Monday, July 23, 2007

P 46 Index

This is taken directly off the blog of Brandon Wason, Novum Testamentum Blog . He has moved his blog and I can't access this page any more by the usual method, so I have pulled this out of cache and reposted it so it doesn't get lost. I hope that's okay. Thanks for all your work, Brandon.

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A New Way to Access Michigan's P46 Images



P46 is without question one of the most important manuscripts for New Testament studies, and arguably the most important text of the Pauline Corpus. The manuscript itself was comprised of 104 leaves strung together into a codex. Today 86 of those original 104 leaves are extant and housed in both Michigan and Dublin. The reason for its importance is that it is the earliest extant collection of Paul's letters. The usual date ascribed to it is 200 C.E., though Aland notes that there is leeway on either side (Text 87). The order of the contents of P46 is as follows: Romans, Hebrews, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, and 2 Thessalonians. The Pastoral Epistles, in their present form, were not contained in P46 as there was not enough space on the remanding leaves for them to have been included. Most scholars claim that 2 Thessalonians was counted, despite the fact that it has not been preserved over the centuries. Parts of Romans and 1 Thessalonians are also missing. 1 Thessalonians, if I recall correctly, does not contain an alpha in the title, thus some have argued that 2 Thessalonians was never included because the collater of P46 only knew 1 Thessalonians as Paul's only letter to that group. Another issue with P46 is how it handles the doxology in Romans by placing it after Romans 15:33 and before chapter 16. P46 is generally categorized as belonging to (or preceding) the Alexandrian text-type, though there are some Western qualities about it.

As I mentioned above, part of P46 resides in Michigan at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. They possess thirty of the 86 leaves, which they have made availabe on their website (which I blogged about in August). I often refer to the APIS (The Advanced Papyrological Information System at U Michigan) website to look at the very detailed images of P46, yet their system is often very difficult to navigate. I finally took the time to list the contents of each of the leaves (front and back, thus sixty images) and link to them individually, which is what I have below:

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