64 F.EY. GEORGE MILLIGAX, D.D.^ OX THE GREEK PAPYRI. 



dated by year and month. To the historian it throws a sad 

 side-light on the social customs of the time. And even to the 

 Xew Testament student it, along with similar documents, 

 presents indirectly not a few points of great interest and 

 importance. Before, however, proceeding to these, let me 

 indicate some of the direct contributions which the new 

 discoveries have made to our knowledge of the sacred writers 

 and their times. 



Amongst these must be reckoned the recovery of a large 

 number of fragmentary texts of our Biblical writings, some of 

 wliich are older in point of date than any previously available. 

 This, in the Old Testament field, the famous Papyrus Xash, now 

 in the Library of Cambridge University, presents us with a 

 manuscript text of the Decalogue, which must have been 

 written five or six hundred years before the oldest Hebrew 

 manuscript now in our possession, and which, with certain 

 variations, in the main confirms the accuracy of the text we 

 find in our Hebrew Bibles. Similarly, when we pass to the 

 New Testament, we have now recovered fragmentary portions 

 of the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke belonging to the 

 end of the third century, and a papyrus roll containing a 

 considerable part of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which is 

 generally assigned to the early years of the fourth century. Of 

 much the same date is a leaf with the first seven verses of 

 Eomans, written in large rude uncial characters, which the 

 discoverers, Dr. Grenfell and Dr. Hunt, pronounced to be a 

 schoolboy's exercise. Dr. Deissmaun, however, in his Light 

 from the Ancient East (p. 232), adopts the view that the papyrus 

 really served as an amulet for the AureKus Paulus who is 

 named in the cursive writing beneath the Xew Testament 

 text. We know from other sources how widely the early 

 Christians used amulets as a protection against harm, and this 

 may well be an additional example of the practice. In any case 

 the simple and rude character of the writing is of interest as 

 showing how widelv bv this time the Xew Testament writincrs 

 had penetrated amongst all classes of the population. And in 

 this same connexion we may note in passing the recent recovery 

 of certain leaves of such small dimensions that they point to 

 the existence of pocket editions of various parts of the canonical 

 and uncanonical writings of the day. 



Amongst these uncanonical writings, special mention may be 

 made of the so-called Logia or Sayings of Jesus. In 1897, 

 Dr. Grenfell and Dr. Hunt discovered at Oxyrhynchus the leaf 

 of a papyrus-book containing eight Sayings, several of which 



