Chester Beatty Papyri

(a list of New Testament manuscripts) 𝔓45, 𝔓46, and 𝔓47), and one consisting of portions of the Book of Enoch and an unidentified Christian homily.

Other theories have proposed that the collection was found near the Fayum instead of Aphroditopolis, or that the location was a Christian church or monastery instead of a graveyard.

[4] Most of the papyri were bought from a dealer by Alfred Chester Beatty, after whom the manuscripts are named, although some leaves and fragments were acquired by the University of Michigan and a few other collectors and institutions.

[2] All of the manuscripts are codices, which was surprising to the first scholars who examined the texts because it was believed that the papyrus codex was not extensively used by Christians until the 4th century.

[7]: 6 Since all but two (P. XI, XII) of the eleven manuscripts are dated before the 4th century, they present significant textual evidence for the Greek Bible as it existed in Egypt prior to the Diocletian persecutions, where Christian books are said to have been destroyed and a century or more earlier than the Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus.

[5]: 13 [6]: 1:901  Although some of the scholars who first studied the collection considered some of the New Testament manuscripts, especially P. Chester Beatty I (𝔓45) to be of the apparent Caesarean text-type, this has little support today.

The first, P. I, is labelled under the Gregory-Åland numbering system as 𝔓45, and was originally a codex of 110 leaves that contained the four canonical gospels and Acts.

[8]: 155 𝔓46 is the second New Testament manuscript in the Chester Beatty collection (P. II), and was a codex that contained the Pauline Epistles dated to c.

[8]: 204  What remains today of the manuscript is roughly 85 out of 104 leaves consisting of Romans chapters 5–6, 8–15, all of Hebrews, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, virtually all of 1–2 Corinthians and 1 Thessalonians 1–2, 5.

[8]: 335  This manuscript also dates to the 3rd century,[9] and Kenyon describes the handwriting as being "rather rough in character, thick in formation, and with no pretensions to calligraphy.

The last manuscript in the Chester Beatty Papyri, XII, contains chapters 97-107 of the Book of Enoch and portions of an unknown Christian homily attributed to Melito of Sardis.

Campbell Bonner of the University of Michigan published this manuscript in his 1937 The Last Chapters of Enoch in Greek and 1940 The Homily on the Passion by Melito Bishop of Sardis.