The Gospels and the professor
Sir: One or two of your corre- spondents refer to the papyrus manuscripts as though they were all negligible fragments. But some of them are quite extensive; one, dated about AD 200, contains eighty-six pages out of an original 104 (Papyrus 46, St Paul's letters). And it is significant that even in cases where only a page of a papyrus Ms survives, it agrees with 'our' New Testament.
All this talk (by your reviewer) of two hundred years of altering, expanding, deforming etc is pure fantasy and is contrary to the evidence.
I have before me as I write a complete transcription of one of the Bodmer papyri; it is known as P.66 and it comes from about the year 200. It contains the first four- teen chapters of St John's Gospel, almost in their entirety; and it has fragments of all the remaining seven chapters. This papyrus sis of over 100 pages agrees with the Fourth Gospel as we know it today. It is not a small oddment, nor is it fairly described as incoherent or inconclusive, T. Francis Glasson New Testament Lecturer, New Col- lege, University of London
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