P46 (Papyrus Chester Beatty II / University of Michigan inv. 6238) is a single-quire papyrus codex that originally contained roughly 104 leaves and now preserves 86. It was acquired in two batches in 1930-1931 — thirty leaves bought by Alfred Chester Beatty in Cairo, fifty-six purchased shortly afterward by the University of Michigan — almost certainly from the same find at the Egyptian Fayum. Frederic Kenyon published the editio princeps in 1936-1937. The codex has been dated paleographically to around AD 200, with some scholars arguing for a slightly earlier date in the late 2nd century. The surviving leaves contain Romans (with the doxology of 16:25-27 included after chapter 15), Hebrews (placed second, immediately after Romans), 1-2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, and 1 Thessalonians, in that order. The original codex would have continued with 2 Thessalonians and then ended; the missing leaves at the beginning and end may have contained additional material, perhaps the Pastoral Epistles, but the page-counting strongly suggests they did not — the codex was designed for a Pauline corpus that excluded 1-2 Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, an intriguing hint about the corpus order in early Egypt. P46 is the earliest substantial copy of Paul's letters by roughly a century. Its placement of Hebrews directly after Romans is the earliest known witness to that ordering, which became standard in some Eastern traditions. The text is overall close to the early Alexandrian tradition of Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, with occasional independent readings. Eleven leaves are at the University of Michigan; the rest are at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. Sources: Frederic G. Kenyon, The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri III: Pauline Epistles (1934-1937); Philip W. Comfort and David P. Barrett, The Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts (2001); James Royse, Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri (2008); Edgar B. Ebojo, "A Scribe and His Manuscript: An Investigation into the Scribal Habits of P46" (Birmingham PhD diss., 2014).
Demonstrates the Pauline corpus circulating as a coherent collection within ~150 years of Paul's death. The text matches later manuscripts very closely, evidence of careful transmission from the start.