This is the manuscript I'm working on (see here for the full size picture).
As I mentioned before, it's dated c.200, and contains most of John's gospel (some pages are missing and others are fragmentary).
It's commonly said that there's no punctuation in early Greek NT papyri, but that's untrue. Here there are single dots, colons, paragraphs and chevrons (>). In chapter 1 alone, there are 41 single dots and colons, and 27 of these coincide with verse divisions in our Bibles (there are 51 verses in John 1). This is consistent with similar manuscripts.
So when people say that verse divisions weren't put in until the 16th Century, that's only partially true - that's when the marks became numbers. (Chapter divisions were introduced by Archbishop Langton in the 13 century.)
The question now is why did the scribe included the rest of the marks? All bar a tiny minority make grammatical sense, but there are so few that it's hard to see why he chose to put them in at all.
Have you applied any image processing techniques, you know, even basic cotrast stretch, inverting and so on?
ReplyDeletecan I read the English translation of this papyrus somewhere?
ReplyDeleteHi Ivan, the easy answer is no. As far as I know there is no straight translation from P66.
DeleteBut the cheeky answer would be, yes, in John's gospel since P66 differs only in minor respects from the Nestle Aland Greek New Testament from which our modern English Bibles are translated (though not the KJV/AV). However, some pages of P66 have been lost, and reading an English Bible won't tell you which, and of course there are many minor variations which won't show in English versions, but then few are really significant and some simply don't translate (e.g. spelling mistakes). The one really major difference is that John 7:53-8:11 is omitted by P66 (and other early MSS).
Having said all that, I have found a pdf online which has the Greek-English texts parallel and a critical apparatus. If you were really patient, you could work out what was in P66. NB I don't know who put this together, and I don't know how reliable it is. bibletranslation.ws/trans/johnwgrk.pdf
You'll just have to learn Greek! ;-)
Hi Mike,
ReplyDeleteI have two questions please. Does P66 contain the staurogram? If so, this would mean it was a Christian symbol well before Constantine.
Also, you mentioned the Nestle Alan text is close except the P. Adulteraie. This is contrary to what is claimed by Bible critic Bart Ehrman. How would you reconcile this?
Thanks,
Chris
Chris,
DeleteYes, P66 does contain the staurogram and nomina sacra. Not only was the staurogram used pre-Constantine, it was also pre-Christian (with a different meaning, of course). See http://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2013/02/15/the-staurogram-newly-published-article/
When you say 'This is contrary to... Ehrman' do you mean the absence of 7:53-8:11 or that P66 is close to NA27?
There's no doubt at all that P66 does not contain 7:53-8:11. http://bible.org/article/my-favorite-passage-that%E2%80%99s-not-bible
As for disagreements between P66 & NA, Ehrman has gained a lot of publicity out of his claims that the MSS differ in thousands of places. But he's disingenuous. He knows full well that the vast majority are simple & accidental errors (spelling mistakes, copying a word twice, missing out a word etc. and don't affect the meaning of the text). I co-wrote an article about how accidental errors occur in one MS when the scribe re-inks his pen (hence the name of this blog!) http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/Tyndale/staff/Head/Reinking.htm
Taking P66, I did a study of the singular readings for my Masters, and concluded that, in the corrected text, while there are 310 singular readings, 136 of them make no sense and are presumably unintentional errors. Ehrman claims that because the scribes made considerable numbers of changes to their exemplars which do make sense (174 in P66), the scribe is deliberately changing the meaning of the text. But this is simply untrue. Only 2 of these singular readings in P66 make any real change to the meaning of the text (12:11 - change from 'many of the Jews were going away and believing in Jesus' to 'many of the Jews believed in him' and 15:25 where 'their Law' is 'the law'). So even here, any change in meaning is v. minor and has no theological effects at all.
I would like an English translation of the exact verses contained in P66 and photographs of the greek version "side-by-side" to make a tract. Is this possible? This document needs publishing raw English translated. Every church should have a copy.
ReplyDeleteHi Conrad
ReplyDeleteSee my reply to Ivan's comment above.
Mike
Hi Mike, so only the modern English translations like the nasb, niv, esv, have the closest best translations of p66 and p75? Besides the adultress scene
ReplyDeleteHi mike...so only the modern English translations like the nasb, niv, esv, have the closest best translations of p66 and p75? Besides the adultress scene
ReplyDelete