Rylands Library Papyrus P52

Papyrus 𝔓⁵²

New Testament manuscript
Rylands Greek P 457, The St John Fragment , On display in the Rylands Gallery at John Rylands Library in Manchester, England
Text	John 18:31–33, 18:37–38
Date	125–175[1]
Script	Greek
Found	Egypt
Now at	John Rylands University Library
Cite	C. H. Roberts, An Unpublished Fragment of the Fourth Gospel in the John Rylands Library from the Bible (Manchester University Press, 1935)
Size	8.9 by 6 centimetres (3.5 in × 2.4 in)
Type	not ascertainable
Category	I

The Rylands Library Papyrus P52, also known as the St John's fragment and with an accession reference of Papyrus Rylands Greek 457, is a fragment from a papyrus codex, measuring only 3.5 by 2.5 inches (8.9 cm × 6.4 cm) at its widest (about the size of a credit card), and conserved with the Rylands Papyri at the John Rylands University Library Manchester, UK. The front (recto) contains parts of seven lines from the Gospel of John 18:31–33, in Greek, and the back (verso) contains parts of seven lines from verses 37–38.^[2] Since 2007, the papyrus has been on permanent display in the library's Deansgate building.

Although Rylands 𝔓⁵² is generally accepted as the earliest extant record of a canonical New Testament text, the dating of the papyrus is by no means the subject of consensus among scholars. The original editor proposed a date range of 100–150 CE,^[3] while a recent exercise by Pasquale Orsini and Willy Clarysse, aiming to generate consistent revised date estimates for all New Testament papyri written before the mid-4th century, has proposed a date for 𝔓⁵² of 125–175 CE.^[1] A few scholars say that considering the difficulty of fixing the date of a fragment based solely on paleographic evidence allows the possibility of dates outside these range estimates, such that "any serious consideration of the window of possible dates for P52 must include dates in the later second and early third centuries."^[4]

The fragment of papyrus was among a group acquired on the Egyptian market in 1920 by Bernard Grenfell, who chose several fragments for the Rylands Library and began work on preparing them for publication before becoming too ill to complete the task. Colin H. Roberts later continued this work and published the first transcription and translation of the fragment in 1935.^[5] Roberts found comparator hands in dated papyrus documents between the late 1st and mid 2nd centuries, with the largest concentration of Hadrianic date (117 CE to 138 CE). Since this gospel text would be unlikely to have reached Egypt before c. 100 CE, he proposed a date in the first half of the 2nd century. Roberts proposed the closest match to 𝔓⁵² as being an undated papyrus of the Iliad conserved in Berlin;^[6] and in the 70 years since Roberts's essay the estimated date of this primary comparator hand has been confirmed as being around 100 CE,^[7] but other dated comparator hands have also since been suggested, with dates ranging into the second half of the 2nd century, and even into the 3rd century.^[8]