Papyrus P77 (𝔓⁷⁷)

Reflection

Papyrus 𝔓⁷⁷ preserves the woes Jesus pronounced on the scribes and Pharisees and the lament he raised over Jerusalem — Matthew 23:30-39. The fragment was found at Oxyrhynchus, published in 1968, and then enlarged in 1997 when a second piece from the same codex was identified among the still-unpublished Oxyrhynchus material at Oxford.

The date is late second or early third century AD — within about a hundred and twenty years of when Matthew wrote. The text-type is Alexandrian, the family that gives us our cleanest readings. The hand is careful, formed for reading aloud in a congregation. The nomina sacra are present.

What the fragment preserves is one of the most weighted passages in Matthew. "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those sent to her — how often I wanted to gather your children as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing." Those are the words on 𝔓⁷⁷, written by an Egyptian scribe perhaps a hundred and forty years after Jesus spoke them outside the temple. The fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 was already history when the scribe copied this line. The lament had become testimony.

For the believer today, 𝔓⁷⁷ is a witness to the sober realism of the Gospels. Matthew did not soften the warnings of Jesus. The scribes who copied his Gospel in the second and third centuries did not edit them out. The Lord's tears over Jerusalem and his judgment on hypocrisy stand in the earliest manuscripts as they stand in your Bible. The text held. The warning still applies. And the Christ who wept over the city that killed him is the Christ who died for that city, and for ours, and rose. The gospel in 𝔓⁷⁷ is the gospel still preached.