PAPYRI AND OSTRACA

together. Grenfell and Hunt have carried out splendid excavations at Oxyrhynchus and other places, and have published their treasures with a rapidity and accuracy that place them in the front rank of editors, as the world of scholarship acknowledges. Besides these there are many other editors, and every year adds to the army of workers on the texts; pliilologists and historians, lawyers and theologians, all have found and are finding abundant work. The young and hopeful science has found a centre in the Archil) filr Papyrustorschung, a journal edited by the leading German papyrologist, Ulrich Wilcken.

The papyri fall into two great classes according to the nature of their contents, viz. literary texts and non-literary texts.

Literary texts have come to light in large numbers, though generally only in fragments. They comprise not only very ancient liISS of well-known authors, but also a large number of lost authors; and lost writings by known authors have been partially recovered. These finds would suffice to show the extreme importance of the papyrus discoveries. And many scholars have con-sidered these Uterary finds to be the most valuable.

But for scholarship as a whole the second group, the non-Uterary texts, is no doubt the more important. As regards their contents, they are as varied as life itself. Legal documents of the most various kinds, e.g. leases, accounts and receipts, contracts of marriage and divorce, wills, denunciations, notes of trials, and tax-papers, are there in innumerable examples; more-over, there are letters and notes, schoolboys' exercise-books, horoscopes, diaries, petitions, etc. Their value lies in the inimitable fidelity with which they reflect the actual Ufe of ancient society, especially in its middle and lower strata.

The oldest papyri date from c. B.C. 2600, and are among the most precious Egyptological records. To the Sth cent. b.c. belong the Aramaic papyri from Assuan, pubUshed by Sayce and Cowley in 1906, and those from Elephantine, published by Sachau in 1907— documents that have furnished astonishing information relative to the history of Judaism. In the 4th cent. b.c. the main stream, as it were, begins, consisting of Greek papyri, and extending from the time of the Ptolemys till the first centuries of the Arab occupation, i.e. over a period of more than 1000 years. Associated with them there are Latin, Coptic, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and other papyri — so that, taken all together, they confer an immense benefit, and at the same time impose an immense obUgation, upon the science of antiquity.

What is the importance of the papyri to Biblical science? It is twofold. In the first place, they increase our stock of BibUcal MSS in a most gratifying manner; and secondly, they place new sources at the disposal of the philological student of the Greek Bible.

Beginning then with Biblical MSS, and first of all MSS of the Hebrew Bible, we have in the Nash Papyrus a very ancient copy of the Ten Commandments. As regards the Greek Old Testament, we have numerous Septuagint fragments (.e.g. the Leipzig fragments of the Psalms, the Heidelberg fragments of the Minor Prophets), together with isolated remains of other translations. For the New Testament we possess an equally fine series of ancient fragments. But besides these we have acquired quite new material, in particular the various remains of lost Gospels and two papyrus fragments and one vellum fragment with sayings of Jesus, some of which are not to be found in the NT. Of course with such finds as these it is always a question how far they contain ancient and genuine material; and the opinions of specialists, e.g. with regard to these sayings of Jesus, are at variance. But in any case, even if, as is not at all likely, they should prove to be of quite secondary importance as regards the history of Jesus, they would be valuable documents

PAPYRI AND OSTRACA

in the history of Christianity. Quite a number of the papyri throw fresh light on early Christianity as a whole. Fragments of the Fathers, Apocryphal and Gnostic writings, liturgical texts, homiietic fragments, remains of early Christian poetry, have been recovered in large numbers, both in Greek and Coptic. But to these must be added the large number of non-literary documents, both Jewish and Early Christian, which are to be reckoned among the oldest reUcs of our re-ligion. From the time of the persecution of the Christians under the Emperor Decius, we possess, for example, no fewer than five libelli issued to libdlatid, i.e. official certificates by the authorities responsible for the pagan sacrifices, that the holder of the papyrus had performed the prescribed sacrifices. To the time of the Diocletian persecution belongs probably the letter of Psenosiris, a Christian presbyter in the Great Oasis, relating to a banished Christian woman named Poll tike. Then comes a long series of other early Christian original letters in Greek and Coptic, from the 3rd cent, until late in the Byzantine period. Centuries that had long been supposed to be knowable only from the folios of Fathers of the Church are made to live again by these original documents — documents of whose complete naivete and singleness of purpose there can be no doubt.

The direct value of the papyri to Bible scholarship and ecclesiastical history is thus very considerable. Less obvious, however, but none the less great, is the indirect value of the papyri, and chiefly the non-literary documents of private life.

This value is discoverable in two directions. The papyri, as sources of popular, non-Uterary Late Greek, have placed the Unguistic investigation of the Greek Bible on new foundations; and, as autograph memorials of the men of the ancient world from the age of the great reUgious revolution, they enable us better to understand these men — the public to whom the great world-mission of Primitive Christianity was addressed.

As regards the first, the philological value of the papyri, these new texts have caused more and more the rejection of the old prejudice that the Greek Bible (OT and NT) represents a linguistic entity clearly determinable by scholarship. On the contrary, the habit has arisen more and more of bringing 'BibUcal' or 'New Testament' Greek into relation with popular Late Greek, and it has come to be reaUzed that the Greek Bible is itself the grandest monument of that popular language.

The clearest distinctive features of a Uvlng language faU within the province of phonology and accidence. And in the phonology and accidence we see most readily that the assumption of a 'BibUcal' Greek, capable of being isolated from other Greek for purposes of study, was wrong. The hundreds of morphological details that strike the philologist accustomed only to classical Attic, when he begins to read the Greek Bible, are found also in the contemporary records of the 'profane' popular language, especiaUy in the papyri and ostraca. The recent Grammars of the NT by Winer-Schmiedel, Blass, and James Hope Moulton, have furnished an extremely copious coUection of parallel phenomena. Helbing's Grammar of the Greek Old Testament (Septua-gint) does the same. The Septuagint was produced in Egypt, and naturally employed the language of its surroundings; the Egyptian papyri are therefore magnificent as paraUel texts, especiaUy as we possess a great abundance of texts from the Ptolemaic period, i.e. the time when the Septuagint itself originated. The correspondence between them goes so far that Mayser's Grammar of the Greek Papyri of the Ptolemaic Period might in many particulars be used as a Septuagint Grammar.

Questions of BibUcal orthography, which seem un-important to the layman, but cause much worry to an editor of the BibUcal text, are of course iUumined by the contemporary papyri. The matter is not unimportant

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