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The Reading Culture of Early Christianity

Papyrus 10 (in the Gregory-Aland numbering system), signed by P¹⁰ and named Oxyrhynchus papyri 209, is an early copy of part of the New Testament content in Greek. It is a papyrus manuscript of the Epistle to the Romans, dating paleographically to about 316 C.E.[1]

Romans 1:1-7
Name	P. Oxy. 209
Text	Romans 1:1-5, 7
Date	c. 316
Script	Greek
Found	Oxyrhynchus, Egypt
Now at	Houghton Library
Cite	Grenfell & A. S. Hunt, Oxyrhynchus Papyri II (1899), pp. 8-9
Size	25.1 x 19.9
Type	Alexandrian text-type
Category	I

Description of P¹⁰

The manuscript is a fragment of one leaf, written in one column per page. The surviving text is of Romans, verses 1:1-7. The manuscript was written very carelessly. The handwriting is crude and irregular, and the copy contains some irregular spellings. A part of verse 6 is omitted (εν οις εστε και υμεις κλητοι who are called to belong to).[2]

The nomina sacra are written in an abbreviated way.

The Greek text of this codex is a representative of the Alexandrian text-type. Aland placed it in Category I.[3] The manuscript is too brief for certainty. The only variant of any importance is Χριστου Ιησου in Rom 1:7, where the manuscripts all have the reverse order.[4]

History of P¹⁰

The papyrus manuscript, which “displays the handwriting of a student learning to write Greek” (Comfort & Barret, 2019, p. 371) was found tied up with a contract that dates to 316 A.D., and other documents of the same period.[5]

It was discovered in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, and is currently housed at the Houghton Library of the Harvard University (Semitic Museum Inv. 2218), Cambridge (Massachusetts).[6]

Person, Place, and Technical Terms Defined

The Alexandrian text-type is one of several text-types found among New Testament manuscripts. It is the text type favored by textual critics, and it is the basis for most modern Bible translations. The name of the text type comes from Codex Alexandrinus, a manuscript of this type.

A biblical manuscript is any handwritten copy of a portion of the text of the Bible. Biblical manuscripts vary in size from tiny scrolls containing individual verses of the Jewish scriptures to huge polyglot codices containing both the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and the New Testament, as well as extracanonical works.

The Epistle to the Romans or Letter to the Romans, often shortened to Romans, is the sixth book in the New Testament. Biblical scholars agree that it was composed by Paul the Apostle to explain that salvation is offered through the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is the longest of the Pauline epistles (7,000+ (words).

Houghton Library, on the south side of Harvard Yard adjacent to Widener Library, is Harvard University’s primary repository for rare books and manuscripts. It is part of the Harvard College Library, the library system of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Kurt Aland was a German theologian and biblical scholar who specialized in New Testament textual criticism. He founded the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster and served as its first director from 1959 to 83. He was one of the principal editors of Nestle-Aland – Novum Testamentum Graece for the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft and The Greek New Testament for the United Bible Societies.

New Testament manuscripts in Greek are categorized into five groups, according to a scheme introduced in 1981 by Kurt and Barbara Aland in The text of the New Testament. The categories are based on how each manuscript relates to the various text-types. Generally speaking, earlier Alexandrian manuscripts are category I, while later Byzantine manuscripts are category V. Aland’s method involved considering 1000 passages where the Byzantine text differs from non-Byzantine text. The Alands did not select their 1000 readings from all of the NT books; for example, none were drawn from Matthew and Luke.

Oxyrhynchus is a city in Middle Egypt located about 160 km south-southwest of Cairo in Minya Governorate. It is also an archaeological site, considered one of the most important ever discovered. Since the late 19th century, the area around Oxyrhynchus has been excavated almost continually, yielding an enormous collection of papyrus texts dating from the Ptolemaic Kingdom and Roman Egypt. Among the texts discovered at Oxyrhynchus are plays of Menander, fragments from the Gospel of Thomas, and fragments from Euclid’s Elements. They also include a few vellum manuscripts and more recent Arabic manuscripts on paper.

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a group of manuscripts discovered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by papyrologists Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt at an ancient rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.

Palaeography (UK) or paleography is the study of historic writing systems and the deciphering and dating of historical manuscripts, including the analysis of historic handwriting. It is concerned with the forms and processes of writing; not the textual content of documents. Included in the discipline is the practice of deciphering, reading, and dating manuscripts, and the cultural context of writing, including the methods with which writing and books were produced, and the history of scriptoria.

Papyrus is a material similar to thick paper that was used in ancient times as a writing surface. It was made from the pith of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus, a wetland sedge. Papyrus can also refer to a document written on sheets of such material, joined together side by side and rolled up into a scroll, an early form of a book.

[1] Aland, Kurt; Aland, Barbara (1995). The Text of the New Testament: An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism. Erroll F. Rhodes (trans.). Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. p. 96.

[2] B. P. Grenfell & A. S. Hunt, Oxyrhynchus Papyri II (1899), p. 8.

[3] Aland, Kurt; Aland, Barbara (1995). The Text of the New Testament: An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism. Erroll F. Rhodes (trans.). Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. p. 96.

[4] B. P. Grenfell & A. S. Hunt, Oxyrhynchus Papyri II (1899), p. 9.

[5] B. P. Grenfell & A. S. Hunt, Oxyrhynchus Papyri II (1899), p. 8.

[6] Aland, Kurt; Aland, Barbara (1995). The Text of the New Testament: An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism. Erroll F. Rhodes (trans.). Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. p. 96.

“Handschriftenliste.” Münster: Institute for New Testament Textual Research. Retrieved 23 August 2011.

Philip Wesley Comfort and David P. Barrett, THE TEXT OF THE EARLIEST NEW TESTAMENT MANUSCRIPTS: Papyri 75-139 and Uncials, Vol. 2 (English and Greek Edition) (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2019), 371.