Papyrus P44: Matthew 25:8–10 in a Greek Witness

The Metropolitan Museum's Egyptian Expedition excavated the Monastery of Epiphanius at western Thebes during the 1912–1914 seasons. The papyrus fragments entered the Met through the Rogers Fund in 1914 and are now object 14.1.527. Herbert Winlock and Walter Crum published the monastery and its textual finds in The Monastery of Epiphanius at Thebes. This controlled institutional history ties the pieces to a Christian monastic complex rather than an undocumented market lot. It does not, however, identify the particular monk, reader, service, or room in which every leaf was used. The Met's object record describes the cultural setting as Coptic, while the visible biblical text is Greek; those labels refer to community and language at different analytical levels.

The Met frames the group at approximately 21.7 by 14.3 centimeters, while individual fragments are much smaller and the standard manuscript register records a representative piece near 6.7 by 4.8 centimeters. The leaves had one column and perhaps around fifty lines when complete. Rather than following one Gospel continuously, the remnants preserve separate Gospel selections consistent with a lectionary. Tears and lacunae leave partial lines, and several fragments must be distinguished by hand, content, and page relationship. The Matthew 25 and John 10 portions appear together in the exact artifact image, but physical juxtaposition in the modern mount should not be confused with a continuous biblical sequence. Scholars have also questioned whether the John 10 material is in the same hand as all the Matthean pieces.

The Met assigns AD 580–640 on palaeographic and archaeological grounds, overlapping the conventional sixth- to seventh-century date. The monastic recovery context gives this estimate more historical texture than handwriting alone, although it still does not produce a copied-on date. At western Thebes, Greek and Coptic texts coexisted within Christian institutional life. Lectionaries selected passages for ordered reading, so discontinuity is functional evidence rather than textual corruption. P44 belongs to that practice. Modern reclassification is equally important context: John 9:3–4 and 12:16–18 were formerly included because they were mounted and studied with the same group, but they are now cataloged separately as P128. Current content lists should follow the revised register and explain the older scope.