Papyrus P104 of Matthew

The fragment belongs to the enormous Oxyrhynchus corpus recovered by Grenfell, Hunt, and later Egypt Exploration Society work from the city's rubbish mounds. It was not fully published until volume LXIV of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri in 1997, when J. David Thomas edited it as number 4404. It remains in Oxford's papyrology collections and has been imaged through the Oxford Imaging Papyri Project. The long interval between excavation, identification, publication, and digitization is typical of a collection containing hundreds of thousands of fragments awaiting conservation and specialist reading.

P104 is a very small, broken piece of papyrus from a codex leaf, roughly seven by five centimeters in published descriptions. Greek letters survive in a single column; projected line count is about thirty-one. One side is substantially clearer, while the reverse is rubbed so heavily that many proposed letters require dots of uncertainty in an edition. Writing on both sides establishes codex form. Its physical smallness is decisive for interpretation: line-length reconstruction can test possible sequences, but tiny margins and lost fibers leave too little evidence for confident claims about every intervening verse.

The first editor compared the handwriting with other early literary hands and proposed the later second century. CSNTM uses the broader label '2nd Century,' while Roger Bagnall places P104 within a cluster whose comparative scripts often span the late second and early third centuries. Palaeography normally supplies ranges, not exact years, especially for literary hands without securely dated close parallels. The fragment nevertheless belongs among the earliest surviving copies of Matthew. That importance should sharpen, not relax, caution about using an early date to make population, canon, or textual-stability claims from one leaf.