List of New Testament papyri

A New Testament papyrus is a copy of a portion of the New Testament made on papyrus. To date, over 120 such papyri are known. In general, they are considered the earliest witnesses to the original text of the New Testament.

Contents

• List of all registered New Testament papyri
• Distribution based on content
• References

This elite status among New Testament manuscripts only began in the 20th century. The grouping was first introduced by Caspar René Gregory, who assigned papyri texts the Blackletter character P followed by a superscript number. This number refers not to the age of the papyrus, but to the order in which it was registered. Before 1900, only 9 papyri manuscripts were known, and only one had been cited in a critical apparatus ( P ¹¹ by Constantin von Tischendorf). These 9 papyri were just single fragments, except for P ¹⁵, which consisted of a single whole leaf. The discoveries of the twentieth century brought about the earliest known New Testament manuscript fragments. Kenyon in 1912 knew 14 papyri, Aland in his first edition of Kurzgefasste... in 1963 enumerated 76 papyri, in 1989 were known 96 papyri, and in 2008 124 papyri. As of 2015, a total of 131 papyri are known.

The most important papyri are P ⁴⁵ (the Chester-Beatty papyrus), which contains the Gospels; P ⁴⁶, which contains the letters of Paul; and P ⁴⁷, which contains the Revelation of John. All of these date from sometime in the third century.

Discoveries were also made of more complete manuscripts, which allowed scholars to examine the textual character of these early manuscripts.

Not all of the manuscripts are simply New Testament texts: P ⁵⁹, P ⁶⁰, P ⁶³, P ⁸⁰ are texts with commentaries; P ², P ³, and P ⁴⁴ are lectionaries; P ⁵⁰, P ⁵⁵, and P ⁷⁸ are talismans; and P ⁴², P ¹⁰, P ¹², P ⁴², P ⁴³, P ⁶², and P ⁹⁹ belong to other miscellaneous texts, such as writing scraps, glossaries, or songs.

Every papyrus is cited in Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece.