BIBLICAL ARCH/EOLOGY. New Testament—The contribution of archwology to the understanding of the New Testa ment has not been less but rather more than to that of the Old, since, while it has in deed come from various quarters, yet the largest element has proceeded from a source far less prolific in case of the one than of the other. It is the recent finds of Egyptian papyri that have cast the broadest light upon the life of the first Christian centuries, at least on the banks of the Nile, but the discovery and decipher ment of numerous inscriptions in other regions, especially in. Asia Minor,. have also cleared up many questions, while indeed starting many others.
The use of papyrus in writing is thought to date back nearly or quite 5,000 years, and the oldest preserved specimen, .about 4,500 years old, to be the copy of an original a mil lennium older. Such writing, though a govern ment monopoly till Alexander's conquest, was the constant occupation of numerous scribes. Papyrus rolls were of course very perishable, and it was Herculaneum that first, in 1752, yielded some charred ones written in Greek, which however were little valued. Twenty-six years later a roll discovered (along with 40 or 50 others) in an e,arthen pot, by Arabs in Egypt, was brought to Europe, where it excited small interest Forty-two years then passed before the Serapeum at Memphis yielded the mass of manuscripts of the 2d century B.c., which sup plied local color for Ebers' novels. The next year (1821) the so-called Bankes Homer (Book XXIV of the Iliad), purchased near Elephan tine, was brought to England; thenceforth the finds enriched more and more the treasury of the classics, and in 1839 the British Museum published 44 papyri. The recent period, marked by four great discoveries (in 1877, 1892, 1895, 1905-06) was opened, 1877, by enormous finds at Arsinoe, at first but little esteemed as non-literary fragments from Byzantine times; many others of the first three Christian centunes, better preserved and with interesting contents, were found in 1892 on the site of the neighboring village of Socnopaei Nesus. But already m 1890 the first great papyrus sensation had been fett in the dis covery of Aristotle's (Constitution of Athens,' supposed to be irrecoverably lost, written on the backs of four rolls (ledger of a small Egyptian farm, 78-79, A.D.), about 19 by 12 inches, a book, when translated, of 116 pages, startling by the strange light cast on the polit ico-legislative history of Athens. In 1891 ICen yon of die British Museum published a volume of 'Classical Texts from the Papyri,' includ ing seven mimes of Herodas (found in 1289), and the next decade witnessed a rivalry among museums in the purchase and publication of the long. neglected papyri, adding to the Gieek classics masterpieces of Hypereides, Bacchy lides and Timotheus, the (Persai' of the latter found at Abusir near Memphis (Weidemann, 1902) in a coffin with a corpse and dating from the 4th century a.c., being the oldest Greek manuscript book yet known. In 1892 Ed. Naville disclosed a whole library in a govern-, ment registration office at Thumuis in the Delta, but the charred rolls defied decipherment until 1915, when the editors of the Greek papyri in the John Rylancls library, Manchester, suc ceeded in making 80 of them legible in publica tion, thereby disclosing an ancient book-keeping comparable with the best of to-day. Still earlier (18&3-90) the illustrious W. M. Flinders Petrie had unwound extremely instructive papyri-manuscripts (of the 3d century ac.)
from the' faces of mummies in the Hawara cemetery. Trained by him (1894-95), B. P. Grenfell, with A. S. Hunt, began digging (1895) in the Fayum (sunken oasis, 30 miles across, 40 miles south-southwest of Cairo), and in 1897 at Oxyrhynchus (south, on the canal supplying the Fayum with water) in the heaps of rubbish that gird this town, like others of the East, they began the series of discoveries that have restored so vividly the life of the Fayum from Philadelphus (270 a.c.) to the 3d century A.D. (when irrigation ceased and the desert sand resumed its sway), and have con tributed no little to our comprehension of New Testament Greek. These remarlcable finds have been published, text and translation, in a stately series of 14 volumes entitled (Oxyrhynchus Papyri' (1898-1918). While the great mass of these and similar publications by the same and other scholars concerns only the private life of that time and clime (letters., accounts, re ceipts, deeds, tax-lists and the like), not a few contain verses of the Scriptures, particularly the New Testament. Of these, five date ap parently from the 3d century (90 verses), two others from the 3d or 4th century (33 verses), and very many from the 4th, 5th and 6th cen turies, while from the 7th comes a treasure in some ways still more remarkable, 20 fragments of a gospel lectionary, possibly a continuous text, written by three poor Christians not on papyrus but on much cheaper pottery. Such ostroka, long disregarded, are now carefully collected and studied, since the great work of U. Wilcken ((Greek Ostraca in Egypt and Nubia," 1899) and W. E. Crum ((Coptic Ostraca,' 1902) Altogether, the New Testament finds of recent years reach the imposing total of 28 New Testaments (17 on skin, 11 on papyrus), 14 parclunent manuscripts (listed by. C. R. Gregory, 1909), 20 papyrus manuscripts (Ken yon and Milligan, 1912-13), with countless frag ments in hopeless dismemberment, an array constantly _swollen by frequent additions. Chief among all, however, is the (Washi= Codex,' bought (19 Dec. 1906) with others* by Charles L Freer of Detroit from the Arab dealer Ali, in Gizeh, near Cairo, who got. (Sanders), or possibly from near Alclunim, it from some rumed monastery in the Delta prolific of manuscripts (Schmidt). Critically edited, with facsimile, by H. A. Sanders (1912), it takes its place beside the other three great manuscripts, Alexandrine (A), Vatican (B), Sinaitic (n), dating probably from the 4th century and bringing strong and unsuspected support to the illesteni* text of the New Testament, hitherto dfiefly represented by the almost outlawed Codex Brox (D). Almost as important is the palimpsest of the Gospels in Synac, discovered February 1892 by the twins, Mmes. Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Gib son, in Saint Catherine's Convent, Mount Sinai, overwriften (778) with lives of women saints. Mrs. Lewis, having detected the words Evangehon, Mathi, Luca, 'in the underwrit ing, guessed that it was the Syriac Gospels, a guess that Professor Bensly was the first to confirm on examining .the photographs made from it by the two sisters on Mount Sinai. The interesting question of the relative author ity of this ancient Syriac version compared with oldest known Greek text remains yet de bated and debatable. Five more recent visits of Mrs. Lewis to die Convent have resulted in various interesting finds, none comparable in importance with the first.