Papyrus 1


Papyrus 1 designated by "", "ε 01 ", is an early copy of the New Testament in Greek. It is a papyrus manuscript of the Gospel of Matthew dating palaeographically to the early 3rd century. It is currently housed at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, and was discovered in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt.

Description

The manuscript is a fragment of one leaf, one column per page, 27-29 lines per page, roughly by. The original codex was arranged in two leaves in quire.
The surviving text of Matthew are verses 1:1-9,12 and 13,14-20. The words are written continuously without separation. Accents and breathings are absent, except two breathings which are a smooth breathing on fifth letter in line 14 of the verso and a rough breathing on the fourth letter to last letter in line 14 of the recto.
And the nomina sacra are written in abbreviated forms: "ΙϹ", "XC", "YC", "ΠΝΑ", "KΣ".

Text

The Greek text-type of this codex is a representative of the Alexandrian. Aland placed it in Category I.
According to scholars, has close agreement with Codex Vaticanus. It supports Vaticanus in 1:3 ζαρε. Ten of the variants are in the spelling of names in the genealogy. Herman C. Hoskier, who finds 17-20 word variations, denied close agreement with Vaticanus.

; Text according to Comfort
Verso
Recto
; Disagreement with Vaticanus

History

and Arthur Surridge Hunt discovered this papyrus at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, on the third or fourth day of excavation, January 13 or 14, 1897. Their findings were published in the first volume of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri in 1898. The manuscript was examined by Francis Crawford Burkitt, Herman C. Hoskier, Comfort and many other scholars.
Grenfell and Hunt collated its text against the Textus Receptus and against the text of Westcott-Hort. They found that the manuscript belongs to the same class as the Sinaiticus and Vaticanus codices, and has no Western or Byzantine proclivities. Usually it agrees with these two codices, where they are in agreement. Where they differ, the manuscript is near to Vaticanus, except in one important case, where it agrees with Sinaiticus.
It was the earliest known manuscript of the New Testament until the discovery of Papyrus 45.