AlanG✝️

In a climate-controlled case at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England, there is a piece of papyrus roughly the size of a credit card. It is about three and a half inches tall and two and a half inches wide, torn on every side, with a few lines of faded Greek handwriting on the front and the back. It doesn’t look like much. But for many scholars, this small scrap is the oldest surviving fragment of any book of the New Testament. To see why it matters, you have to go back to the nineteenth century. An influential school of German scholars, led by Ferdinand Christian Baur at Tübingen, argued that the Gospel of John could not have been written by an eyewitness or anyone close to the events. John’s Gospel was too theological, too developed in its picture of Jesus as divine. Baur and his followers dated it to around AD 160 or later, more than a century after the crucifixion. In their view, John was the product of generations of growing legend, a theological novel written long after anyone who knew Jesus had died. For decades, that view shaped how many universities taught the New Testament. Then the ground started answering. In 1920, a scholar named Bernard Grenfell bought a batch of papyrus fragments in Egypt for the John Rylands Library. Egypt’s dry sand had preserved thousands of ancient documents, from tax receipts and letters to literature and scripture. The fragments sat unexamined for years. In 1934, a young scholar named Colin Roberts was sorting through them and recognized a few Greek lines on one small scrap. They were from the eighteenth chapter of John. Roberts studied the handwriting. Papyrologists date undated manuscripts by comparing their script with dated documents, such as letters and contracts that include the year they were written. Based on those comparisons, Roberts concluded that the fragment was copied in the first half of the second century, most likely around AD 125. Leading experts of the day, including Frederic Kenyon of the British Museum, agreed with him. Think about what that means. If this copy of John was circulating in Egypt around AD 125, then the Gospel itself had to be written earlier. Christian tradition says John wrote his Gospel in Ephesus, in Asia Minor, near the end of the first century. For it to be copied and carried hundreds of miles across the Mediterranean to a provincial town in Egypt, the original must have existed for some time before that. A date of AD 160 or later became very hard to defend. The fragment didn’t prove who wrote John, but it pushed the Gospel back into the time when eyewitnesses of Jesus could still be alive. Most scholars today, including many who are not Christians, date John to the late first century, around AD 90 to 100. There is another detail about the scrap. It has writing on both sides. That means it did not come from a scroll, which was written on one side and rolled up. It came from a codex, an early form of the book, with pages stacked and bound. Christians adopted the codex very early and much faster than the rest of the ancient world, likely because it was easier to carry, to search, and to use for reading in worship. This little scrap is a piece of one of the earliest Christian books. And what does it say? Of all the passages in John that could have survived, this scrap preserves part of John 18. On one side, Jesus stands bound before Pontius Pilate, and the Jewish leaders tell Pilate they are not allowed to put anyone to death. On the other side, Jesus answers Pilate: “For this purpose I was born, and for this purpose I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” And Pilate replies, “What is truth?” Remember the Pilate Stone, the limestone block found in Caesarea in 1961 bearing the name “Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea.” Critics had once questioned whether Pilate’s role was recorded accurately. Now the oldest known fragment of the New Testament preserves the very moment when that same Roman governor stood face to face with Jesus and asked, “What is truth?” The Truth was standing right in front of him. Honesty requires saying more about the date. Dating handwriting is not an exact science. In 2005, scholar Brent Nongbri argued that the script of P52 resembles documents from a broader range of time, possibly as late as the end of the second century, and that a date as precise as AD 125 cannot be proven by handwriting alone. Many papyrologists now give P52 a wider range, roughly AD 100 to 200, with a number still favoring the earlier half. So it’s not accurate to say that P52 is definitely from AD 125. What is accurate is that it remains one of the earliest New Testament manuscripts we have, and the late dates proposed by the Tübingen school have not survived. The story doesn’t end with one fragment. Since 1934, more early papyri of John have been found. Papyrus 66 and Papyrus 75, now in Geneva and the Vatican, contain large portions of John and are generally dated to around AD 200 or earlier. Altogether, more than five thousand Greek manuscripts of the New Testament have been catalogued, far more than any other ancient book. For comparison, the earliest surviving copies of many major works by Roman historians come from hundreds of years after their authors lived, sometimes close to a thousand. Some people say that the Gospels are late legends written by people far removed from the events. But a scrap the size of a credit card, buried in the Egyptian sand, helped overturn that confidence. The Gospel of John was being copied and read far from where it was written, early enough that the claim it was invented generations later fell apart. And the words on that scrap ask the question every person has to answer. Pilate stood in front of Jesus and asked, “What is truth?” and then walked out without waiting for the answer. Jesus had already said it: “Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” He also said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” The truth Pilate asked about was not an idea. It was a Person, standing in front of him. Don’t make Pilate’s mistake. Don’t ask the question and walk away. Jesus is the Truth.