1920 (acquired by Bernard Grenfell; identified by C. H. Roberts)
- Where it is now
- John Rylands Library, Manchester
- Related to
- The earliest surviving physical copy of any Gospel text — Jesus before Pilate
- Scripture
- John 18:31–33 · John 18:37–38
What this find showsJohn's Gospel was composed no later than the early second century and plausibly within the first — the old late-date scepticism is dead, killed by a scrap of papyrus.
What it does not proveHandwriting can only be dated within a range of decades, so P52 cannot pin an exact year; and an early copy attests the book's age, not the truth of its contents.
Sources & further reading