Sacred Hands
Greek Gospel of Matthew
This papyrus preserves one leaf from a codex, damaged on all sides. The front of the papyrus (shown here) contains Matthew 26:19-37, detailing the Lord's supper. The back contains Matthew 26:37-52. The handwriting is a regular but not very elegant cursive. It is the work of somebody used to writing, but not of a
professional scribe of literary texts. At a later moment somebody added diagonal dashes to the text, possible reading marks for reading in church.
The text is revealing for the early manuscript tradition of the Gospel of Matthew in that it provides a number of readings not known from later traditions. A remarkable scribal mistake is clearly visible in line 12 from above, where the scribe first wrote "he called [the bread]," but then crossed this out and added the correct "he broke [the bread]" above the line. (In Greek, the difference between these verbs is not that big: EKALESEN and EKLASEN.)
Purchased in Egypt in 1924.