 106. Meditation |
Among the first papyrus fragments published in 1897 by the excavators, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt, was a small leaf measuring 5 2/3 by 3 1/3 inches. Numbered POxy 1, the fragment is a single leaf from a papyrus codex. Its Greek text, dated by the style of writing to around 200C.E., is part of a series of sayings of Jesus. Grenfell and Hunt later published two other similar fragments from this find, POxy 654 and POxy655. The former is a single fragment from a papyrus roll. The latter is actually six fragments from another roll, preserved at Harvard University's Houghton Library. Both, like POxy 1, were recognized as the fragmentary remains of a collection of Jesus' sayings written in Greek. Grenfell and Hunt referred to them simply as "Sayings of Jesus."
Though discussed from time to time by interested scholars, the full significance of these fragments for the history of early Christianity was not realized until the 1950s, after the publication of the Coptic version of the Gospel of Thomas. It was the French scholar Henri-Charles Puech who made the connection that would pull these ancient fragments back into the limelight. Puech noticed that the sayings of Fragment 654 actually corresponded to the Prologue and first seven sayings of the newly discovered Coptic Gospel of Thomas, the six sayings of Fragment 1 to Thomas 28-33, and the fragmentary sayings of 655 to Thomas 37-40. It had been suspected that perhaps Fragments 1 and 654 represented two parts of the same text, but this had not previously been suggested for 655. After studying the Coptic version of Thomas in Nag Hammadi Codex II, Puech could argue that all three fragments were witnesses to the original Greek text of the Gospel of Thomas. The newly discovered Gospel of Thomas was not really so new after all; at least parts of it, in its original language, had been available since the turn of the century.
Today, the Coptic version of Thomas, together with the Greek fragments, provide us with the only surviving exemplars of this important early Christian document.
