Papyrus P104 (𝔓¹⁰⁴)

Reflection

Papyrus 𝔓¹⁰⁴ preserves the climax of one of Jesus's sharpest parables. The fragment on the recto contains Matthew 21:34-37 — the lord of the vineyard sending his servants, the tenants beating and killing them, the lord finally sending his son. The verso contains the conclusion: the kingdom of God will be taken from those tenants and given to a nation that produces its fruits.

The date assigned to 𝔓¹⁰⁴ is roughly AD 125 to 175. That places it within seventy-five to a hundred and twenty-five years of when Matthew wrote — closer to the autograph than almost any other manuscript witness to the Gospels. It rivals 𝔓⁵² (the Rylands John fragment) for the title of earliest surviving New Testament manuscript.

The fragment was published in 1997 as part of the long Oxyrhynchus papyrus series. The scribe wrote in a careful upright bookhand — the kind of hand used for serious literary works. The nomina sacra are present where the surviving text contains the relevant divine names. This is a Gospel being read seriously in a Christian community no later than the middle of the second century, while men and women still lived who had known the generation of the apostles.

For the believer today, 𝔓¹⁰⁴ is a witness to two things at once. It witnesses to the antiquity of the Gospel text — that what your Bible says Jesus said about the vineyard and its tenants is what mid-second-century Egyptian Christians read him saying. And it witnesses to the parable itself, which is a warning that has not become less urgent with time. The son the lord sent is the Son who came. The tenants who killed him are the tenants who killed him. The fruit the Father is still seeking is the fruit of repentance and faith. The text in this papyrus is the text in your Bible. The parable still preaches.