Egerton Gospel

The Egerton Gospel (British Library Egerton Papyrus 2) refers to a collection of three papyrus fragments of a codex of a previously unknown gospel, found in Egypt and sold to the British Museum in 1934; the physical fragments are now dated to the very end of the 2nd century CE.

Throughout the 20th century the provenance of the Egerton fragments was kept anonymous, with the initial editors suggesting without proof that they came from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri.

[5] Colin Henderson Roberts reported seeing an account of the Passion of Jesus in Nahman's collection.

Other Biblical scholars urgently pursued this missing fragment, but Nahman's collection was sold off indiscriminately to many different European universities and private collectors.

[5]: 30–33 The surviving fragments include four stories: The latter story has no equivalent in canonical Gospels:[1][3] Jesus walked and stood on the bank of the Jordan river; he reached out his right hand, and filled it [...] And he sowed it on the [...] And then [...] water [...] and [...] before their eyes; and it brought forth fruit [...] many [...] for joy [...][1]The date of the manuscript is established through palaeography (the comparison of writing styles) alone.

[2] In this additional fragment a single use of a hooked apostrophe in between two consonants was observed, a practice that became standard in Greek punctuation at the beginning of the 3rd century; this sufficed to revise the date of the Egerton manuscript.

Porter proposes that, notwithstanding the discovery of the hooked apostrophe in P. Köln 255, the original editors' proposal of a mid second century date for the Egerton Papyrus accords better with the palaeographic evidence of dated comparator documentary and literary hands for both 𝔓52 and this papyrus "the middle of the second century, perhaps tending towards the early part of it".

On the other hand, suggestions that the Egerton Gospel served as a source for the authors of Mark and/or John also lack conclusive evidence.

The latest possible date would be early in the second century, shortly before the copy of the extant papyrus fragment was made.