Papyrus P56: Acts 1:1 in a Greek Witness

The consulted institutional and scholarly catalogs place the manuscript in Vienna and associate it broadly with Egypt; some repertories propose the Arsinoite/Fayum region, but a controlled excavation context is not supplied. Peter Sanz published the fragments in 1946 in the Austrian National Library's series on Greek Christian literary papyri. The present shelfmarks are Pap. G. 19918 and 19927. Because the recovery and acquisition trail is less fully documented online than the custody and publication history, claims about a specific ancient congregation, monastery, or copying workshop would exceed the evidence.

CSNTM catalogs three papyrus fragments in a single-column format with an estimated twenty-eight to twenty-nine lines per full column. The standard repertory reconstructs an original page about 29–30 by 18 centimeters, although that size depends on line and margin estimates from the surviving scraps. Both faces preserve portions of the same opening chapter. The script is Greek and the fragments belong to a codex, not a roll or isolated amulet. Damage leaves only selected words and lines, so editorial transcriptions combine visible letters with cautious restoration from the known sequence of Acts.

Published dates vary from the fifth/sixth century to the sixth or sixth/seventh century. These are palaeographic estimates, not dates supplied by the manuscript itself. Reporting a fifth-to-sixth-century center with acknowledgment of a possible later margin is more responsible than assigning a precise year. By this period Acts circulated both independently and in the Praxapostolos grouping with the Catholic Epistles; CSNTM classifies the broader content category accordingly, though P56's surviving fragments themselves preserve only Acts 1 and cannot demonstrate which additional books the lost codex contained.