The Egerton Gospel (British Library Egerton Papyrus 2) refers to a group of fragments of a codex of a previously unknown gospel, found in Egypt and sold to the British Museum in 1934 and now dated to the very end of the 2nd century AD. It is one of the oldest known fragments of any gospel. The B.M. lost no time in publishing it: acquired in the summer of 1934, it was in print in 1935.

Dating the manuscript

The date of the fragment is established on paleography alone. It is rivaled in age only by the John Rylands Library fragment of the Gospel of John. Later, when an additional piece of the same manuscript was identified in Cologne and published in 1987— it fit on the bottom of one of the Egerton pages— a single use of an apostrophe in the Cologne fragment sufficed to revise the date of the manuscript. The apostrophe was not normally added to Greek punctuation until the 3rd century. This adjustment shows to the general reader that dating a Greek manuscript to within a generation on the basis of handwriting alone is on very shaky ground. See entry at Gospel of John for details of the Rylands fragment and contrast the optimistic early dating of the fragment of John.

Why have so few heard of the Egerton Gospel when there are almost a hundred published references to it? One reason is that it is incomplete, a mere fragment. Another reason that the Egerton Gospel is not more familiar to readers of the New Testament is that it does not bear a clear relationship to any of the four canonical gospels, as Helmut Koester and J. D. Crossan have argued. The disquieting presence of the Egerton Gospel has been widely ignored, outside a small circle of specialized scholars. The work cannot be dismissed as "apocrypha" or "heretical" without compromising the orthodoxy of the Gospel of John. Nor as "gnostic" and therefore marginal. It seems to be almost independent of the synoptic gospels and to represent a tradition similar to the canonical John, but independent of it. Additionally it tells us an otherwise unknown miracle, in the Johannine manner.

Date of composition

Jon B. Daniels writes the following in his introduction in The Complete Gospels:

"On the one hand, some scholars have maintained that Egerton's unknown author composed by borrowing from the canonical gospels. This solution has not proved satisfactory for several reasons: The Egerton Gospel's parallels to the synoptic gospels lack editorial language peculiar to the synoptic authors, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. They also lack features that are common to the synoptic gospels, a difficult fact to explain if those gospels were Egerton's source.

On the other hand, suggestions that the Egerton Gospel served as a souce for the authors of Mark and/or John also lack conclusive evidence. The most likely explanation for the Egerton Gospel's similarities and differences from the canonical gospels is that Egerton's author made independent use of traditional sayings and stories of Jesus that also were used by the other gospel writers."

Ronald Cameron states: "Since Papyrus Egerton 2 displays no dependence upon the gospels of the New Testament, its earliest possible date of composition would be sometime in the middle of the first century, when the sayings and stories which underlie the New Testament first began to be produced in written form. The latest possible date would be early in the second century, shortly before the copy of the extant papyrus fragment was made. Because this papyrus presents traditions in a less developed form than John does, it was probably composed in the second half of the first century, in Syria, shortly before the Gospel of John was written."

Reference

• Ronald Cameron, The Other Gospels, 1982

External links

• The PAPYRUS EGERTON 2 Homepage Detailed description of the manuscript, with many images. Greek and English text and reconstruction.
• Early Christian Writings website: text, commentary, links.

See also Apocrypha