The Egerton Gospel (Egerton Papyrus 2)

Every apocryphal gospel scholars usually discuss has some kind of paper trail: a title, a claimed author, at least a mention in an ancient heresy hunter's list of texts to avoid. Egerton Papyrus 2 has none of that. When the British Museum bought a handful of fragmentary papyrus leaves in 1934 and the papyrologists H. Idris Bell and T. C. Skeat published them the following year, they were publishing a gospel text that no surviving ancient source names, quotes, or refers to in any way. It became known, faute de mieux, as the Unknown Gospel, a name that describes the scholarship's ignorance rather than the text's own claims.

What survives reads like the canonical gospels without copying any of them: a controversy dialogue with religious authorities that echoes exchanges in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John without matching any one closely, a healing miracle, and sayings material with a similar flavor to Jesus's recorded speech elsewhere. Scholars disagree about whether its author knew the canonical gospels and paraphrased them freely, or drew on the same oral and written traditions those gospels themselves later drew on independently, a question the fragmentary state of the surviving text makes very hard to settle either way.

When Bell and Skeat first dated the Egerton Papyrus 2 fragments, they reasoned much as C. H. Roberts would when he dated Rylands P52 a few years later: comparing the handwriting to other Egyptian papyri whose dates were independently established. Their original estimate placed the writing in the first half of the second century, which would make Egerton Papyrus 2 a close contemporary of Rylands P52 and one of the very earliest physical witnesses to any gospel tradition, canonical or not, surviving from antiquity.

Later paleographic work has generally pulled that date later, closer to the end of the second century, part of a broader pattern in which early twentieth century papyrologists, working with a smaller comparison set of securely dated documents than scholars have today, tended to date distinctive-looking early Christian hands earlier than more recent analysis supports. The fragments remain genuinely old by any reasonable standard, among the oldest physical evidence for written gospel material anywhere, but the exact decades involved have moved as the comparative evidence base has grown, the same pattern of revision that reshaped confidence in Rylands P52's own famous early date.