AND HISTORICAL EESEARCH UPON THK NEW TESTAMENT. 155 



■of John, besides remains of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, frag- 

 ments from Thucydides, and other classical writers. 



The most mteresting, probably, of all these finds was a leaf 

 ■of the Gospel of St. Matthew. This page of the Gospel 

 according to St. Matthew is so nearly identical with the 

 corresponding passage in the Greek of Westcott and Hort tliat 

 it took the keen eyes of Professor Eendel Harris to discover 

 the difference between them. He thinks that he can make 

 out an apostrophe on this page which is not found in the 

 Westcott and Hort text ! A copyist might try his hand on the 

 Greek of either of these texts, and he would prove himself 

 skilful if he succeeded in producing a copy as exact as one 

 of these is of the other. 



Dr. Winslow, Secretary of the Egyptian Exploration Fund, 

 says of tliis fragment — 



"Its date is fixed by some experts at 150 A.D., and by the 

 editors of the Society's publications at fifty or sixty years later." 



This fragment of the Gospel, a century and a half older than 

 our two oldest Greek MSS., the Tischendorf Sinaitic and the 

 Vatican, and evidently copied from the same older exemplar, is 

 of no small value, not only as a witness of the practically 

 correct Greek text as now presented by the latest criticism, 

 but as showing that the Gospel was not undergoing an 

 evolutionary process at that early date. 



Of the two pao'es of the Gospel of John, discovered at the 

 same place, Dr. Winslow says — 



" The fragment of St. John's Gospel forms an important portion, 

 small though it be, of a book of about fifty pages containing that 

 Gospel, dating about 200. We have St. John i, 23-41, except that 

 verse thirty-two is wanting : also St. John xxi, 11-25, except that 

 verse eighteen is missing. . . . The papyrus belongs to the 

 same class with the Vatican and Sinaitic codices." 



vi. The Eefutation of All Heresies. 



The last document to which attention will be directed 

 was discovered long before those which have been mentioned, 

 but as it gives in some ways a more comprehensive view of the 

 early history of the whole New Testament than any of them, it 

 may well take its place at the conclusion of our survey of 

 documents which archaeology has caused to shed light on this 

 wonderful Book. 



In 1842, M. Villemain, Minister of Public Instruction under 

 Louis Philippe, sent Minoides Mynas, a Greek scholar, to search 



