Talk:List of New Testament papyri

Format issues
First of all this is a good start, and I commend Alastair Haines for putting the legwork into inputting all the data into the table. I have two suggestions. I think we should remove "AD" from the column. It just makes the column wider and is unnecessary according to the WP:MoS Normally you should use plain numbers for years in the Anno Domini/Common Era, but when events span the start of the Anno Domini/Common Era, use AD or CE for the date at the end of the range (note that AD precedes the date and CE follows it). What it is saying is that numbers after year 1 do not require any era notation unless in a range of dates that begin in BC. And since all NT manuscripts were written after Jesus' death, it is probably clear to our readers that none of the dates are BC. The Manual of Style also suggests using "c." for circa for approximations. Maybe we could just note at the top of the date column that all dates are approximated/rounded so we don't have to write ~ or c. before every date. Also, I am a little concerned over the wikilinking the books of the bible. Normally, you should avoid over wikification, and linking the book everytime it is mentioned seems like overkill. In fact, I think we could do without any linking, because the column to to explain what portion of the manuscript survives, and the links don't tell us any more about the specific surviving portion, but instead are about the entire book. Just a couple thoughts.-Andrew c 18:21, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Andrew, I was in two minds about including AD. The only reason to include it was because people are unused to three digit years. At least I am! ;) Anyway, I'm happy to see it go. I love simplicity, just won't surrender it unless clarity isn't thrown out with the bathwater. As I said, I'm content. Explaining the "nearest 50 years" rule is great. :)
 * Also, I was going to explain the contents were only as specific as chapter. You have done this in a very neat and clear way, thank you! Great to have you at work on things!
 * Yes, I thought about linking the books or not. The main argument against was that it took so long to enter them! However, the point of linking every repeated entry in a sortable list imo is that people may sort on city, for example, to see manuscripts near their home, say. If they see that Thessalonians is in a university library 125 miles away, maybe they will click on the link to Thess to see what Wiki editors have said about the book. Instead of looking for the first instance of Thessalonians in the table, or trying to decipher the abbreviation they just click on the field in the record they are looking at.
 * I agree about not over-Wiki-ing, especially in the body of an article, and especially if different words are given the same link. Tables, by their nature are speedy reference systems, I like the idea of giving people just one click to follow up locating a record of interest.
 * One example of how I might use the table is to add a "Textual criticism" section to articles on NT books that don't have one already. I'd sort the table by the Contents field (I know it's not perfect), view the data relevant to a book and click through to it.
 * Another use is to check just what 1 Corinthians chapters 10-11 contain. That article actually has links to specific chapters. Some of us know what's in chapters, most won't. Though, admittedly, not all articles on NT books go to specifics on chapters, but maybe in time they will.
 * Now the work is done, it seems like a pity to lose it. Rest assured, I'm not going to be writing articles with every second word Wikified. ;) Alastair Haines 02:48, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Museo Egizio
The Wiki article is on the much more famous Egyptian Museum of Turin. That is why I didn't give a link. It also explains why I translated into English. It is more clear that it is a generic name -- Egyptian Museum, which exist in several cities in Italy. As it stands in Italian, it would appear to some readers that it refers to the Museo Egizio, which is not quite right. In fact, I couldn't be sure from my googling if the Papyrological Institute in Florence is actually a separate entity to the Egyptian Museum in that city. The two were refered to in close proximity, appearing almost synonymous in a couple of sites I checked.

I'll repeat my main argument for translating names of foreign institutions, once more. We are bound to be inconsistant if we don't translate, because we do not use the Arabic for the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (where Egyptian has a different meaning too, of course). We would run into serious transliteration issues with Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic etc., because there are no cannonical transliteration systems. Certainly there are multiple, widely used systems. Even the Egyptian Museum in Berlin is already not given in German, though we could render it more easily in ASCII. This is English language Wiki. It is not NA27, which is written for a universal audience. The "other languages" feature of Wiki is probably the place to use our knowledge of the autonyms of foreign institutions.

Love to hear your thoughts. Alastair Haines 02:56, 10 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Update. I just found the Italian Wiki article on the Egyptian Museum in Florence. If I've understood it correctly, the Papyrological Institute is indeed a sub-branch of the museum. It specializes in Coptic art and documents. I've linked to this Italian article, simply translating it into English would create a stub at English Wiki, which we could then link to from this table. I'll do that soon enough, unless you beat me to it, and be my guest in doing that! :) Alastair Haines 03:34, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Distribution based on content
What do editors think of the Distribution chart at the bottom? Do the parenthetical numbers work, or would it have been better to create a third column for the early numbers?-Andrew c 17:53, 26 June 2007 (UTC)


 * The above post is referring to this version. The current version is another option. After spending the time to make the table look 'prettier', I think the improvement in look is minimal, and the addition of the extra code is detrimental to readability in the edit window (assuming another editor wants to come along and update the table and isn't familiar with coding).-Andrew c 18:18, 26 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I like the newer version, the parentheses interupt the smooth look of the alternative text. It's a great table to give a neat summary of the data. It raises questions for my mathematical mind -- Luke and Acts are 28 chapters long. Colossians and Philippians only 4 chapters long. If all books were copied at the same rate and decayed at the same rate, what would the percentages look like? But the data you've gathered mean I can do those calculations on a spreadsheet. Your table provides verifiable information, which suggests trajectories for further thinking, without indulging in speculation. Thanks Andrew, it might also stimulate someone to research a little regarding popularity of particular New Testament books -- dates of inclusion in the canon, earliest dates of quotation in church fathers, ... John's gospel seems to have been fairly popular. I wonder why? ;) Cheers Alastair Haines 12:35, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

Sorry to be thick but which book is this table from? The ref says Aland(1996). There is no such book. Suspecting a typo ie Aland(1995), I checked p.85. Sure enough the table is there BUT the numbers are different eg Matthew 18 (7). Has there been an update I'm not aware of? TIA Mercury543210 (talk) 20:27, 7 September 2008 (UTC) PS The table is very useful.

I have updated the Distribution based on content section to provide more useful information. I retained the count for early manuscripts as well as total, while adding columns for the centuries to populate the Papyrus numbers. Many of these cannot be dated to a single century, so I used the colspan config to stretch these over the two possible centuries.ChickDaniels (talk) 17:56, 24 July 2019 (UTC)

A few suggestions
I love the table. I'd love to see links to on-line images; dates using centuries or ranges (with reference to e.g. NA27). I don't particularly like the 'Elite status' discussion in the opening - it is not particularly true for a start (Vaticanus and Sinaiticus still exert the dominant influence on edited NT texts); and it obscures the fact that the papyri come from II-VII - they are not all early (as is acknowledged now only at the end).

But you guys are obviously workign on this page so I haven't done any edits, except to delete the 'pending' papyrus which is not on papyrus. PeterMHead 11:29, 2 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Those are excellent recommendations for improvements Peter.
 * There are more online pictures of papyri now than there were when the page was created. Please join the team searching for them and posting them.
 * Wieland Willker has done a lot of work to make key resources for NT textual criticism available online, you can find some images there, and links to many more as well.
 * Just as a housekeeping thing, where Wiki has an article entry for a papyrus, that is the main place to have images. For P66, for example, the article can be quite extensive, and we really should have a link to an electronic copy of the Greek text at Wikisource too (I don't think we do yet). Comfort and Barrett have the Greek text for early papyri, though I'd be a little concerned about copyright if transcribing a large papyrus like P66. (Greek text ought to be public domain, but I'm not sure.)
 * For papyrus fragments that don't have articles, the number can be used as the location of a link to a picture.
 * Finally, I think your impression of how the lead could be refined is spot on. Just go ahead and make those changes, you don't need to ask permission. It's the "be bold" principle. If someone doesn't like a change that's made, it can be reverted and discussed.
 * Ideally, if you can source something (put in an inline reference to a book that says what you think should be said) please do that.
 * The mark up for references looks like this:
 * Alastair Haines (talk) 21:47, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

New papyri
It is time to complete List of NT papyri. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Leszek Jańczuk Leszek Jańczuk (talk) 09:51, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
 * p119	Oxyrhynchus 4803, John 1:21-28.33-44; 3th century, Oxford.
 * p120	Oxyrhynchus 4804, John 1:25-28.33-38.42-44; 4th century, Oxford.
 * p121	Oxyrhynchus 4805, John 19:17-18.25-26; 3th century, Oxford.
 * p122	Oxyrhynchus 4806, John 21:11-14.22-24; 4/5th century, Oxford.


 * Adding up to P124. Thanks for the heads up.-Andrew c [talk] 15:14, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Great Work
This is great stuff! - Ret.Prof (talk) 21:44, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Unicode for Papyrus Blackletter P
Seeing as Unicode has a 𝔓 character, and Biblical studies is certainly an area where Unicode support is required for polytonic diacritics, why use an image for the blackletter P when we could use 𝔓 instead?--Akhenaten0 (talk) 17:21, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree. What do people think about changing this? I might change it in all articles. --BurritoBazooka (talk) 23:49, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Choice of colors?
There is a lot of great information here, and I'd like to first thank the contributors for their hard work. But I do have a comment about the choice of the colors "beige" and "pink" to distinguish entries. As I assume you don't realize, about six percent of men are red-green colorblind and have difficulty distinguishing shades of these colors. As in happens, both of the colors chosen here look almost identical to me. Would it be possible for someone who is a little more Wiki-savvy than I am to choose a different color scheme here?

Thanks so much!

(And although I am the only one to note this, with over 6 billion people on this planet there are millions of colorbind men who will benefit from a simple change like this) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.112.204.86 (talk) 18:08, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

Table † symbol
Nowhere is the meaning of the † symbol explained. Presumably it carries meaning. Someone who knows might like to add a clarification. JohnHarris (talk) 09:20, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

External links modified
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Facelift to the NT papyri page
I have undertaken an update to this page to add page count, and most importantly links to hosting institutions where digital photos are available. This will both properly document everything and provide easy access to the primary sources. I am also going to supply correct separation of rows when needed, and correct numerous data errors where institution shelf numbers have changed, and so forth. It will take a few weeks, and I will update this message when finished.ChickDaniels (talk) 18:59, 18 August 2017 (UTC)

Work on this update is now complete, though I am still cleaning up some minor issues.ChickDaniels (talk) 20:11, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

External links modified
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Reference formatting consistency
The references for the various papyri--for example Papyrus 44 (Matthew 17:1-3, 6-7, 18:15-17, 19, 25:8-10; John 10:8-14)--uses a different format (comma separates verse and chapters) than the one on their respective Wiki pages (dot separates different verses of same chapter, semicolon separate chapters).

Aaronshenhao (talk) 07:43, 25 July 2020 (UTC)

Possible update
would P.Yale 1 inv. 419 make it to this list? FuzzyMagma (talk) 08:45, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

Just make a single table
I don't think there's any value in having the papyri broken into three tables like this. It makes the table less useful. I plan to combine them into a single table, so I'm inviting comment.Ordinary Person (talk) 05:44, 31 January 2024 (UTC)