Скачать или смотреть Papyrus P52. The Oldest Gospel Manuscript?

The Oldest Gospel Manuscript?
Papyrus P52 of the 2nd Century
Implication for the date of the Gospel of John
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The 18th and 19th centuries proved very productive for intelligent men inventing theories related to the origins of the New Testament Gospels. So, how did one tiny scrap of paper bring down a hundred years of scholarship?

The famous German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), heavily influenced scholars of this era. “Hegel saw history as a working out of opposing forces—thesis and antithesis—which interact and form a third force, known as the synthesis” (Wikipedia).

Although Hegel himself never employed this syllogism, others applied it in their analysis of historical data. German theologian, Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860), reasoned that Jewish Christianity was a thesis, Gentile Christianity an antithesis, and their synthesis was the Catholic Christianity taught in the Gospel of John.

Because there were no known copies of the Gospel of John from before the fourth century, Baur was able to propose that this fourth Gospel was edited by theologians around the year 170 in an effort to reconcile the followers of Saint Peter with those of Saint Paul.

Baur published this theory in the 1844 edition of the Theologishe Jahrbücher of the University of Tubingen. Since neither John himself nor other eyewitnesses could have write the fourth Gospel, it can be neither credible nor authoritative. This theory held sway amongst academics for the next century.

Consequently, thousands of pastors and millions of Christians abandoned their faith.

In 1920, papyrologists Bernard Grenfell and A. S. Hunt acquired in Egypt a hoard of papyrus fragments, which included some biblical materials in a variety of languages. In 1935, some 90 years after Baur’s published his theory of the date of John’s gospel, Colin H. Roberts published a transcription and a translation of one of those fragments conserved in the Rylands Library at the University of Manchester.

Collins identified the text of that fragment as a Greek copy of a passage of John’s Gospel. Next, he photographed the fragment and sent it to paleographers who found the writing to be similar to that of texts dated from the years 94 and 127 BCE.