MTB-04 P39 (The Gospel of John)

In the late 1800s or early 1900s, a small fragment of John’s gospel was discovered, along with hundreds of thousands of other fragments, in a trash heap in the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus. This fragment is only half a page from a codex, or bound book, of John’s gospel, but it contains enough information to tell us something about the people who produced it. And, perhaps more importantly, it offers some insight into the codex — a communication technology that changed the way the Bible was read and transmitted. Today, this fragment is known as “P39.”

We’ll examine P39 by considering four related areas, beginning with the artifact itself. Where was P39 found, and what does this fragment tell us about its original codex?

P39 gets its name from being the 39th New Testament text on papyrus to be registered in the official catalog of Greek New Testament manuscripts. Papyrus is a reedy water plant that was cut, soaked, flattened into sheets and dried, and then used for writing in the same way the modern world might use paper. In fact, the word “paper” is derived from the word “papyrus.”

Oxyrhynchus, the city where the fragment was found, was located about 160 miles southwest of modern-day Cairo on a branch of the Nile. It was a regional capital in Egypt during the Hellenistic period, and attracted large numbers of Greek settlers. Eventually, Oxyrhynchus became Egypt’s third largest city and retained its prominence through several centuries.

It became famous as a Christian center with many churches and thousands of adherents who lived in religious orders. In light of its prominent Christian history, two scholars from Oxford University, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, led excavations in Oxyrhynchus from 1896 to 1907. They hoped to find Christian artifacts from this period — and they were not disappointed. According to their own reports, they and their team of local excavators found papyri documents faster than they could sort them. Over the course of their excavations, roughly 500,000 manuscript fragments were discovered and brought back to England.