Oxyrhynchus

We have their rubbish.

In 1896, two young Oxford scholars, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, began digging into the ancient rubbish mounds of a town called Oxyrhynchus, about 160 kilometers south of Cairo.

The town was named after a fish, and in Roman times, it was a busy provincial center.

For centuries, its people had thrown their old paperwork onto the rubbish heaps at the edge of town.

Across 1800 years, the tantrum is perfectly recognizable.

It's easy to think of ancient people as figures in a textbook.

The rubbish of Oxyrhynchus reminds us that they were simply people.

They paid taxes, argued with neighbors, and had children who sulked.

Um, I have two websites.

I have my academic projects, um, on a site called symmachus.org, and that's where you'll find odd things like, you know, translations of, um, all the pottery shards at Oxyrhynchus, um, or, uh, analyses of all the boards of directors and the, the network there.

Uh, and then I have Industrial Linguistics, which is, uh, the website that I do my more commercially focused things like, uh, the accounting ops, uh, tool for accountants, um, and other, other things that you might use in, in business.

Amazing.

And then we have around about 200 fragments, and some of these consist of just a single word, but every one has been preserved.

And much of what we have may sound unusual, but is not so to classicist and papyrologists, is that most of this material we have comes from this massive collection we call the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, named after the location, Oxyrhynchus, in Egypt, where a huge collection of papyri was discovered in the 19th and 20th centuries.

And this collection were all random pieces of scraps of papyrus, and basically Oxyrhynchus was an ancient rubbish dump or rubbish tip, and these pieces were just thrown all together, discarded, and you might find receipts for a purchase.

You might find someone trying to work out their tax or, like, scraps of letters.

And within this, we find quotations from ancient authors as well, and Sappho is one of those.

Now, we had part of this poem in one fragment form prior to the 21st century, and that was called Fragment 58.

Then in 2004, some fragments from a collection we call the Cologne Papyrus Collection were published, and these are three new fragments.

And when these fragments were joined with the existing Fragment 58 from the Oxyrhynchus collection, a new poem was formed, Poem 58.

absolutely you can literally erase it by It's not as expensive as we might have thought because so much of it gets thrown away.

So we look to this place at Oxyrhynchus is its big name, but it's where we've discovered the most papyrus.

And it's a garbage dump.

And people's entire libraries got thrown out.

Quite so, that imprint.

So we have new fragments of ancient literature, particularly from Oxyrhynchus, where we have all these fragments published all the time.

And occasionally they provide something new and interesting about early Christianity.

So in 2024, there was a new Greek fragment which was published and is from the same place that the other Greek fragments of the Gospel of Mary came from.

So conservative scholars, they want to say, Well, just some background.

So we have three papyri, third century papyri of Thomas, all found in one fine spot in Oxyrhynchus, which is Middle Egypt.

And if you read conservative scholars, they want to say that, well, these papyri, they don't look like other biblical manuscripts, besides the fact that, you know, one of them was found right next to the Gospel of Matthew.

They don't, they're not written on parchment, or they look too sloppy to be biblical manuscripts, or the handwriting is not as good.

But again, when you look at the papyri in the third century, it's just as well attested as the Gospel of Matthew.

It's better attested than the Gospel of Mark.

It's just as likely that it was read in the churches of Oxyrhynchus, you know, so it's not, it seems to be less read beginning in the fourth century when people began to associate it with Manichaeanism.

But then again, that just proves that the Manichaeans were reading it.

And so we have a good number of papyrus fragments, mostly from Egypt.

So Oxyrhynchus in particular, a few other places that have little vignettes of Jesus.

He healed this leper or he had some sort of – dispute with a Pharisee over this or that issue, and they vaguely sound like something that you would find in Matthew or Luke, but they're not directly in the—they're clearly not the same.

They're not like a copy of it.

And that made the news.

Okay.

Oxyrhynchus – this is a papyrus, Oxyrhynchus 5575.

Oxyrhynchus findings do not make the national news typically, right? These are published in expensive monographs from – The Egyptian Exploration Society.

There's no doubt about it.

The Nag Hammadi documents, Oxyrhynchus, all the early documents, there's no discoveries of the name Trinity on anything for 200 or 300 years.

Mageto Mosaic, the oldest church ever discovered, the floor had an inscription, "Jesus is our God." Pliny in 110 says Jesus Christ is their God.

Never mentions a Trinity.

Now, why did it turn, why did it become Trinitarian and all the rest? That's another story.

But the early church was oneness, there's no doubt about it.

The Nag Hammadi documents, Oxyrhynchus, all the early documents, uh, the discoveries that are being made, there's no discoveries of Trinitarian, the name Trinity on anything for 2 or 300 years.

So, um, so John 1:1 is the beginning place.