The Divine Pen Strokes

First Century Manuscripts
Copyists were often paid according to the number of lines they produced. They would keep a record, on the document, of the number of lines copied and that would determine their pay. One interesting feature of Papyrus P46, according to researchers at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, is that the copyist of P46, in adding up his lines, counted more lines than he had actually done. It was apparently a common practice in those days for copyists to cheat a little bit, to get a little extra money. I guess some things never change. (Well, whoever copied out P46, God bless him anyway.)

P46 is the earliest complete manuscript we have that is relatively intact. It contains 10 of Paul's letters. It's comprised of 172 pages on 86 leaves. Thirty of the leaves belong to University of Michigan. They are available online, and you can see a small sampling of them right here in this book. If you want to see the other 56 leaves, you can view them in the Chester Beatty Library, on the grounds of the Dublin Castle Museum, in Dublin, Ireland where they are kept. It’s well worth the trip.

Keep in mind, these are Paul’s LETTERS to the CHURCH, to “the saints who faithfully follow Jesus,” as Paul writes in Ephesians 1v1, according to P46. Paul addressed the book of Ephesians to you and I. It was his personal letter, written toward the end of his life, to the church that was to come. Christians therefore SHOULD be able to freely view the manuscripts, because they are letters from Paul to US. The University of Michigan has rightfully stated documents, our earliest Bible manuscripts. My purpose herein is to bring them to you. that these manuscripts are in the public domain. In the same way that every American citizen should be able to view the actual U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, every Christian should be able to view OUR foundational

P46 was probably produced around the end of the first century of the Christian Era – at some time around AD 80 to 95. Not surprisingly, those dates are disputed by people who disparage and trivialize the Bible. More on that later. This book features more than 30 pages of photographs of p46 with translation.

We also have the Bodmer p66 manuscript. The Bodmer, made by a different copyist, probably a generation or two later than the Beatty, contains the first 14 chapters of the book of John. It is said to have been produced at some time in the early or middle second century.

Besides the Beatty 2, P46, the only other first century “manuscripts” that we have are, in actual fact, just tiny little pieces, each as small as a postage stamp—and we only have a couple of them.

These tiny "fragments" are, however, very important, because they provide strong evidence that the New Testament really was written down in the middle part of the first century, by first century men, the apostles. Papyrus 7Q5, according to leading paleographers, came from one of the earliest copies of the book of Mark. It is so old, (from AD50-60), that it did not come from a book but from a scroll. The apostles would all have still been alive when the scroll that it came from was produced. P64, the Magdalen Papyrus, is from around the year AD 68. It is actually comprised of just three little pieces of papyri. Given that both sides of the papyri have writing, it is obviously from a codex. It contains a few words from Matthew's Gospel.