Oxyrhynchus! It’s not something you use to wash your clothes!
It’s a place in Egypt where, a century ago, a huge load of ancient manuscripts were found. (This tends to happen in Egypt, where the desert climate better preserves documents written on papyrus, which has a nasty tendency to rot in wetter climes.)
A BUNCH OF STUFF WAS DISCOVERED AT OXYRHYNCHUS,
including some fragments of what later turned out to be the Gospel of Thomas (we got the full text from the Nag Hammadi find later on) and the Gospel of the Hebrews–both being apocryphal gospels that are not inspired and do not belong in the New Testament.
This much is common knowledge among folks with a passing familiarity with biblical archaeology.
But what many have been less familiar with is the fact that many of the Oxyrhynchus texts remained unread because they were simply illegible. In fact, 800 boxes of the things remained unread at Oxford.
NOW THEY’RE BEING READ.
A new technique using infra-red has enabled scholars to finally read the documents, and the results thus far have been stunning.
EXCERPTS:
The original papyrus documents, discovered in an ancient rubbish dump in central Egypt, are often meaningless to the naked eye – decayed, worm-eaten and blackened by the passage of time. But scientists using the new photographic technique, developed from satellite imaging, are bringing the original writing back into view. Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence. Some are even predicting a "second Renaissance".
The papyrus fragments were discovered in historic dumps outside the Graeco-Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus ("city of the sharp-nosed fish") in central Egypt at the end of the 19th century. Running to 400,000 fragments, stored in 800 boxes at Oxford’s Sackler Library, it is the biggest hoard of classical manuscripts in the world.
The previously unknown texts, read for the first time last week, include parts of a long-lost tragedy – the Epigonoi ("Progeny") by the 5th-century BC Greek playwright Sophocles; part of a lost novel by the 2nd-century Greek writer Lucian; unknown material by Euripides; mythological poetry by the 1st-century BC Greek poet Parthenios; work by the 7th-century BC poet Hesiod; and an epic poem by Archilochos, a 7th-century successor of Homer, describing events leading up to the Trojan War. Additional material from Hesiod, Euripides and Sophocles almost certainly await discovery
Now, as this story starts to break further into public consciousness, you’re going to hear a lot about the possibility of new gospels being discovered, and the secular media will do its part to try to suggest that any that are found are as early as possible, so as to make them rivals for the canonical gospels.
Take all this with a big spoonful of salt.
While it is theoretically possible that documents from the first century could be found, it is more likely that additional works from later than that would be found. These might be simply copies of Gnostic works we found at Nag Hammadi and be no big deal (despite media hype) or they might be new documents. In any event, it would take a good bit of time to figure out what their dates are, and the first dates proposed would likely turn out to be wrong.
It is possible that documents could be discovered that would contain accurate historical traditions of Jesus or the apostles, but the discovery of anything actually by them is unlikely (which is not to say that we mightn’t find things falsely attributed to them).
If we did discover, say, a new letter of Paul that looked authentic, it would set off a huge debate in the Christian community over what to do with it, but the odds of it being added to the New Testament (certainly in our lifetimes) would be remote.
What it might do, though, is prompt a lot of folks to realize how dependent on Tradition we are for the canon of Scripture–that it was Tradition that guided the early Church in identifying as authentic the manuscripts that we now have in the Bible. Any new document appearing to be authentic would lack a tradition of use in the churches and thus would not readily be added to the Scriptures of any group of Christians–except those already favorable to Gnostic texts out of an attraction to heterodoxy and novelty.
More later on what would happen if we found such a document. In the meantime,
GET THE STORY.
