Sample text for Eyewitness to Jesus : amazing new manuscript evidence about the origins of the Gospels / Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew D'Ancona.
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THE MAGDALEN COLLEGE PAPYRUS: AN INTRODUCTION
Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the Leper, when a woman came to him with a small bottle of fragrant oil, very costly; and as she sat at the table she began to pour it over his head.
-- ST. MATTHEW 26:6-7
We may start with the fact, which I confess I did not appreciate before the investigation, of how little evidence there is for dating any of the new testament writings.
--JOHN A. T. ROBINSON, Redating the New Testament (1976)
On Christmas Eve, 1994, The Times of London reported on its front page an astonishing claim made by the German biblical scholar Carsten Peter Thiede. "A papyrus believed to be the oldest extant fragment of the New Testament has been found in an Oxford library," the newspaper said. "It provides the first material evidence that the Gospel according to St. Matthew is an eyewitness account written by contemporaries of Christ."
The story concerned three tiny scraps of paper belonging to Magdalen College, Oxford, the largest of which is only 4.1 cm X 1.3 cm (15/8 in. X 1/2 in.). On both sides of the fragments appeared Greek script, phrases from the twenty-sixth chapter of St. Matthew, which describes Jesus' anointment in the house of Simon the Leper at Bethany and his betrayal to the chief priests by Judas Iscariot. Though the verses concern a crucial moment in the life of Christ, the scraps looked unremarkable in themselves. Yet Thiede, Director of the Institute for Basic Epistemogical Research in Paderborn, Germany--argued that they were of astonishingly early origin, dating from the mid-first century A.D. He was shortly to publish his claims in the Zeitschrift f³r Papyrologie, a specialist journal for papyrologists (scholars who study ancient manuscript evidence on papyrus).
The argument was complex, based upon expert analysis of the Greek writing on the fragments and upon extensive comparisons with calligraphy on other manuscript fragments. A scholarly controversy was bound to follow, since Thiede was challenging the orthodox view that the tiny second-century fragment of St. John's Gospel in the John Rylands Library in Manchester was our earliest Gospel text. He was also making a claim which would have radical implications for our understanding of the Gospels and their origins. And--most important--he was doing so on the basis of physical evidence rather than literary theory or historical supposition.
The new claim clearly deserved a much broader audience than the comparatively small guild of papyrologists to whom Thiede's learned article was addressed. Here, it was alleged, was a fragment of the twenty-sixth chapter of St. Matthew remnants of a book perhaps 150 pages long--which might have been written in the lifetime of the apostle himself. If true, Thiede's argument had far-reaching implications. As one senior fellow of Magdalen put it at the time: "It means that the people in the story must have been around when this was being written. It means they were there."
* * *
At some stage during his time in Egypt, Charles Bousfield Huleatt came upon three scraps of papyrus which he considered very important. Before taking up his next post, in Messina, he arranged for his mother to send them to Magdalen, which she did by recorded delivery in October , together with some rough notes by her son (now lost). Two months later, Huleatt himself wrote to the college librarian, H. A. Wilson, to check that the package had arrived and remarked regretfully en passant upon the recent robbery of mummies and papyri from one of the tombs at Luxor. This is the only record left to us of Huleatt's discovery and bequest of the Magdalen Papyrus--now the most widely discussed fragment of the New Testament in the world.
Where might he have come upon it? The market in such treasures was prodigious and still underregulated, in spite of the efforts of the Antiquities Service to prevent the unauthorized sale of discoveries. Writing in 1895, the author Henry Stanley was scandalized by the contempt in which such regulations were held in Luxor and by the trade in mummies and other antiquities, many of them fake. "Oh certainly Thebes is the place to buy souvenirs," he wrote, recalling that one man had bought "three men's heads, one woman's head, one child's head, six hands large and small, twelve feet, one plump infant's foot, one foot minus a toe, two ears, one part of a well-preserved face, two ibis mummies, one dog mummy."
Such grotesque and ghoulish purchases would never have been to Huleatt's taste, of course. But Stanley's example illustrates the easy ability of antiquities, authentic or otherwise. The antika shops and bazaars of Egypt were full of illicitly acquired goods, and scholars were frequently approached with papyri--those in Coptic and hieroglyphic script generally supposed by the natives to be more valuable than those in Greek. Sayce's memoirs make clear how liquid this market actually was. Even a man as conscientious as Huleatt might not always have been able to distinguish between a sale which was fully legitimate and one which was not, especially if the papyrus was a gift from one of his many admirers and acquaintances among the guests at the Luxor Hotel.
His overriding instinct was evidently to send the papyrus somewhere where it would be safe. This it would certainly be at Magdalen. His alma mater would indeed keep the fragments secure, safer than they would ever be in a land of grave robbers, antika dealers and tourists. But the college's reaction when presented with the papyrus was that of the relaxed antiquarian rather than the fascinated scholar. Huleatt's letter of December 1901 to the librarian reveals that the college had not even acknowledged its receipt of the fragments in October. Arthur Hunt, a Senior Demy at Magdalen from 1896 to 1900, before his election to a fellowship at Lincoln, was asked to estimate the fragments' date, following Huleatt's own tentative suggestion that they might be third century. Hunt, it seems, thought this too early and suggested that "they may be assigned with more probability to the fourth century."
The fragments were laid in a display cabinet in the Old Library, a magnificent but inaccessible room up a steep staircase in the college cloisters, which directly adjoin the President's lodgings. Gibbon used to labor over his books there and Magdalen Fellows still use the library as a quiet workplace away from the busier parts of college. It is Magdalen's inner sanctum--although the papyrus was scarcely treated as its holiest of holies. Instead, it lay among other college memorabilia--the corrected typescript of Lady Windemere's Fan, a portrait of Henrietta Maria exciting little attention among the members of the college.
Arthur Hunt's verdict effectively snuffed out the debate on the fragments' age until after the Second World War. He found a scholarly niche at Lincoln, while Grenfell returned to The Queen's College, which has remained a stronghold of papyrology throughout the twentieth century. In 1953, Colin Roberts redated the Magdalen papyrus to the later second century and established its relationship to two scraps at the Fundacion San Lucas Evangelista, Barcelona. That judgment was to stand until Carsten Thiede's redating, more than forty years later. By this stage, few Fellows of Magdalen even knew of the existence of the papyrus.
Library of Congress subject headings for this publication: Magdalen papyrus, Bible, N, T, Matthew XXVI, 6-7 Authorship Date of authorship, Bible, N, T, Manuscripts, Greek, Bible, N, T, Manuscripts (Papyri)Bible, N, T, Gospels Authorship Date of authorship, Magdalen College (University of Oxford), Library, Huleatt, Charles Bousfield, 1863-1908