Rylands Library Papyrus P52

Acquired by Bernard Greenfell in Egypt in 1920, this small papyrus is generally accepted to be the earliest extant copy of New Testament canonical writing. The front (recto) contains lines from the Gospel of John 18:31-33, and the back (verso) contains lines from verses 37-38.

The original translation of the work was not done until 1934 by C. H. Roberts, who published the essay “An Unpublished Fragment of the Fourth Gospel in the John Rylands Library” in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library XX, 1936, pp 45-55.

Although Rylands P52 is generally accepted as the earliest extant canonical record (see 7Q5 for an alternate candidate), the dating of the papyrus is by no means the subject of consensus among critical scholars. The style of the script is strongly Hadrian, which would suggest a date somewhere between 125 and 160 CE. The difficulty of fixing the date of a fragment based solely on paleographic evidence allows for a range of dates that extends well into the second half of the 2nd Century.

The significance of P52 rests on both its early date, and its geographic dispersal from the site of authorship. As the fragment is removed from the autograph by at least one step of transmission, the date of authorship for the Gospel of John must be as least a few years prior to the dating of P52. The location of the fragment in Egypt extends that time even further, allowing for the dispersal of the documents from the point of authorship and transmission to the point of discovery.

Unfortunately, P52 is not a valuable attestation to the form of John's Gospel extant at the time of the writing of the parchment. The fragment contains so few lines that it is not useful for comparison to later documents containing a more complete record of the work.