Papyrus P39: John 8:14–18 in a Greek Witness

Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt recovered the leaf during the 1905–1906 Oxyrhynchus excavations and published it in 1922 as P.Oxy. 1780. It was presented in 1924 to Crozer Theological Seminary, later held at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, and was long cited under Ambrose Swasey Library inventory 8864. The institution sold it at Sotheby's in 2003; it passed through the Ink & Blood exhibition and Green Collection before donation to Museum of the Bible in 2012. The current museum number is PAP.000116. This chain matters because older catalogs and the live record still name Rochester, while the museum catalog and recent object documentation establish the present custody. Excavation establishes Oxyrhynchus as the recovery site, not necessarily the place where the codex was copied.

The surviving strip measures about 25.6 by 8 centimeters; reconstruction suggests an original leaf near 26 by 16 centimeters. One column of twenty-five lines occupied each page. Pagination survives at the top, helping identify the object as a leaf from a paginated codex rather than a loose quotation. The script is a careful literary hand conventionally described as biblical majuscule, with controlled letter forms and standard Christian abbreviations. Because the right or left portion of almost every line is missing, editors restore substantial text from sequence and expected line length. The photographs therefore show both strong physical continuity and the difference between visible ink and bracketed reconstruction. Recto and verso together move continuously from Jesus' claim about valid testimony into the hearers' question, 'Where is thy Father?'

The customary third-century date is palaeographic. There is no dated colophon, associated coin, or radiocarbon result. Comparative study has supported a third-century center, while wider reassessments of literary hands allow overlap from the later second into the fourth century. The responsible formulation is therefore third century, with handwriting-based uncertainty rather than a precise year. That places the leaf among the early material witnesses to John and well before the major complete parchment Bibles. The codex format, pagination, and disciplined hand indicate deliberate book production, but the fragment does not reveal the scribe, patron, congregation, or full contents of the parent volume. Its modern movements also caution against treating an outdated shelfmark as permanent identity.