Updated American Standard Version
Giving Bible readers what God said not what translators think God meant
Explore the significance of the priceless discovery of Papyrus 52 (P52), the earliest known fragment of the New Testament. Delve into its historical context, dating, and impact on our understanding of early Christian manuscripts and the Gospel of John.
The Rylands Library Papyrus P52, also known as the St John's fragment, is one of the earliest surviving manuscripts of the New Testament. This chapter examines its historical context, physical description, content analysis, significance, challenges, controversies, preservation, and future research. Discover the importance of studying ancient texts like Papyrus Rylands Greek 457 for the understanding of early Christianity and the history of the Bible.
Why is this fragment of John’s Gospel so valuable to those who love the Bible today? What did the experts conclude about it?
The latest calculations have all known Greek manuscripts at about 5,898, written from as early as 110 C.E. to as late as the end of the fifteenth-century. P52 although a fragment is one of the most important.
The oldest manuscript of the New Testament known today is P52, a small fragment from John’s Gospel, dated to the first half of the second century (110-150 C.E.).
Why should every Christian buy THE P52 PROJECT book? There is a course of action in the dating and redating of the earliest Greek New Testament papyri that will lead inevitably from one action or result to the unintended consequence of undermining the actual trustworthiness of the New Testament. Christians need to be able to defend against this trend. Much effort was put into THE P52 PROJECT book so that we could understand it and the issues at hand.
What are the churchgoers, the Bible college students, and seminary students to do when one Bible scholar says one thing and another Bible scholar says something entirely different, or worse still, as is the case with P52, several Bible scholars are saying other dates for the time when the Greek New Testament fragment P52 was written? P = Papyrus (a plant in Egypt), the material used to make sheets of papyrus paper written on by scribes to make copies of Bible books. 52 = the number assigned to that discovered manuscript. What makes it even more alarming is when one is not an expert in the field of study, only having basic knowledge. How can they possibly know who is correct? Worse still, the Christian is put in the embarrassing position on social media of telling an atheist that P52 is dated to 100-150 C.E., and then the atheist responds to the Christian with, ‘no your evidence from 1935 is outdated, as recent research points to a date of 200 C.E. or later.’ What is the Christian to do?
The Egerton Gospel (British Library Egerton Papyrus 2) refers to a collection of three papyrus fragments of a codex of a previously unknown gospel, found in Egypt and sold to the British Museum in 1934; the physical fragments are to be dated to about 150 C.E. What does the nomina sacra tell us? And how has a simple hooked apostrophe impacted two of our earliest manuscripts for many new textual scholars?