446 
Paul actually wrote is found in II 
Cor. 1:17. The revisors of the Amer- 
ican Standard Version were undoubt- 
edly influenced by P* at this point and 
rendered the verse, ““Did I make my 
plans like a worldly man, ready to say 
Yes and No at once?” Except for 
three other pieces of scattered evi- 
dence, the whole mass of manuscripts, 
versions, and Church Fathers read, 
“Yes, yes and No, no.” 7! 
The third Chester Beatty papyrus of 
the New Testament, designated P*’, 
comprises 10 slightly mutilated leaves 
of a codex of the book of Revelation. 
Of the original book, estimated to have 
been 32 leaves in length, only the 
middle portion remains, containing 
the text of:9: 10-1722: 
As was mentioned above, these 
papyrus codices of parts of the New 
Testament are of exceptionally great 
importance, for they antedate the 
oldest vellum codices of the New 
Testament by about a century. Ex- 
pert paleographers date P*® and P*® 
early in the third century, and P* 
somewhat later in the third century. 
Thus, to make it very concrete, we 
have today a fairly complete copy of 
Paul’s letters to seven Churches written 
perhaps 140 years after the Apostle’s 
death. 
The question may be asked, How 
does the discovery of these three 
manuscripts modify our knowledge of 
the history of the transmission of the 
New Testament text? It may be said, 
first of all, that they emphatically con- 
firm the general soundness of the text 
of the Greek ‘Testament. They agree, 
by and large, with the text which the 
Church has always regarded as canoni- 
cal. ‘Their importance, moreover, is 
of the highest in shedding more light 
upon the vexing problems concerning 
the distribution and antiquity of 
21 Simultaneously with the publication of 
the Revised Standard Version, a Jesuit 
scholar in Madrid, José M. Bover, came to 
the same conclusion in his “El ‘SV y el ‘NO’: 
Un Caso Interesante de Crftica Textual,” 
Estudios Biblicos, segunda época, vol. 5, 
pp. 96-99, 1946. 
ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1948 
certain types of variant readings. 
The papyri do not support whole- 
heartedly any one of the previously 
isolated types of families of New 
Testament text. To use the termi- 
nology popularized by Westcott and 
Hort, the text of P** and P* is inter- 
mediate between the Neutral and 
Western families of text of the New 
Testament, standing somewhat closer 
on the whole to the former than to 
the latter. The most recent textual 
analyses, refining those made by the 
editor of the papyri, regard P* as 
belonging to a type of text current in 
the Fayyum-Gizeh region of Egypt 
and designate it the “‘pre-Caesarean” 
type of text.” With regard to P*® the 
Jatest scholarly opinion * holds that 
its text is to be classified in the sub- 
group of manuscripts which von Soden 
designated I**. The most exhaustive 
investigation of the textual affinities of 
P*’ reveals it to be quite closely related 
to codex Sinaiticus of the fourth 
century and to the ninth- or tenth- 
century minuscule 1841, both of which 
represent a type of text current at 
Alexandria. 
Four Other Small Fragments of Papyri 
In 1933 Yale University purchased 
a leaf of Egyptian papyrus which 
offers more than one intriguing prob- 
lem. The leaf, which has been as- 
22 See Tedfilo Ayuso’s thorough and pains- 
taking study ‘‘¢Texto Cesariense o Pre- 
cesariense?” Biblica, vol. 16, pp. 369-415, 
1935. For a recent survey of investigation 
dealing with the Caesarean text of the 
Gospels, reference may be made to my article 
on this subject, Journ. Biblical Lit., vol. 64, 
pp- 457-589, 1945. 
23 See José M. Bover, ed., Novi Testamenti 
Biblia Graeca et Latina, pp. xlix sq., Madrid, 
1943. 
24 José M. Bover, “;El] Cédice 1841 (=127) 
es el Mejor Representante del Apocalipsis?”’ 
Estudios Eclesiasticos, vol. 18, pp. 165-185, 
1944. For a summary and evaluation of the 
work done by the Hispanic scholars men- 
tioned in the last four footnotes, reference 
may be made to the present writer’s 
article in Journ. Biblical Lit., vol. 65, 
pp. 401-423, 1947, entitled ““Recent Spanish 
Contributions to the Textual Criticism of 
the New Testament,”’ which deals with about 
40 books and articles published since 1925. 
