Rylands Papyri Rylands Papyri The Rylands Papyri are a collection of thousands of papyrus fragments and documents from North Africa and Greece housed at the John Rylands University Library, Manchester, UK. The collection includes the Rylands Library Papyrus P52, also known as the "St John's fragment", a fragment from a papyrus codex, generally accepted as the earliest extant record of a Canonical gospel. The Rylands Papyri collection held by the John Rylands University Library, is one of the most extensive and wide-ranging papyrus manuscript collections in the United Kingdom. It includes religious, devotional, literary and administrative texts. The collection includes 7 hieroglyphic
Rylands Library Papyrus P52 Stanley Porter, is much narrower than the ranges envisaged by Barker or Nongbri, and implies within their dating schema that formula_1 and formula_1 stand as the earliest New Testament papyri so far identified (although, strangely, at the conclusion of their article, Orsini and Clarysse state that formula_1, formula_1, and formula_1 "probably all [date to] the second half of the second century)." The John Rylands Library states "The first editor dated the Fragment to the first half of the second century (between 100-150 AD). The date was estimated palaeographically, by comparing the handwriting with other manuscripts. However, palaeography is not an