Papyrus P1 of Matthew

Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt opened their first Oxyrhynchus campaign in January 1897 with workers excavating rubbish mounds outside the ancient city. During the first week they recovered the Matthew fragment among the mass of documentary and literary papyri preserved by Egypt's climate. It was published in the first Oxyrhynchus volume and distributed through the Egypt Exploration Fund to the University Museum in Philadelphia in 1901. Unlike many antiquities purchased without context, P1 has a documented excavation provenance, publication history, institutional number, and connection to the foundational Oxyrhynchus project.

The fragments are papyrus written in Greek ink on both sides, demonstrating that they came from a leaf of a codex rather than a one-sided sheet or continuous roll. Penn records dimensions of about 15 by 16.9 centimeters; CSNTM describes a single column with approximately twenty-five to twenty-seven lines. The surviving text is discontinuous because the leaf is broken, not because the scribe intentionally omitted whole genealogical sections. Page numerals alpha and beta are a particularly useful physical clue, placing the leaf at the very beginning of the manuscript's page sequence.

Palaeographic comparison assigns P1 to the third century, and Penn's catalogue gives AD 200-300. That range is based on handwriting rather than a dated colophon or archaeological layer precise to a decade. Oxyrhynchus was a major Greco-Roman Egyptian city whose rubbish mounds preserved administrative papers and literary books alike; the find therefore situates a Matthew codex within the documentary landscape of Roman Egypt. The codex format is significant for Christian book culture, but one fragment cannot reveal the size, ownership, liturgical use, or complete contents of the original volume.