Papyrus P18: Revelation 1:4–7 in a Greek Witness

Grenfell and Hunt excavated the papyrus at Oxyrhynchus and published the two texts separately in 1911. The Egypt Exploration Fund presented the lot containing Papyri 2040–2075 to the British Museum in 1914; the fragment is now in the British Library as Papyrus 2053. Early cataloguing tended to imagine a reused roll: Exodus was written first along the fibres and Revelation later on the back. Brent Nongbri argued in 2013 that physical and textual features instead fit a codex whose leaves carried two different works, while Scott Charlesworth and Peter Malik have continued to test the construction. The modern history is therefore not merely discovery and storage; it includes a century of changing reconstruction. Complete digital coverage now permits readers to inspect both sides, but the exact original sequence and how the two texts came together remain interpretive questions.

Papyrus 2053 is a single framed fragment preserving one column on each side. The Exodus side has twenty-three lines in a sloping Severe Style hand and a closing title; the Revelation side has seventeen lines in a heavier upright semi-cursive hand with contracted sacred names. Fibre direction differs because one text runs with and the other against the fibres. The British Library's measurements are 151 by 98 millimeters. CSNTM estimates the lost Revelation column at about twenty-nine to thirty lines, showing that the extant seventeen lines are only part of the page or column. Different hands establish separate copying acts, but not automatically separate artifacts before reuse or binding. Readers should notice the material clues—fibre direction, margins, column position, hands, and colophon—because the scroll-versus-codex debate arises from those features rather than from the theological content of Exodus and Revelation.

The British Library catalogue assigns the third century; other handlists give the broader third-to-fourth-century range. Palaeography supplies both estimates, and the absence of a dated documentary text prevents a calendar precision. Revelation survives in far fewer early manuscripts than the Gospels or Paul, so even four verses matter for its textual history. Oxyrhynchus in this period contained Jewish, traditional Egyptian, Greco-Roman, and increasingly visible Christian textual cultures. A reused roll would show economical appropriation of an older Exodus manuscript for a Christian apocalypse. A codex reconstruction could instead place two scriptural works in a deliberately assembled but unusual book. Neither model should be chosen simply because it produces a more attractive story. Both agree that one physical papyrus bears Greek biblical texts copied by different hands.