448 
but as far as these few verses are con- 
cerned, their text agrees almost ex- 
actly with that of printed editions. 
With the exception of several variants 
which amount to no more than the 
difference between “‘honor” and “‘hon- 
our” or “theatre” and “theater,” the 
only significant variant which does not 
appear in any other witness is the 
probable omission in verse 37 of the 
Greek words meaning “for this cause.” 
This omission is almost certain, for if 
the two words involved in this variant 
had been originally present in the lost 
portion of the fragment, the number of 
letters in that line would be 38, 
whereas without them the number of 
letters is 30. The scribal omission (for 
thus it must be regarded) can be ac- 
counted for by supposing that the 
presence of the same two words in the 
preceding line confused the scribe who, 
overlooking the second occurrence of 
the phrase, copied only once what 
should have been copied twice (called 
technically, haplography). 
Although the extent of the verses 
preserved is so slight, in one respect 
this tiny scrap of papyrus possesses 
quite as much evidential value as 
would the complete codex. As Rob- 
inson Crusoe, seeing but a single foot- 
print in the sand, concluded that 
another human being, with two feet, 
was present on the island with him, 
so P®? proves the existence and use of 
the Fourth Gospel in a provincial 
town along the Nile, far from its tra- 
ditional place of composition (Ephesus 
in Asia Minor), during the first half of 
the second century. Had this little 
fragment been known during the 
middle of the past century, that school 
of New Testament criticism which 
was inspired by the brilliant Tubingen 
professor, Ferdinand Christian Baur, 
could not have dated the composition 
of the Fourth Gospel in about 160. 
In 1934 the University of Michigan 
acquired two leaves of a Greek papy- 
rus from a dealer in Cairo. One leaf 
contains Matt. 26:29-35, 36-40, and 
the other Acts 9:34-38; 9:40—-10:1. 
The editor, Henry A. Sanders, thinks 
ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1948 
it probable that the two leaves “‘were 
once parts of the same manuscript, 
which in that case perhaps contained 
the four Gospels and Acts” (as does 
P*).% The text is without any spe- 
cially noteworthy characteristics, be- 
ing, in the opinion of the editor, a 
typical third-century text of Egypt. 
The number assigned to it is P ®. 
Finally, to complete this list of all 
the Greek papyrus fragments of the 
New Testament which have been 
published since 1933, there is a fifth- 
or sixth-century leaf from Oxyrhyn- 
chus, acquired in 1928 by Robert 
Garrett, a banker of Baltimore, and 
containing some verses from the 
Epistle of James (2:16-18, 22-23, on 
one side, and 2:24-25; 3:2-4, on the 
other). The owner deposited the frag- 
ment in the Library of Princeton 
University where it was edited in 
1936 by Edmund H. Kase, Jr. As 
was mentioned above, this leaf has 
had the singular misfortune of having 
been assigned two different numbers, 
P% by von Dobschiitz and P™* by 
Eltester. 
Along with this confusion of num- 
bering, the fragment offers an inter- 
esting opportunity for detective work. 
A Greek numeral on each side of the 
leaf indicates that it was once pages 
29 and 30 of a codex. What pre- 
ceded it? Assuming that this codex 
contained the Catholic (or General) 
Epistles alone, the editor points out 
that ‘‘the fourteen missing leaves 
(pages 1-28) would have provided just 
enough space (making allowance for 
titles) for the three Johannine Epistles 
and the opening section of James 
(1:1-2:16),” but that “this space 
would be insufficient to accommo- 
date the two Epistles of Peter in addi- 
tion to the missing portion of James.” 
In other words, it is likely that this 
28 «A Third Century Papyrus of Matthew 
and Acts,” Quantulacumque, p. 151. Sand- 
ers recognizes that the small size of the leaf 
would require some 250 leaves for the four 
Gospels and 75 for Acts (ibid., p. 153). 
29 Papyri in the Princeton University Col- 
lections, vol. 2, pp. 1-3, Princeton, 1936. 
