The
Bodmer Papyri are a group of twenty-two papyri discovered in Egypt in 1952. They are named after Martin Bodmer who purchased them. The papyri contain segments from the Old and New Testaments, early Christian literature,
HomerHomer is a legendary ancient Greek epic poet, traditionally said to be the author of the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey...
and
MenanderMenander , Greek dramatist, the best-known representative of Athenian New Comedy, was the son of well-to-do parents; his father Diopeithes is identified by some with the Athenian general and governor of the Thracian Chersonese known from the speech of Demosthenes De Chersoneso...
. The oldest,
P66Papyrus 66 is a near complete codex of the Gospel of John, and part of the collection known as the Bodmer Papyri.- Description :...
dates to
c. 200. The papyri are kept at the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, in
ColognyCologny is a municipality in the Canton of Geneva, Switzerland.On the heights of Geneva, it offers breathtaking views on the lake Léman and houses a prestigious golf course, the Geneva Golf Club. It is the headquarters of the World Economic Forum. The area consists mainly of villa-style residential...
,
SwitzerlandSwitzerland , officially the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 states named cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities...
outside
GenevaGeneva, is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie...
. In 2007 the Vatican Library acquired two of the papyri,
P74Papyrus 74 , designated by 74, is a copy of the New Testament in Greek. It is a papyrus manuscript of the Acts of the Apostles and Catholic epistles with lacunae. The manuscript paleographically had been assigned to the 7th century.- Description :ContentsThe surviving texts are...
and
P75Papyrus 75 is an early New Testament papyrus.- Description :Originally '[it] contained about 144 pages ... of which 102 have survived, either in whole or in part.' It 'contains about half the text of ... two Gospels' - Luke and John in Greek...
, which are kept at the
Vatican LibraryThe Vatican Library is the library of the Holy See, currently located in Vatican City. It is one of the oldest libraries in the world and contains one of the most significant collections of historical texts. Formally established in 1475, though in fact much older, it has 75,000 codices from...
.
The Bodmer Papyri were found in 1952 at Pabau near Dishna,
EgyptEgypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Western Asia...
, the ancient headquarters of the
Pachomian orderSaint Pakhom , also known as Pachome and Pakhomius, is generally recognized as the founder of Christian cenobitic monasticism. His saint day is celebrated on 9 May.-Biography:...
of monks; the discovery site is not far from
Nag HammadiNag Hammadi , is a city in Upper Egypt. Nag Hammadi was known as Chenoboskion in classical antiquity, meaning "geese grazing grounds". It is located on the west bank of the Nile in the Qena Governorate, about 80 kilometres north-west of Luxor.It has a population of about 30,000, who are mostly...
, where the secreted
Nag Hammadi libraryThe Nag Hammadi library is a collection of early Christian Gnostic texts discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945. That year, twelve leather-bound papyrus codices buried in a sealed jar were found by a local peasant named Mohammed Ali Samman...
had been found some years earlier.
The
Bodmer Papyri are a group of twenty-two papyri discovered in Egypt in 1952. They are named after Martin Bodmer who purchased them. The papyri contain segments from the Old and New Testaments, early Christian literature,
HomerHomer is a legendary ancient Greek epic poet, traditionally said to be the author of the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey...
and
MenanderMenander , Greek dramatist, the best-known representative of Athenian New Comedy, was the son of well-to-do parents; his father Diopeithes is identified by some with the Athenian general and governor of the Thracian Chersonese known from the speech of Demosthenes De Chersoneso...
. The oldest,
P66Papyrus 66 is a near complete codex of the Gospel of John, and part of the collection known as the Bodmer Papyri.- Description :...
dates to
c. 200. The papyri are kept at the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, in
ColognyCologny is a municipality in the Canton of Geneva, Switzerland.On the heights of Geneva, it offers breathtaking views on the lake Léman and houses a prestigious golf course, the Geneva Golf Club. It is the headquarters of the World Economic Forum. The area consists mainly of villa-style residential...
,
SwitzerlandSwitzerland , officially the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 states named cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities...
outside
GenevaGeneva, is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie...
. In 2007 the Vatican Library acquired two of the papyri,
P74Papyrus 74 , designated by 74, is a copy of the New Testament in Greek. It is a papyrus manuscript of the Acts of the Apostles and Catholic epistles with lacunae. The manuscript paleographically had been assigned to the 7th century.- Description :ContentsThe surviving texts are...
and
P75Papyrus 75 is an early New Testament papyrus.- Description :Originally '[it] contained about 144 pages ... of which 102 have survived, either in whole or in part.' It 'contains about half the text of ... two Gospels' - Luke and John in Greek...
, which are kept at the
Vatican LibraryThe Vatican Library is the library of the Holy See, currently located in Vatican City. It is one of the oldest libraries in the world and contains one of the most significant collections of historical texts. Formally established in 1475, though in fact much older, it has 75,000 codices from...
.
Overview
The Bodmer Papyri were found in 1952 at Pabau near Dishna,
EgyptEgypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Western Asia...
, the ancient headquarters of the
Pachomian orderSaint Pakhom , also known as Pachome and Pakhomius, is generally recognized as the founder of Christian cenobitic monasticism. His saint day is celebrated on 9 May.-Biography:...
of monks; the discovery site is not far from
Nag HammadiNag Hammadi , is a city in Upper Egypt. Nag Hammadi was known as Chenoboskion in classical antiquity, meaning "geese grazing grounds". It is located on the west bank of the Nile in the Qena Governorate, about 80 kilometres north-west of Luxor.It has a population of about 30,000, who are mostly...
, where the secreted
Nag Hammadi libraryThe Nag Hammadi library is a collection of early Christian Gnostic texts discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945. That year, twelve leather-bound papyrus codices buried in a sealed jar were found by a local peasant named Mohammed Ali Samman...
had been found some years earlier. The
manuscriptA manuscript is a recording of information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...
s were covertly assembled by a Cypriote, Phokio Tano of Cairo, then smuggled to Switzerland, where they were bought by Martin Bodmer (1899-1971). The series
Papyrus Bodmer began to be published in 1954, giving transcriptions of the texts with note and introduction in French and a French translation. The Bodmer Papyri, now conserved in the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, in Cologny, outside
GenevaGeneva, is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie...
, are not a gnostic cache, like the Nag Hammadi Library: they bear some pagan as well as Christian texts, parts of some thirty-five books in all, in
CopticCoptic or Coptic Egyptian is the final stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the seventeenth century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the first century...
and in
GreekAncient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning across the Archaic , Classical , and Hellenistic periods of ancient Greece and the ancient world. It is predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
. With fragments of correspondence, the number of individual texts represented reaches to fifty. Most of the works are in
codexA codex is a book in the format used for modern books, with separate pages normally bound together and given a cover...
form, a few in
scrollA scroll is a roll of parchment, papyrus, or paper, which has been drawn or written upon.Scroll may also refer to:*Scroll , the decoratively curved end of the pegbox of string instruments such as violins...
s. Three are written on
parchmentParchment is a thin material made from calfskin, sheepskin or goatskin, often split. Its most common use was as a material for writing on, for documents, notes, or the pages of a book, codex or manuscript. It is distinct from leather in that parchment is limed but not tanned, therefore it is very...
.
Books V and VI of Homer's
IliadThe Iliad is an epic poem recounting significant events during a portion of the final year of the Trojan War — the Greek siege of the city of Ilion — hence the title...
(P
1), and three comedies of
MenanderMenander , Greek dramatist, the best-known representative of Athenian New Comedy, was the son of well-to-do parents; his father Diopeithes is identified by some with the Athenian general and governor of the Thracian Chersonese known from the speech of Demosthenes De Chersoneso...
appear among the Bodmer Papyri, as well as gospel texts:
Papyrus 66Papyrus 66 is a near complete codex of the Gospel of John, and part of the collection known as the Bodmer Papyri.- Description :...
(P
66), is a text of the
Gospel of JohnThe Gospel of John , is the last of the four canonical gospels. This non synoptic gospel is an account of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth...
, dating in the early third century, in the manuscript tradition called the
Alexandrian text-typeThe Alexandrian text-type is one of several text-types used in New Testament textual criticism to describe and group the textual character of biblical manuscripts...
. Aside from the papyrus fragment in the
Rylands Library Papyrus P52The Rylands Library Papyrus P52, also known as the St John's fragment, is a fragment from a papyrus codex, measuring only 3.5 by 2.5 inches at its widest; and conserved with the Rylands Papyri at the John Rylands University Library , Manchester, UK...
, it is the oldest testimony for John; it omits the passage concerning the moving of the waters (John 5:3b-4) and the pericope of the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53-8:11). P
72 is the earliest known copy of the
Epistle of JudeThe Epistle of Jude is second to last book of the New Testament and is attributed Jude, the brother of James the Just .- Composition :...
, and 1 and 2 Peter.
Papyrus 75Papyrus 75 is an early New Testament papyrus.- Description :Originally '[it] contained about 144 pages ... of which 102 have survived, either in whole or in part.' It 'contains about half the text of ... two Gospels' - Luke and John in Greek...
(P
75) is a partial codex containing most of Luke and John. Comparison of the two versions of John in the Bodmer Papyri with the third-century
Chester Beatty PapyriThe Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri or simply the Chester Beatty Papyri are a group of early papyrus manuscripts of biblical texts. The manuscripts are in Greek and are of Christian origin. There are eleven manuscripts in the group, seven consisting of portions of Old Testament books, three...
convinced Floyd V. Filson that there was no uniform text of the Gospels in Egypt in the third century".
There are also Christian texts that would become declared
apocryphaApocrypha comes from the Greek word , which means those having been hidden away. The general term is usually applied to the books that were considered by the Church as useful, but not divinely inspired...
l in the fourth century, such as the
Infancy Gospel of James. There is a Greek-Latin
lexiconIn linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes....
to some of Paul's letters, and there are fragments of
Melito of SardisSaint Melito of Sardis was the bishop of Sardis, near Smyrna in western Anatolia, and a great authority in Early Christianity: Jerome, speaking of the Old Testament canon established by Melito, quotes Tertullian to the effect that he was esteemed a prophet by many of the faithful...
. Among the works is a Christian
Vision of Dorotheus, son of "Quintus the poet" assumed to be the pagan poet
Quintus SmyrnaeusQuintus Smyrnaeus was a Greek epic poet whose Posthomerica, following "after Homer" continues the narration of the Trojan War....
, written in archaising
HomerHomer is a legendary ancient Greek epic poet, traditionally said to be the author of the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey...
ic
hexameterHexameter is a literary and poetic form, a line consisting of six metrical feet, as in the Iliad. It was the standard epic metre in Greek and became standard for Latin too. It was also used in other types of composition -- in Horace's satires, for instance, and Ovid's Metamorphoses...
s, the earliest Christian hexameter poem (
P29Papyrus 29 , designated by 29, is an early copy of the New Testament in Greek. It is a papyrus manuscript of the Acts of the Apostles, it contains only Acts 26:7-8.20. The manuscript paleographically had been assigned to the early 3rd century.- Description :The Greek text of this codex...
). The earliest extant copy of the
Third Epistle to the CorinthiansThe Third Epistle to the Corinthians is believed to be a pseudepigraphical text under the name of Paul of Tarsus. It is also found in the Acts of Paul, and was framed as Paul's response to the Epistle of the Corinthians to Paul. The earliest extant copy is Bodmer Papyri X.In the West it was not...
is published in
Bodmer Papryri X.
The collection includes some non-literary material, such as a collection of letters from the abbots of the monastery of Saint Pachomius, raising the possibility that the unifying circumstance in the collection is that all were part of a monastic library.
The latest of the Bodmer Papyri (P
74) dates to the sixth or seventh century.
Vatican acquisition
Plans announced by the Foundation Bodmer in October 2006 to sell two of the manuscripts for millions of dollars, to capitalize the library, which opened in 2003, drew consternation from scholars around the world, fearing that the unity of the collection would be broken.
Then, in March 2007 it was announced the Vatican had acquired the Bodmer Papyrus XIV-XV (P
75), which is believed to contain the world's oldest known written fragment from the
Gospel of LukeThe Gospel of Luke is the third and longest of the four canonical Gospels. This synoptic gospel is an account of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. It details his story from the events of his birth to his Ascension...
, the earliest known
Lord's PrayerThe Lord's Prayer, also known as the Our Father or Pater noster, is perhaps the best-known prayer in Christianity. On Easter Sunday 2007 it was estimated that 2 billion Catholic, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox Christians read, recited, or sang the short prayer in hundreds of languages...
, and one of the oldest written fragments from the
Gospel of JohnThe Gospel of John , is the last of the four canonical gospels. This non synoptic gospel is an account of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth...
.
The papyri had been sold for an undisclosed "significant" price to
Frank Hanna IIIFrank J. Hanna III is an American entrepreneur and merchant banker who has been described as "one of the leading Catholic philanthropists in the USA."-Education and career:...
, of Atlanta, Georgia. In January 2007, Hanna presented the papyri to the Pope. They are kept in the Vatican Library and will be made available for scholarly review, and in the future, excerpts may be put on display for the general public. They were transported from Switzerland to the Vatican in "An armed motorcade surrounded by people with machine guns."
Greek
- Papyrus Bodmer II
Papyrus 66 is a near complete codex of the Gospel of John, and part of the collection known as the Bodmer Papyri.- Description :...
(66)
- Bodmer V — Nativity of Mary, Apocalypse of James; 4th century
- Papyrus Bodmer VII-IX
Papyrus 72 is an early New Testament papyrus. It contains all the text of 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and Jude. Paleographically it had been assigned to the 3rd or 4th century.- Description :...
(72) — Epistle of Jude, 1-2 Peter, Psalms 33-34
- Bodmer X — Epistle of Corintians to Paul; 4th century
- Bodmer XI — Ode of Solomon 1; 4th century
- Papyrus Bodmer XIV-XV
Papyrus 66 is a near complete codex of the Gospel of John, and part of the collection known as the Bodmer Papyri.- Description :...
(66)
- Papyrus Bodmer XVII
Papyrus 72 is an early New Testament papyrus. It contains all the text of 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and Jude. Paleographically it had been assigned to the 3rd or 4th century.- Description :...
(74)
- Bodmer XXIV — Psalms 17:46-117:44; 3rd/4th century
- Bodmer XLVI — Daniel 1:1-20
Coptic
- Bodmer III
Codex Bodmer III, is a Coptic uncial manuscript of the four Gospels, dated palaeographically to the 4th century. It contains the text of the Gospel of John with some lacunae. It is written in Bohairic dialect of Coptic language....
— John 1:1-21:25; Genesis 1:1-4:2; 4th century; Bohairic
- Bodmer VI — Proverbs 1:1-21:4; 4th/5th century; Paleo-Theban ("Dialect P")
- Bodmer XVI — Exodus 1:1-15:21; 4th century
- Bodmer XVIII — Deuteronomium 1:1-10:7; 4th century
- Bodmer XIX
Codex Bodmer XIX, is a Coptic uncial manuscript of the four Gospels, dated palaeographically to the 4th century . It contains the text of the Gospel of Matthew 14:28-28:20; Epistle to the Romans 1:1-2:3. It is written in Sahidic dialect of Coptic language.The two books are paginated separately in...
— Matthew 14:28-28:20; Romans 1:1-2:3; 4th/5th century; Sahidic
- Bodmer XXI — Joshua 6:16-25; 7:6-11:23; 22:1-2; 22:19-23:7; 23:15-24:2; 4th century
- Bodmer XXII (Missisippi Codex II) — Jeremiah 40:3-52:34; Lamentations; Epistle of Jeremiah; Book of Baruch; 4th/5th century
- Bodmer XXIII — Isajah 47:1-66:24; 4th century
- Bodmer XL — Song of Songs
- Bodmer XLI — Acta Pauli; 4th century; sub-Achmimic
- Bodmer XLII — 2 Corinthians; dialect unknown
- Bodmer XLIV — Book of Daniel; Bohairic
External links