THE NEW WORDS OF CHRIST.

Otago Witness, Issue 2268, 19 August 1897, Page 31

THE NEW WORDS OF CHRIST.

A cable message a few days ago stated that papyri had been discovered in the ruins of a town in the Libyan desert, containing some new layings of Christ. The Times, of May 29, gives the following particulars of the discovery :— One of the largest and most important finds of papyri in Egypt has been made during the last winter by Mr Bernard F. Grenfell and Mr A S. Hunt, cf Queen's College, Oxford, working on behalf of the Egyptian Exploration Fund at Behneia, the ancient Oxyrrhyncus. The site of the old town, which is one mile and a quarter long by half a mile broad, and is situated on the little explored edge of the western desert between Fayum and Minya ' had remained almost untouched by dealers and antiquity seekers, and offered to the excavators — what is in Upper Egypt now almost a thing of the past — a practically virgin field. Very few remains of buildings were discovered, the place having been long used as a quarry, both for stone and bricks ; but many of the ancient rubbish mounds yielded a rioh store of papyri, while in three mounds the quantity of rolls found together was large enough to warrant the assumption that part of the archives had been thrown there at different periods. The papyri range from the Roman conquest to early Arab times, each cantury being largely represented, and are for the most parb written in Greek, .with a sprinkling of Latin, Coptic, and Arabic. As the excavators had not time for deciphering, very little is yeb known of. their contents, bat Mr Greufell'a chief hope in digging the site of Oxyrrbyncus— the prospect of finding early Christian documents — would seem to have bean to some extent realised. Among the papyri discovered at the very beginning of the excavations was a leaf from a third century p&pyras book, apparently containing a collection of Logia, or sayings of Christ. Some of those found in the fragment are not in the Gospels, while others exhibit several divergences from the text of the parallel passages in the Gospels. The age, character, and value of these Logia are likely to be the subject of considerable speculation ; but there is no foundation for the entirely unauthorised and inaccurate reports connecting this discovery with the Logia which Papias states were collected by Sb. Matthew. It is hoped that when the papyri come to be examined in detail further discoveries of early Christian records will be made, as well as of fragments of lost classical literature, since in some of the mounds; notably tha earlier ones, an unusually large proportion of the papyri found were written in uncials. The cre»m of the collection, iv point of e_ize and condition consisting of 150 large and complete rolls, in many cases several feet long, has been retained by the Ghizeh Museum. The rest of the collection, of which the bulk is, of coarse, in a very fragmentary condition, is on its way to England, where the systematic examination and publication of it will be undertaken by Messrs Grenfell and Hunt. Besides pUpyri the excavators found a considerable nnmber of coins, about 200 inscribed ostraca. bronze and ivory ornaments, and other small objects of the Roman and Byzantine periods.