In the year 1898, Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt discovered thousands of papyri fragments just outside the ruins of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus. These fragments turned out to be one of the most
In the year 1898, Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt discovered thousands of papyri fragments just outside the ruins of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus. These fragments turned out to be one of the most important papyri discoveries of all time. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri (Vols. 1–15) provide access to the editors’ transcriptions of over 1,800 fragments of papyrus with detailed notes, translations, and commentary.
When Grenfell and Hunt began their excavations at Oxyrhynchus in 1896, they never could have anticipated the magnitude of the discoveries in this ancient city. Over one hundred years later, scholars continue to sift through the thousands of fragments, publishing volume after volume of transcriptions. For the first time, volumes one through fifteen will be available digitally with completely searchable text, exponentially increasing the value of these volumes with their copious notes, translation, and commentary.
Many of the more important literary papyri receive a dual treatment with the standard literal transcription and also a reconstructed text in modern style. All these texts become even more valuable with Logos Bible Software. Across a wide variety of important tools for studying the New Testament, they are discussed in hundreds of grammars, lexicons, critical apparatuses, commentaries, journal articles, and monographs.
Those who own Comfort and Barrett’s The Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts already know the great value of having access to the earliest New Testament papyri and being able to compare them with critical editions and textual apparatuses. The Oxyrhynchus papyri make it possible to compare and confirm the transcriptions of 17 of those early New Testament manuscripts, while also adding access to an additional 12 New Testament manuscript transcriptions not available in Comfort and Barrett’s work.
Even more exciting is the fact that the Oxyrhynchus papyri take textual criticism beyond the New Testament. In these 15 volumes, there are 20 papyri representing the Septuagint, which will provide an incredibly helpful resource beside the Göttingen Septuagint (65 Vols.). On top of that there are also 5 manuscripts from the Apostolic Fathers, 11 from the New Testament Apocrypha, 2 from Philo, and many more from a variety of Classical authors and documentary papyri.
Finally, unlike critical apparatuses that merely report readings without any sort of text critical discussion or Comfort and Barrett’s The Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts, which provides an introduction to the manuscript without any notes on specific portions of the papyri texts, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (Vols. 1–15) provide both an introduction to the manuscripts themselves and on top of that, extended notes and commentary on variant readings and their relationship to other manuscripts.
One hundred and fifty years ago, one would commonly hear it said that the Greek New Testament was unique, or that is was written in “Holy Ghost Greek.” It was believed to be written in a form of Greek never in common use, fit only for a sacred and holy book. Scholars like Alfred Deissmann and James Hope Mouton changed all of that. And they could not have done it without the papyri discoveries at Oxyrhynchus. Moulton, in the preface to his Prolegomena, writes:
The immense stores of illustration, which have been opened to us by the discoveries of Egyptian papyri, accessible to all on their lexical side in the brilliant Bible Studies of Deissmann, have not hitherto been systematically treated in their bearing on the grammar of New Testament Greek. The main purpose of these Prolegomena has accordingly been to provide a sketch of the language of the New Testament as it appears to those who have followed Deissmann into a new field of research.
—Grammar of New Testament Greek, Prolegomena
Most volumes includes an index of grammatical terminology mentioned in the discussions of individual papyri and Logos Bible Software’s search capabilities make it possible to find these same grammatical discussions in those volumes that do not.
The discoveries at the city of Oxyrhynchus did no less than to revolutionize the creation of New Testament dictionaries and lexicons. It was the papyri discoveries that lead Frederick Danker to write these words about Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament:
[The corrected edition of his Greek-English Lexicon] made Thayer a standard name in the English-speaking theological world until 1957. Nevertheless, discontent found repeated expression during this long period of valued service. And justly so, for even while the first lines of type were being set the seeds of Thayer’s obsolescence had already been sown.
—