Papyrus P71: Matthew 19:10–11 in a Greek Witness

The fragment was recovered in the Oxyrhynchus excavations and published in 1957 by Lobel, Roberts, Turner, and Barns in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri XXIV. It is preserved in Oxford's papyrology collection as P.Oxy. 2385 and registered internationally as P71. Its Oxyrhynchus origin is substantially firmer than an undocumented market provenance, though the exact discard deposit, ancient owner, and reading community are not identified by the current catalogues. The editio princeps remains important because it records the initial transcription and handwriting comparisons; later databases refine dating and collate its readings against a wider manuscript record.

P71 is one fragment from a papyrus codex, written in brown ink in a single column. Only about five lines are materially preserved on each face, although comparison with Matthew suggests an original column of thirty or more lines. Letter size and form vary within the biblical majuscule hand. The fragment has no unambiguous surviving sacred-name abbreviation, though one may have stood in a lost portion. Broken edges mean supplied letters dominate any printed reconstruction. The two faces are valuable together: they establish a leaf-book and place separated parts of Matthew 19 within the same physical page sequence.

The date comes from palaeographic comparison. CSNTM uses the fourth century; 4CARE reports a late-fourth-century judgment, approximately 375–399, based on recent specialist reassessment. That narrower range remains an expert estimate rather than an absolute date. P71 belongs to the literate environment of late Roman Oxyrhynchus, where biblical codices circulated alongside documentary, classical, and other Christian texts. The fragment's modest scale says nothing secure about the wealth or institutional identity of its users. It also cannot show whether the original codex contained Matthew alone or a larger Gospel collection.