Discovery of P.Oxy. 87.5575 Bible Fragment Sparks Debate; How Do Experts Determine the Age of Literary Papyrus?

On August 31, the Egypt Exploration Society published the latest volume in its long-running series on the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Among the many papyri included in LXXXVII volume, the spotlight has fallen on a small fragment which contains sayings of Jesus similar to texts found in the gospels of Matthew, Luke, and Thomas.

Biblical but Not Christian?

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri is a massive collection of papyri excavated during the late 19th and early 20th centuries near Oxyrhynchus, Egypt by a team led by Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt. The site served as an ancient trash dump where public and private documents were discarded.

The papyri range in date from the 3rd century B.C. to A.D. 640. From almost half a million troves of papyri included in this volume, it has caught the attention of many, especially historians and Biblical scholars. This is due to some issues concerning its content and date. As scholar Brent Nongbri describes, the fragment is a non-canonical text about Jesus, which, if the dating is accurate, is earlier than the majority of all surviving copies of anything in the New Testament.

The text of P.Oxy. 87.5575 is far from being the canonical gospel, as it seems to interweave material from the gospel of Matthew and also the gospels of Luke and Thomas, with a few new words included in it. This is the first known occurrence of weaving together of Biblical material similar to existing gospels.

The inclusion of material from the gospel of Thomas also poses some problems. This text is about early Christianity but then disappeared and only emerged in the mid-1940s containing mentions of Jesus with a series of mystical sayings. The new fragments suggest that, early on, the material from the gospel of Thomas was as canonical as material from Matthew and Luke.

With regard to its date, if the proposed second century origin is right, then 5575 would be the earliest surviving witness to sayings associated with the gospel of Thomas, one of the earliest witnesses to any existing Christian document. As experts suggest, 5575 may come from a collection of sayings, or perhaps a discourse given the flow from one saying to another. One possibility is its role in representing a work which was not dependent upon the gospel of Thomas, but rather served as a source for it.

Dating New Testament Christian Manuscripts

The New Testament texts that we read today in various translations are not based on a single manuscript of the original Greek text. The surviving manuscripts which contain the entire Christian Bible are the work of medieval monks. The oldest surviving examples of the New Testament come to us as fragments of papyrus mostly excavated in Egypt.

Before dating a manuscript, scholars need to decide what is being dated. It could be the text such as the writing of the apostles, the media like the parchment used, or the manuscript like the New Testament. In most cases, it is the last item that scholars want to date.

There are scientific tests which are done on the media and ink, such as the radiocarbon dating or carbon-14 dating. This method can accurately determine the age of organic materials as old as 60,000 years. It relies on the fact that living organisms absorb carbon-14 isotope into their tissue. When they die, this isotope begins to change into other atoms over time. By counting the remaining carbon-14 atoms left in a material, the scientists can estimate how long the organism has been dead.