• I Wanted to See for Myself
    Awake!—1988 | July 22

    • Nevertheless, which is the oldest known manuscript of the Christian Greek Scriptures?

      A Tiny Treasure in Manchester

      It is but a fragment of John 18:31-34, 37, 38 and measures three and a half by two and a quarter inches [8.9 by 5.7 cm]. The Gospel of John was originally written about 98 C.E. This fragmentary copy was made only shortly afterward. It is dated 100-150 C.E. Where is it to be found? In the 19th-century boomtown of England’s cotton industry, Manchester. There in The John Rylands Library this fragment is displayed to the public only on rare occasions.

      The librarian kindly explained to me how the original dimensions of the book could be calculated from such a fragment. It is estimated to have come from a codex of 130 pages of the Gospel of John, with a page size comparable to that of this magazine. Mounted between two glass plates, the fragment appears like an extremely fragile wafer. I was told that even so, many pieces of papyrus are surprisingly flexible.

      How is its age determined? I learned that the type of papyrus used, its general appearance, and also the style of writing give clues. Even I could see that the hand, which is not considered to be that of a professional scribe, was different from the writing on the vellum manuscripts I had seen, in which the vertical strokes were thicker and the horizontal strokes had heavy dots on the end.

      What is the significance of this tiny fragment? It disproves the theory of some critics that the Gospels are actually forgeries from the second century, not written by Jesus’ disciples at all. However, since it is universally agreed that Matthew, Mark, and Luke were written before John, here we have evidence that they were all written in the first century. No group of frauds could possibly have produced them in the first century when eyewitnesses of the events they related could have refuted any false stories.