P. Oxy. 1 – Oxyrhynchus papyrus #1 – part of the lost Gospel of Thomas.
Oxyrhynchus (fl. AD 100-600), which sounds like “lots of wrinkles” to the YouTube captioner, was the third largest city in Roman Egypt. Only one column of it is left standing, the rest having been used to build the Arab town of el Bahnasa. But like Pompeii it is one of the best known towns of the Roman Empire – because out in the desert are its old city dumps, mounds of rubbish covered in sand, containing the biggest find of Roman and Byzantine documents ever.
Alexandria was at least ten times bigger and had the largest library in the world – but all that remains are a few scraps of paper.
Oxyrhynchus, meanwhile, has left behind some 500,000 papyrus documents: tax returns, census records, court records, business accounts, business letters, personal letters, contracts, marriage certificates, books, schoolwork, porn, horoscopes, memoirs, etc. Even a contract to throw a boxing match. Anything you can think of that would be written down is there, and in quantity. You can even see the move from scrolls to bound books (the codex) between the years 200 and 400.
Almost all of it is in Greek, then the language of government and education, though some is in Latin, Coptic, Aramaic, etc.
Only 5,000 documents have been published so far. Most of the other 495,000 or so sit in boxes at Oxford University (some in Egypt), much of it looking like large cornflakes (pictured above).
Oxyrhynchus was called Per-Medjed in Ancient Egyptian, capital of the 19th nome. Both names mean Elephantfish in English, named for a sacred fish that no one there would eat. Its theatre could seat 13,000, a third of the town. Oxyrhynchus was on the Bahr Yussef, a canal that ran parallel to the Nile, placing it and its papyrus beyond the Nile’s yearly floods.
In the 300s churches and monasteries suddenly sprang up at the edge of town. The bishop boasted of 10,000 monks and 20,000 virgins.
In 1896 two archaeologists from Queen’s College, Oxford arrived: Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt. It was those 20,000 virgins that drew them there. They were looking for the earliest Christian writings and Oxyrhynchus seemed to have deep Christian roots. They were right.
Christian writings at Oxyrhynchus of which more than one copy has been found so far, in whole or in part:
- 15 Matthew
- 14 John
- 13
- 12
- 11
- 10 Shepherd of Hermas
- 9
- 8
- 7 Psalms
- 6
- 5 Genesis, Romans, Revelations
- 4 James
- 3 Thomas, Hebrews, Galatians, Acts
- 2 Luke, Exodus, Leviticus, Judith, Tobit, 1 Peter
The ones in italics, Thomas and the Shepherd of Hermas, did not make it into the Bible.
Gospels: In addition to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John of the Bible, they found gospels of Thomas, Peter, James, Mary Magdalene, and two that are simply known by their catalogue numbers: Oxyrhynchus 840 and Oxyrhynchus 1224.
Other lost books: They found other lost books too, like “The Constitution of Athens” (a lost work of Aristotle), several lost plays of Menander and one of Sophocles, what seems to be the “Hellenika” of Cratippus, etc.
– Abagond, 2019.
See also:
- Roman Empire
- gospel
- Gospel of Peter
- Elaine Pagels: Beyond Belief – more on the Gospel of Thomas
- papyrus
- languages
- The libraries of Timbuktu
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